Author: GT

Microsoft is getting rid of developer onboarding fees for the Microsoft Store on Windows, the digital distribution platform for its flagship operating system, the company announced Monday during its Build 2025 conference. Starting June 2025, individual developers will be able to sign up and publish apps to the Microsoft Store without having to pay to register an account. Previously, Microsoft charged around $19 for registration. The waiving of the Microsoft Store’s app publishing fees comes as Microsoft rival Apple faces intense legal pressure to eliminate certain developer fees it charges in the App Store. Those fees are commissions, however —…

A Waymo autonomous vehicle drives along Masonic Avenue on April 11, 2022 in San Francisco, California. Justin Sullivan | Getty Images News | Getty ImagesAlphabet’s Waymo unit has received approval to expand its autonomous ride-hailing service to more parts of the San Francisco Bay Area, including San Jose.In March, the company submitted a request to the California Public Utilities Commission to gain approval for its latest passenger safety plan, a key step in gaining permission to operate driverless vehicles across a broader area. On Monday, the proposed expansion was approved, allowing for Waymo’s driverless coverage to extend from San Francisco down…

Can AI speed up aspects of the scientific process? Microsoft appears to think so. At the company’s Build 2025 conference on Monday, Microsoft announced Microsoft Discovery, a platform that taps agentic AI to “transform the [scientific] discovery process,” according to a press release provided to TechCrunch. Microsoft Discovery is “extensible,” Microsoft says, and can handle certain science-related workloads “end-to-end.” “Microsoft Discovery is an enterprise agentic platform that helps accelerate research and discovery by transforming the entire discovery process with agentic AI — from scientific knowledge reasoning to hypothesis formulation, candidate generation, and simulation and analysis,” explains Microsoft in its release.…

Microsoft wants to make it easier for developers to build AI-powered apps on Windows devices. On Monday during its Build 2025 conference, Microsoft announced Windows AI Foundry, a rebranding and expansion of the Windows Copilot Runtime service the company launched last May. Microsoft describes Windows AI Foundry as a “unified platform for local AI development” — a way to fine-tune, optimize, and deploy the AI models underpinning Windows apps. Microsoft increasingly sees AI, whether running locally or in the cloud, as a major profit driver, despite the high costs associated with developing tentpole models. In January, Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella said…

LOS ANGELES (AP) — Hollywood’s actors’ union filed an unfair labor practice charge against Llama Productions on Monday, alleging the company replaced actors’ work by using artificial intelligence to generate Darth Vader’s voice in Fortnite without notice.The Screen Actors Guild-American Federation of Television and Radio Artists said Llama Productions, a subsidiary of gaming giant Epic Games, “failed and refused to bargain in good faith with the union” in the last six months. The company made unilateral changes to the terms and conditions of employment “without providing notice to the union or the opportunity to bargain” by using AI-generated voices to…

A trio of phone surveillance apps, which was caught spying on millions of people’s phones earlier this year, has gone offline. Cocospy, Spyic, and Spyzie were three near-identical but differently branded stalkerware apps that allowed the person planting one of the apps on a target’s phone access to their personal data — including their messages, photos, call logs, and real-time location data — usually without that person’s knowledge. Stalkerware apps, like Cocospy and its clones, are designed to stay hidden from device home screens, making the apps difficult to detect by their victims but all the while making the phone’s…

Elon Musk is in a legal fight with Microsoft but made a friendly virtual appearance at the software giant’s annual technology showcase to reveal that his Grok artificial intelligence chatbot will now be hosted on Microsoft’s data centers.“It’s fantastic to have you at our developer conference,” Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella said to Musk in a pre-recorded video conversation broadcast Monday at Microsoft’s Build conference in Seattle.Musk last year sued Microsoft and its close business partner OpenAI in a dispute over Musk’s foundational contributions to OpenAI, which Musk helped start. Musk now runs his own AI company, xAI, maker of Grok,…

This illustration picture shows a person waiting for an update of Epic Games’ Fortnite on their smartphone in Los Angeles on August 14, 2020.Chris Delmas | AFP | Getty ImagesApple must work out its latest issues with Epic Games, or head back to court to prove it has a legal basis for delaying the restoration of the popular Fortnite game to its iOS App Store, a judge ordered on Monday.Fortnite recently re-submitted its game but was blocked by Apple, Epic Games said Friday. The company later filed a motion to enforce the earlier injunction from the court.U.S. District Judge Yvonne Gonzalez…

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WASHINGTON (AP) — President Donald Trump and his wife, Melania, on Monday were hosting a signing ceremony for the Take It Down Act, a measure the first lady helped usher through Congress to set stricter penalties for the distribution of non-consensual intimate imagery online, or “revenge porn.”In March, Melania Trump used her first public appearance since resuming the role of first lady to travel to Capitol Hill to lobby House members to pass the bill following its approval by the Senate. White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt told reporters earlier Monday that the first lady was “instrumental in getting this…