Author: GT

The U.S. House of Representatives’ top official has banned WhatsApp from government-issued devices used by its staff, saying the app poses potential security risks, Reuters reported, citing a memo sent to House staff. “The Office of Cybersecurity has deemed WhatsApp a high risk to users due to the lack of transparency in how it protects user data, absence of stored data encryption, and potential security risks involved with its use,” Reuters reported the memo as saying. The memo instead recommends staff use apps like Signal, iMessage, FaceTime, and Microsoft Teams, the report said. Meta in January said it had detected…

Federal traffic safety regulators are looking into suspected problems with Elon Musk’s test run of self-driving “robotaxis” in Texas after videos surfaced showing them braking suddenly or going straight through an intersection from a turning lane and driving down the wrong side of the road.The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration said Tuesday that it has asked Tesla for information about the apparent errors. Though many other videos show robotaxis driving perfectly, if regulators find any major issues, that would likely raise questions about Musk’s repeated statements that the robotaxis are safe and his claim that Tesla will dominate a future…

Plastic has a recycling problem. Only about 9% of plastic gets recycled, and a majority of that waste comes from single-use items like plastic grocery bags. It’s partly a design problem — they’re made to be discarded. But it’s also a technology problem because recycling such films isn’t easy, and the results usually aren’t great. Novoloop says it has developed a way to take those troublesome plastics and turn them into something other companies actually want to buy.  The California-based startup recently completed a test run of its demonstration plant that continuously upcycles waste plastic. The plant is capable of cranking…

Google announced on Tuesday that you can now access historical Street View imagery on Google Earth. Until now, you’ve only been able to access historical Street View imagery on Google Maps. Google says the launch will allow people to explore from even more viewpoints, whether it’s a bird’s-eye view or at street level. Google is introducing the update to commemorate Google Earth’s 20th birthday. The launch comes as there was a social media trend last year that saw people visiting Google Maps to virtually time travel and find their loved ones on imagery or see how a place evolved over…

When Eventual founders Sammy Sidhu and Jay Chia were working as software engineers at Lyft’s autonomous vehicle program, they witnessed a brewing data infrastructure problem — one that would only become larger with the rise of AI. Self-driving cars produce a ton of unstructured data from 3D scans and photos to text and audio. There wasn’t a tool for Lyft engineers that could understand and process all of those different types of data at the same time — and all in one place. This left engineers to piece together open source tools in a lengthy process with reliability issues. “We…

In a test case for the artificial intelligence industry, a federal judge has ruled that AI company Anthropic didn’t break the law by training its chatbot Claude on millions of copyrighted books.But the company is still on the hook and must now go to trial over how it acquired those books by downloading them from online “shadow libraries” of pirated copies.U.S. District Judge William Alsup of San Francisco said in a ruling filed late Monday that the AI system’s distilling from thousands of written works to be able to produce its own passages of text qualified as “fair use” under…

The latest phase of the mobile OS wars isn’t being fought over app stores or user interfaces – it’s being waged with artificial intelligence. Huawei’s latest salvo comes in the form of HarmonyOS 6, in which AI agents aren’t features but the architecture driving user interactions.The beta release to developers signals a broader industry shift where operating systems transform from passive platforms into what are being framed as intelligent intermediaries that anticipate, learn, and act on behalf of users.The AI-first approach defines the latest releaseThe centrepiece of HarmonyOS 6 lies in its AI agents framework, which lets developers create automated…

Dario Amodei, Anthropic CEO, speaking on CNBC’s Squawk Box outside the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland on Jan. 21st, 2025. Gerry Miller | CNBCAnthropic’s use of books to train its artificial intelligence model Claude was “fair use” and “transformative,” a federal judge ruled late on Monday.Amazon-backed Anthropic’s AI training did not violate the authors’ copyrights since the large language models “have not reproduced to the public a given work’s creative elements, nor even one author’s identifiable expressive style,” wrote U.S. District Judge William Alsup.”The purpose and character of using copyrighted works to train LLMs to generate new text was quintessentially…

Google DeepMind on Tuesday released a new language model called Gemini Robotics On-Device that can run tasks locally on robots without requiring an internet connection. Building on the company’s previous Gemini Robotics model that was released in March, Gemini Robotics On-Device can control a robot’s movements. Developers can control and fine-tune the model to suit various needs using natural language prompts. In benchmarks, Google claims the model performs at a level close to the cloud-based Gemini Robotics model. The company says it outperforms other on-device models in general benchmarks, though it didn’t name those models. Image Credits: Google In a…

The U.K.’s competition regulator said on Tuesday it is considering a new market designation for Google that would require the search giant to provide alternative search options to users, rank search results “more fairly,” and offer greater control to publishers over how their content is used in search and AI Overviews. Under the new Digital Markets Competition Regime that went into force earlier this year, the U.K.’s Competition and Markets Authority (CMA) said it is launching a consultation on whether to designate Google with “strategic market status.” Under that designation, which the CMA says is applicable to companies with a…