Author: techempire

Search giant Google, which made more than $73 billion in profits last year, is protesting a California bill that would require Google and other platforms to pay media. The company announced that it is starting a “short-term test” that will block a “small percentage” of users in the state from connecting to local news sources in California.The move comes in response to the California Press Protection Act, which requires Google, Meta and other platforms to pay California publishers in exchange for links. Jaffer Zaidi, vice president of news partnerships at Google, said the proposed law passed by the state Legislature…

On Friday, people online noticed a new feature on their Instagram feeds: Meta AI, the company’s general artificial intelligence chatbot that can answer questions, write poems and generate images through simple text prompts. The move comes as no surprise. Meta released Meta AI in September 2023 and has added chatbots to products like Facebook Messenger and WhatsApp in the past few months, so adding it to Instagram seemed like a no-brainer.”Our AI-driven generative experiences are in various stages of development, and we are publicly testing a range of them in a limited capacity,” a Meta spokesperson told Engadget, suggesting that…

As Threads has more than 130 million users, one of the main “missing” features that users often complain about is the lack of direct messaging. But people who miss DMs may soon have a new option to send messages to other Threads users.Meta is launching a messaging feature that relies on the Instagram inbox, but allows new messages to be initiated from the Threads app. The feature has begun to roll out to some Threads users, who reported seeing a “Messages” button above other users’ profiles that turned out to be a “Mentions” feature. A Meta spokesperson confirmed the change,…

The monthly subscription price for Tesla’s (sort of) self-driving software just dropped in half. Tesla’s Full Self-Driving (supervised) subscription now costs $99 per month, down from the previous standard of $199.Tesla instituted a $199 monthly upgrade fee in 2021, when its Autopilot system was still in testing. Adding full self-driving (supervisory) functionality to a Tesla (full name each time) costs $12,000, so at the current rate it would take 10 years for the subscription to lose value. As far as installment plans go, this seems like a good deal. To be fair, the same goes for the $199 rate, which…

Back in December, Epic Games. The jury found that the company had an illegal monopoly over in-app billing and app distribution on Android devices and engaged in anti-competitive conduct with certain gaming companies and device manufacturers.At the time, it was unclear what exactly won the day as a remedy had not yet been determined.this fort night The manufacturer has now submitted a proposed permanent injunction against Google, detailing its demands. In short, Epic wants the Play Store to be almost completely open.The ban is based on three core points. Epic noted in a blog post. First, Epic believes that Google…

Possibility Space, an independent game studio with employees spread across the world, was abruptly shut down today by CEO Jeff Strain and former employees revealed on twitter. The studio was founded in 2021 with the goal of creating AAA games, and has also hired industry luminaries such as Waypoint’s Austin Walker and Ubisoft designer Liz England. Last month, Crop Circle Games, another studio owned by Strain’s Prytania Media that he co-founded with his wife, Annie Delisi Strain, closed.In a bizarre message to employees about studio closures and layoffs, Possibility Space boss Jeff Strain blamed the studio closure on employees leaking…

Plume WorkPass was selected as the premier small business solutions partner, providing operational insights and information as well as powerful front-end services, including Adaptive WiFi, without the cost or complexity of enterprise products. WorkPass is an enterprise-grade productivity and connectivity solution that’s easy to understand and easy to use – allowing business owners to focus on day-to-day operations. “We considered several options for our small and medium-sized business customers and ultimately chose Plume WorkPass from Plume’s Swiss partner BN AG. The solution is very simple and does not require any technical knowledge to install and operate. In addition, it is…

It’s been months. While investigating a previous incident in which 15,000 accounts were affected, the company learned that an additional 576,000 accounts were compromised.In both incidents, Roku believes the attackers used a method called credential stuffing. “The login credentials used in these attacks were likely obtained from another source, such as another online account, and the affected users may have used the same credentials,” the company said.Roku added that in fewer than 400 cases, attackers used victims’ Roku accounts to purchase streaming subscriptions and Roku devices using stored payment methods. However, the hackers did not obtain complete credit card numbers…

Many big tech companies, especially those in the TV hardware business, have dabbled in original content. Although it has had its own free, ad-supported television (FAST) channel for some time, it has been late to the game. It won’t be too long, though, as the company will release its first special, a short love story, on TCLtv+ this summer. There’s just one hiccup: TCL is using generative artificial intelligence to produce original content for its platform, but the early signs don’t bode well.The company released its first trailer Next stop Paris, which it calls “the first love story powered by…

New findings from Phylum show that “test files” related to the XZ Utils backdoor have found their way into a Rust crate called liblzma-sys. liblzma-sys, which has been downloaded more than 21,000 times to date, provides Rust developers with bindings for the liblzma implementation, a low-level library that is part of the XZ Utils data compression software. The affected version is 0.3.2. “The current release (v0.3.2) on Crates.io contains XZ test files containing a backdoor,” Phylum noted in a GitHub issue posted on April 9, 2024. “The test archive itself is not included in the .tar.gz and .zip tags on…