Author: GT

TOKYO (AP) — Japanese regulators on Tuesday accused U.S. tech giant Google of violating anti-monopoly laws, echoing similar moves in the U.S. and Europe. Google Japan said in a statement that it found the action “regrettable.” It said it has invested in Japan significantly to promote innovation as a technology leader.The Japan Fair Trade Commission’s “cease and desist order” says Google must stop the pre-installation of the Google search engine in Android smartphones, which it said in effect shuts out competition.It’s unclear if Google, a subsidiary of Alphabet Inc., based in Mountain View in the Silicon Valley, will take legal…

(Reuters) – Crypto exchange Binance said it briefly stopped allowing users to withdraw from the platform on Tuesday, due to an issue involving an Amazon Web Services (AWS) data centre, while other crypto exchanges also reported problems. Binance posted on X that withdrawals were suspended “to keep safe”, before posting around ten minutes later that withdrawals had resumed. A spokesperson for Binance said withdrawals were suspended for around 23 minutes. AWS’s service dashboard showed a “connectivity issue” affected its Tokyo cloud region at 1.15 a.m. PDT (0815 GMT). The issue was resolved by 1.51 a.m. PDT (0851 GMT). “The issue…

Google has developed an AI model called DolphinGemma to decipher how dolphins communicate and one day facilitate interspecies communication. The intricate clicks, whistles, and pulses echoing through the underwater world of dolphins have long fascinated scientists. The dream has been to understand and decipher the patterns within their complex vocalisations. Google, collaborating with engineers at the Georgia Institute of Technology and leveraging the field research of the Wild Dolphin Project (WDP), has unveiled DolphinGemma to help realise that goal. Announced around National Dolphin Day, the foundational AI model represents a new tool in the effort to comprehend cetacean communication. Trained…

OpenAI said on Monday that it would soon wind down the availability of GPT-4.5, its largest-ever AI model, via its API. GPT-4.5 was released only in late February. Developers will have access to GPT-4.5 via OpenAI’s API until July 14, after which they’ll have to transition to another model in OpenAI’s catalog, the company says. OpenAI is positioning GPT-4.1, which launched Monday, as the preferred replacement. “[GPT-4.1] offers similar or improved performance than GPT-4.5 in key areas at a much lower cost,” an OpenAI spokesperson told TechCrunch via email. “[W]e will [be] deprecating GPT-4.5 to prioritize building future models.” To…

TAIPEI, Taiwan (AP) — China said Tuesday it was pursuing three alleged U.S. operatives accused of carrying out cyberattacks on Chinese infrastructure during the Asian Games held in the city of Harbin in February. A notice from the Harbin police headquarters named them as Katheryn A. Wilson, Robert J. Snelling, and Stephen W. Johnson and said they worked through the National Security Agency. The police said nothing about how they obtained the names or where the three were believed to be at present. The alleged attacks targeted the systems for managing the Games themselves, such as registration, competition entry and…

Dogecoin (DOGE) shed 3% while bitcoin (BTC) and ether (ETH) remained flat in the past 24 hours as tariff concerns gradually subsided among traders, though fears of a U.S. recession increased in betting markets. “Prominent financial figures have started to warn that the U.S. is heading into an imminent recession, with betting markets placing 40% to 60% odds of one happening in 2025,” Augustine Fan, head of insights at SignalPlus, told CoinDesk in a Telegram message. “Our view is that it probably doesn’t matter, as sentiment often frames reality, not the other way around.” “As such, crypto has benefited from…

OpenAI on Monday launched a new family of models called GPT-4.1. Yes, “4.1” — as if the company’s nomenclature wasn’t confusing enough already. There’s GPT-4.1, GPT-4.1 mini, and GPT-4.1 nano, all of which OpenAI says “excel” at coding and instruction following. Available through OpenAI’s API but not ChatGPT, the multimodal models have a 1-million-token context window, meaning they can take in roughly 750,000 words in one go (longer than “War and Peace”). GPT-4.1 arrives as OpenAI rivals like Google and Anthropic ratchet up efforts to build sophisticated programming models. Google’s recently released Gemini 2.5 Pro, which also has a 1-million-token…

Car rental giant Hertz has begun notifying its customers of a data breach that included their personal information and driver’s licenses. The rental company, which also owns the Dollar and Thrifty brands, said in notices on its website that the breach relates to a cyberattack on one of its vendors between October 2024 and December 2024. The stolen data varies by region, but largely includes Hertz customer names, dates of birth, contact information, driver’s licenses, payment card information, and workers’ compensation claims. Hertz said a smaller number of customers had their Social Security numbers taken in the breach, along with…

BANGKOK (AP) — The Trump administration has taken its next steps toward imposing more tariffs on key imports, launching investigations into imports of computer chips, chip making equipment and pharmaceuticals. The Department of Commerce posted notices about the probes late Monday on the Federal Register, seeking public comment within three weeks. It had not formally announced them earlier. Although President Donald Trump paused most of his biggest tariff hikes last week for 90 days, apart from those for imports from China, he has said he still plans tariffs on pharmaceutical drugs, lumber, copper and computer chips. The Commerce Department said…

The size of the crypto lending market has fallen by over 43% from its 2021 high of $64.4 billion, dropping to $36.5 billion by the end of the fourth quarter of 2024, according to a report from Galaxy Digital published on April 14. This decline began in 2022, following the collapse of several major centralized finance (CeFi) lenders including Genesis, Celsius Network, BlockFi, and Voyager. These firms filed for bankruptcy as crypto prices fell, leading to a significant reduction in both the supply and demand for crypto loans. The impact on CeFi lending was severe. At its peak in 2022,…