SATURDAY, 13 DECEMBER 2025, 13:35
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: Google has increasingly moved toward keeping features locked to its hardware products, but the Translate app is bucking that trend. The live translate feature is breaking out of the Google bubble with support for any earbuds you happen to have connected to your Android phone. The app is also getting improved translation quality across...
A deal to sell TikTok has remained elusive, despite earlier claims that a deal was done.
Online retailer Coupang, often called South Korea’s Amazon, is dealing with the fallout from a breach that exposed the personal information of more than 33 million accounts — roughly two-thirds of the country’s population — after a former contractor allegedly used credentials that remained active months after his departure to access customer data through the company’s overseas servers. The...
An anonymous reader shares a report: Amazon has quietly added a new AI feature to its Kindle iOS app — a feature that “lets you ask questions about the book you’re reading and receive spoiler-free answers,” according to an Amazon announcement. The company says the feature, which is called Ask this Book, serves as “your expert reading assistant, instantly answering questions about plot details,...
joshuark writes: Arkansas is becoming the first state to officially end its public television affiliation with PBS. The Arkansas Educational Television Commission, whose members are all appointed by the governor, voted to disaffiliate from PBS effective July 1, 2026, citing the $2.5 million annual membership dues as “not feasible.” The decision was also driven by the loss of a similar amount in...
Parents and experts say gaming poses many of the same risks for kids as social media, and want them included.
An anonymous reader shares a report: Amazon Prime Video has pulled its AI-powered video recap of Fallout after viewers noticed that it got key parts of the story wrong. The streaming service began testing Video Recaps last month, and now they’re missing from the shows included in the test, including Fallout, The Rig, Tom Clancy’s Jack Ryan, Upload, and Bosch. The feature is supposed to use AI...
In this episode of Uncanny Valley we take you through our recent conversation with Lisa Su, and go behind the scenes of our Big Interview event.
Like so many things in Elon Musk’s orbit, a lot of it may come down to AI.
Berlin’s regional parliament has passed a far-reaching overhaul of its “security” law, giving police new authority to conduct both digital and physical surveillance. From a report: The CDU-SPD coalition, supported by AfD votes, approved the reform of the General Security and Public Order Act (ASOG), changing the limits that once protected Berliners from intrusive policing. Interior Senator Iris...
The errors included getting dialogue wrong and incorrectly claiming a scene was set 100 years earlier than it was.
The Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals has almost entirely upheld a scathing April ruling that found Apple in willful violation of a 2021 injunction meant to open up iOS App Store payments in its long-running legal battle against Epic Games. A three-judge panel affirmed that Apple’s 27% fee for developers using outside payment options had a “prohibitive effect” and that the company’s design...
Fulu sets repair bounties on consumer products that employ sneaky features that limit user control. Just this week, it awarded more than $10,000 to the person who hacked the Molekule air purifier.
China is leading research in nearly 90% of the crucial technologies that “significantly enhance, or pose risks to, a country’s national interests,” according to a technology tracker run by the Australian Strategic Policy Institute (ASPI) — an independent think-tank. Nature: The ASPI’s Critical Technology Tracker evaluated research on 74 current and emerging technologies this year, up from the...
Communications minister Solly Malatsi gazettes the final policy direction on the role of equity equivalent investment programmes in the ICT sector.
A new study of roughly 80,000 bachelor’s degree recipients from a large urban public college system finds that characteristics of a graduate’s first job can explain nearly two-thirds of the otherwise-unexplained earnings gap between students from low-income and high-income families five years after graduation. The research [PDF], published as an NBER working paper by economists at Columbia...
Fears about AI data centers’ water use have exploded. Experts say the reality is far more complicated than people think.
The Washington Post’s top standards editor Thursday decried “frustrating” errors in its new AI-generated personalized podcasts, whose launch has been met with distress by its journalists. From a report: Earlier this week, the Post announced that it was rolling out personalized AI-generated podcasts for users of the paper’s mobile app. In a release, the paper said users will be able to choose...
As more and more age tech hits the market, I’ve been testing the most innovative gadgets for older folks and caregivers.
Communications minister Solly Malatsi has asked Icasa urgently to align its ownership regulations with the ICT BEE sector code.
Communications minister Solly Malatsi has directed Icasa to address legal problems with its equity ownership rules, which will also clear a path for Starlink to launch in South Africa.