Alphabet's Google says it believes the complaint from the U.S. Department of Justice accusing the company of abusing its dominance in digital advertising is "without merit." From a report: The company also added it will "defend itself vigorously". The government on Tuesday said Google should be forced to sell its ad manager suite, tackling a business that generated about 12% of Google's revenue in 2021 while also playing a vital role in the search engine and cloud company's overall sales. Google, which depends on its advertising business for about 80% of its revenue, said the government was "doubling down on a flawed argument that would slow innovation, raise advertising fees and make it harder for thousands of small businesses and publishers to grow." The federal government has said its Big Tech investigations and lawsuits are aimed at leveling the playing field for smaller rivals who are up against a group of powerful companies that include Amazon, Facebook-owner Meta and Apple.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Reuters: U.S. Senator Josh Hawley, a Republican and China hawk, said on Tuesday that he would introduce a bill to ban the short video app TikTok in the United States. TikTok, whose parent is the Chinese company ByteDance, already faces a ban that would stop federal employees from using or downloading TikTok on government-owned devices. "TikTok is China's backdoor into Americans' lives. It threatens our children's privacy as well as their mental health," he said on Twitter. "Now I will introduce legislation to ban it nationwide." Hawley did not say when the bill would be introduced. "Senator Hawley's call for a total ban of TikTok takes a piecemeal approach to national security and a piecemeal approach to broad industry issues like data security, privacy and online harms," said TikTok spokeswoman Brooke Oberwetter. "We hope that he will focus his energies on efforts to address those issues holistically, rather than pretending that banning a single service would solve any of the problems he's concerned about or make Americans any safer."

Google plans to discontinue a pilot program that allows political campaigns to evade its email spam filters, the latest round in the technology giant's tussle with the GOP over online fundraising. The Washington Post reports: The company will let the program sunset at the end of January instead of prolonging it, Google's lawyers said in a filing on Monday. The filing, in U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of California, asked the court to dismiss a complaint lodged by the Republican National Committee accusing Google of "throttling its email messages because of the RNC's political affiliation and views." "The RNC is wrong," Google argued in its motion. "Gmail's spam filtering policies apply equally to emails from all senders, whether they are politically affiliated or not." [...]

While rejecting the GOP's attacks, Google nonetheless bowed to them. The company asked the Federal Election Commission to greenlight the pilot program, available to all campaigns and political committees registered with the federal regulator. The company anticipated at the time that a trial run would last through January 2023. Thousands of public comments implored the FEC to advise against the program, which consumer advocates and other individuals said would overwhelm Gmail users with spam. Anne P. Mitchell, a lawyer and founder of an email certification service called Get to the Inbox, wrote that Google was "opening up the floodgates to their users' inboxes ... to assuage partisan disgruntlement."

The FEC gave its approval in August, with one Democrat joining the commission's three Republicans to clear the way for the initiative. Ultimately, more than 100 committees of both parties signed up for the program, said Google spokesman Jose Castaneda. The RNC was not one of them, as Google emphasized in its motion to dismiss in the federal case in California. "Ironically, the RNC could have participated in a pilot program leading up to the 2022 midterm elections that would have allowed its emails to avoid otherwise-applicable forms of spam detection," the filing stated. "Many other politically-affiliated entities chose to participate in that program, which was approved by the FEC. The RNC chose not to do so. Instead, it now seeks to blame Google based on a theory of political bias that is both illogical and contrary to the facts alleged in its own Complaint." [...] "Indeed, effective spam filtering is a key feature of Gmail, and one of the main reasons why Gmail is so popular," the filing stated.

To help reduce the potential for malware, Android 14 will begin fully blocking the installation of apps that target outdated versions of Android. 9to5Google reports: For years now, the guidelines for the Google Play Store have ensured that Android developers keep their apps updated to use the latest features and safety measures of the Android platform. Just this month, the guidelines were updated, requiring newly listed Play Store apps to target Android 12 at a minimum. Up to this point, these minimum API level requirements have only applied to apps that are intended for the Google Play Store. Should a developer wish to create an app for an older version, they can do so and simply ask their users to sideload the APK file manually. Similarly, if an Android app hasn't been updated since the guidelines changed, the Play Store will continue serving the app to those who have installed it once before.

According to a newly posted code change, Android 14 is set to make API requirements stricter, entirely blocking the installation of outdated apps. This change would block users from sideloading specific APK files and also block app stores from installing those same apps. Initially, Android 14 devices will only block apps that target especially old Android versions. Over time though, the plan is to increase the threshold to Android 6.0 (Marshmallow), with Google having a mechanism to "progressively ramp [it] up." That said, it will likely still be up to each device maker to decide the threshold for outdated apps or whether to enable it at all. The report notes that it'll still be possible to install an outdated version of an app "through a command shell, by using a new flag."

Microsoft has started testing a new split-screen feature for Edge that lets you compare two tabs side by side. The Verge reports: The feature was first discovered by Leopeva64-2 on Reddit, and it's available in an experimental flag in the beta, dev, and canary versions of Microsoft Edge. Once enabled, a new button appears alongside the address bar that lets you split an Edge window into two separate tabs side by side.

Once you've split existing tabs into a single window, it creates a single tab with the combined webpages. That means you can create multiple split tabs in Edge and navigate through them. You can also pin these side-by-side tabs, duplicate them, or add them to groups just like you would any regular tabs. That makes this feature super useful if you regularly compare documents or webpages.

Playing the military simulation War Thunder is now reportedly considered an official risk on background checks. PCMag reports: As GamesRadar reports, a user going by the name Add Fiat 6616 Pls posted on the War Thunder subreddit earlier this week explaining how a friend of his had applied for a job at aerospace and defense conglomerate Raytheon Technologies. As part of the security clearance process, a private investigator is used to contact the candidates "witnesses," which is shorthand for their friends. Add Fiat 6616 Pls was one of those friends and therefore received a call to answer a range of questions in an attempt to discover if the candidate's lifestyle raised any red flags. One of those question was: "Does he play War Thunder?"

The question makes sense as part of a security check and national security assessment after you realize how much classified information has leaked via the game over the past few years. War Thunder is a free-to-play vehicular combat online multiplayer game developed by Russian game developer Gaijin Entertainment (which relocated to Budapest in 2015). Since 2021, there have been six incidents of restricted or classified documents being leaked during discussions about the accuracy of the vehicles used in the game.

Apple has provided iOS 12.5.7, macOS 11.7.3, and other updates for older devices that can't be updated to the latest releases. AppleInsider reports: The new updates are for users still using older devices and operating systems and address similar bugs and security patches available in the recent iOS 16.3 and macOS Ventura releases. The security patch notes list at least 14 different systems affected by security issues that have been patched. The new update versions are: iOS 12.5.7, iOS 15.7.3, iPadOS 15.7.3, macOS Big Sur 11.7.3, and macOS Monterey 12.6.3.

Users may note the skipped iOS versions between iOS 12 and iOS 15. Those are due to where devices were cut off from updating. Every device that could run iOS 13 could run iOS 15, so Apple doesn't update every version. The oldest device supported by iOS 12.5.7, for example, is the iPhone 5s, which was released in September 2013. The oldest Macs supported by macOS Big Sur are the 2013 MacBook Air, Mac Pro, and MacBook Pro. Anyone capable of updating these new updates to the older operating systems should do so as soon as possible. The update addresses known security issues that could put the user at risk.

Crypto companies seeking to go public over the past year have faced increased scrutiny from the Securities and Exchange Commission, as financial distress and failures spread across the volatile industry. WSJ: Crypto-focused companies including Bullish Global, Circle and eToro have failed to secure the SEC approvals that are required of companies going public. The firms were seeking stock-exchange listings through mergers with special-purpose acquisition companies, an alternative path to going public that thrived in 2020 and 2021 before heightened regulatory checks and market turbulence ended the SPAC boom. Another crypto broker, Galaxy Digital has faced repeated rounds of questions from SEC staff about its business since filing paperwork to go public on the Nasdaq Stock Market, according to people familiar with the questioning.

Galaxy, which isn't using a SPAC structure, announced in March 2021 that it wanted to become a U.S.-listed public company and hoped to clear SEC review by the end of that year. The SEC didn't set out to stop the companies from going public, according to a person familiar with the matter, but crypto firms believe the pace of the agency's review hurt their efforts, particularly after the crash of a well-known cryptocurrency and the failure of a large crypto hedge fund that hit many exchanges and lenders. The bankruptcy of crypto exchange FTX and a bear market in digital asset prices may keep the door closed.

Appliance makers like Whirlpool and LG just can't understand. They added Wi-Fi antennae to their latest dishwashers, ovens, and refrigerators and built apps for them -- and yet only 50 percent or fewer of their owners have connected them. What gives? From a report: The issue, according to manufacturers quoted in a Wall Street Journal report (subscription usually required), is that customers just don't know all the things a manufacturer can do if users connect the device that spins their clothes or keeps their food cold -- things like "providing manufacturers with data and insights about how customers are using their products" and allowing companies to "send over-the-air updates" and "sell relevant replacement parts or subscription services."

"The challenge is that a consumer doesn't see the true value that manufacturers see in terms of how that data can help them in the long run. So they don't really care for spending time to just connect it," Henry Kim, US director of LG's smart device division ThinQ, told the Journal. LG told the Journal that fewer than half of its smart appliances -- which represent 80-90 percent of its sold appliances -- stay connected to the Internet. Whirlpool reported that "more than half" are connected. Wi-Fi-connected smart appliances may be connected when they're first set up, but a new Internet provider, router hardware, or Wi-Fi password could take the device offline. And a smart oven is likely to be far down the list of devices to set up again once that happens. That means companies like Whirlpool are missing out on services revenue, which is increasingly crucial to manufacturers facing rising input costs, declining replacement purchases, and hungry shareholders.

The US Justice Department and eight states sued Alphabet's Google, calling for the break up of the search giant's ad-technology business over alleged illegal monopolization of the digital advertising market. From a report: "Google abuses its monopoly power to disadvantage website publishers and advertisers who dare to use competing ad tech products in a search for higher quality, or lower cost, matches," the Justice Department said in the complaint, which was filed in federal court in Virginia. New York, California and Virginia were among the states that signed on to the complaint.

The lawsuit represents the Biden administration's first major case challenging the power of one of the nation's largest tech companies, following through on a probe that began under former President Donald Trump. It also marks one of the few times the Justice Department has called for the breakup of a major company since it dismantled the Bell telecom system in 1982. Google is the dominant player in the $278.6 billion US digital-ad market, controlling most of the technology used to buy, sell and serve online advertising. A resolution in the case could be years away. The lawsuit marks the DOJ's second antitrust suit against Google and the fifth major case in the US challenging the company's business practices.

The partisan divisions we've become used to on Capitol Hill are if anything even more stark in the new 118th Congress. But so far, there is one thing Democrats and Republicans in the House and Senate seem to agree on: Ticketmaster is a problem. From a report: "In terms of their monopoly power, I'm concerned about it," Senator Josh Hawley told The New Republic in December. "I think we should look into it." Finally, the Senate is going to. Senators Amy Klobuchar and Mike Lee, the chairman and ranking member, respectively, of the Judiciary Committee's subcommittee that oversees antitrust issues, jointly announced a hearing for Tuesday that will be assisted by committee Chair Dick Durbin and ranking member Lindsey Graham. "I look forward to hearing more about how we got here, and identifying solutions," said Graham in a statement.

Ticketmaster has a dark history of confronting political rivals within the music industry. Pearl Jam was the last major live act to challenge the company in Congress in 1994. Pearl Jam filed a complaint with the Justice Department accusing Ticketmaster of being a monopoly. In an obscure House subcommittee, the complaint became an open airing of grievances on MTV by the band and its music industry allies against Ticketmaster CEO Fred Rosen, who, in turn, wrecked the Seattle grunge band's subsequent tours with last-minute ticketing shenanigans. The government all this time has done nothing to rein in the company. In fact, quite the opposite: In 2010, the Justice Department approved Ticketmaster's merger with Live Nation Entertainment, the company that owns the venues (and therein the concessions) where live music acts Taylor Swift and Bad Bunny perform for millions of adoring fans. For the world's biggest acts, Live Nation offers an all-in-one vendor that can pack stadiums for the artist who, in turn, doesn't have to deal with a galaxy of local players in the live events space, like venue owners, concert promoters, food and beverage vendors, public officials, and other hometown luminaries looking to dictate terms for the show.

Much ink has been spilled of late about the tremendous promise of OpenAI's ChatGPT program for generating natural-language utterances in response to human prompts. The program strikes many people as so fresh and intriguing that ChatGPT must be unique in the universe. Scholars of AI beg to differ. From a report: "In terms of underlying techniques, ChatGPT is not particularly innovative," said Yann LeCun, Meta's chief AI scientist, in a small gathering of press and executives on Zoom last week. "It's nothing revolutionary, although that's the way it's perceived in the public," said LeCun. "It's just that, you know, it's well put together, it's nicely done." Such data-driven AI systems have been built in the past by many companies and research labs, said LeCun. The idea of OpenAI being alone in its type of work is inaccurate, he said.

"OpenAI is not particularly an advance compared to the other labs, at all," said LeCun. "It's not only just Google and Meta, but there are half a dozen startups that basically have very similar technology to it," added LeCun. "I don't want to say it's not rocket science, but it's really shared, there's no secret behind it, if you will." LeCun noted the many ways in which ChatGPT, and the program upon which it builds, OpenAI's GPT-3, is composed of multiple pieces of technology developed over many years by many parties. "You have to realize, ChatGPT uses Transformer architectures that are pre-trained in this self-supervised manner," observed LeCun. "Self-supervised-learning is something I've been advocating for a long time, even before OpenAI existed," he said. "Transformers is a Google invention," noted LeCun, referring to the language neural net unveiled by Google in 2017, which has become the basis for a vast array of language programs, including GPT-3. The work on such language programs goes back decades, said LeCun.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from ArsTechnica: Google is still reeling from the biggest layoff in company history last Friday. Earlier cost cuts over the past six months have resulted in several projects being shut down or deprioritized at Google, and it's hard to fire 12,000 people without some additional projects taking a hit. The New York Times has a report about which divisions are being hit the hardest, and a big one is Google's future OS development group, Fuchsia. While the overall company cut 6 percent of its employees, the Times pointed out that Fuchsia saw an outsize 16 percent of the 400-person staff take a hit. While it's not clear what that means for the future of the division, the future of Fuchsia's division has never really been clear.

Fuchsia has been a continuous mystery inside Google since it first saw widespread press coverage in 2017. Google rarely officially talks about it, leaving mostly rumors and Github documentation for figuring out what's going on. The OS isn't a small project, though -- it's not even based on Linux, opting instead to use a custom, in-house kernel, so Google really is building an entire OS from scratch. Google actually ships the OS today to consumers in its Nest smart displays, where it replaced the older Cast OS. The in-place operating system swap was completely invisible to consumers compared to the old OS, came with zero benefits, and was never officially announced or promoted. There's not much you can do with it on a locked-down smart display, so even after shipping, Fuchsia is still a mystery.

The world's largest rail vehicle manufacturer has rolled out a zero-emissions train running on hydrogen fuel cells with a supercapacitor buffer. The four-car train is capable of 100 mph (160 km/h), making it the fastest hydrogen train to date. New Atlas reports: Jointly developed by state-owned industrial monolith CRRC and Chengdu Rail Transit, this is China's first hydrogen-powered passenger train, offering a range of 373 miles (600 km), and emitting nothing but water. It's capable of self-driving, with 5G communications, automatic wake-up, start and stop, and return to depot functionality. Germany is ahead on this kind of thing, with some 14 hydrogen-fueled Alstom trains already in service as of last year. The CRRC machine can beat the German trains for speed by around 20 km/h (12 mph), but the German trains currently offer a much greater range at ~620 miles (1,000 km). According to Information Trends, there are just over 1,000 hydrogen stations in the world -- one-third of them being in China.

Turnitin, best known for its anti-plagiarism software used by tens of thousands of universities and schools around the world, is building a tool to detect text generated by AI. The Register reports: Turnitin has been quietly building the software for years ever since the release of GPT-3, Annie Chechitelli, chief product officer, told The Register. The rush to give educators the capability to identify text written by humans and computers has become more intense with the launch of its more powerful successor, ChatGPT. As AI continues to progress, universities and schools need to be able to protect academic integrity now more than ever. "Speed matters. We're hearing from teachers just give us something," Chechitelli said. Turnitin hopes to launch its software in the first half of this year. "It's going to be pretty basic detection at first, and then we'll throw out subsequent quick releases that will create a workflow that's more actionable for teachers." The plan is to make the prototype free for its existing customers as the company collects data and user feedback. "At the beginning, we really just want to help the industry and help educators get their legs under them and feel more confident. And to get as much usage as we can early on; that's important to make a successful tool. Later on, we'll determine how we're going to productize it," she said.

Turnitin's VP of AI, Eric Wang, said there are obvious patterns in AI writing that computers can detect. "Even though it feels human-like to us, [machines write using] a fundamentally different mechanism. It's picking the most probable word in the most probable location, and that's a very different way of constructing language [compared] to you and I," he told The Register. [...] ChatGPT, however, doesn't have this kind of flexibility and can only generate new words based on previous sentences, he explained. Turnitin's detector works by predicting what words AI is more likely to generate in a given text snippet. "It's very bland statistically. Humans don't tend to consistently use a high probability word in high probability places, but GPT-3 does so our detector really cues in on that," he said.

Wang said Turnitin's detector is based on the same architecture as GPT-3 and described it as a miniature version of the model. "We are in many ways I would [say] fighting fire with fire. There's a detector component attached to it instead of a generate component. So what it's doing is it's reading language in the exact same way GPT-3 reads language, but instead of spitting out more language, it gives us a prediction of whether we think this passage looks like [it's from] GPT-3." The company is still deciding how best to present its detector's results to teachers using the tool. "It's a difficult challenge. How do you tell an instructor in a small amount of space what they want to see?" Chechitelli said. They might want to see a percentage that shows how much of an essay seems to be AI-written, or they might want confidence levels showing whether the detector's prediction confidence is low, medium, or high to assess accuracy. "I think there is a major shift in the way we create content and the way we work," Wang added. "Certainly that extends to the way we learn. We need to be thinking long term about how we teach. How do we learn in a world where this technology exists? I think there is no putting the genie back in the bottle. Any tool that gives visibility to the use of these technologies is going to be valuable because those are the foundational building blocks of trust and transparency."

An anonymous reader quotes a report from 9to5Mac: Apple's first AR/VR headset could be unveiled sometime this spring, and rumors continue to offer more information about what Apple has in the works. A wide-ranging new report from Bloomberg now offers a slew of details on Apple's "Reality Pro" headset, including that the "eye- and hand-tracking capabilities will be a major selling point" for the product. Using external cameras, the headset will be able to analyze the user's hands, while internal sensors will be used to read the user's eyes.

The report explains: "The headset will have several external cameras that can analyze a user's hands, as well as sensors within the gadget's housing to read eyes. That allows the wearer to control the device by looking at an on-screen item -- whether it's a button, app icon or list entry -- to select it. Users will then pinch their thumb and index finger together to activate the task -- without the need to hold anything. The approach differs from other headsets, which typically rely on a hand controller."

More details on the hardware of the headset include that there will be a Digital Crown similar to the Apple Watch for switching between AR and VR. The VR mode will fully immerse the wearer, but when AR mode is enabled the "content fades back and becomes surrounded by the user's real environment." This is reportedly one of the features Apple hopes will be a "highlight of the product." To address overheating concerns, the Reality Pro headset will use an external battery that "rests in a user's pocket and connects over a cable." There will also be a cooling fan to further reduce the likelihood of the headset overheating. "The headset can last about two hours per battery pack," Bloomberg reports. The battery pack is "roughly the size of two iPhone 14 Pro Maxes stacked on top of each other, or about six inches tall and more than half an inch thick." Another tidbit from the report is that the headset will be able to serve as an external display for Mac. "Users will be able to see their Mac's display in virtual reality but still control the computer with their trackpad or mouse and physical keyboard," reports Bloomberg. Apple is also "developing technology that will let users type in midair with their hands."

Additionally, FaceTime on the headset will "realistically render a user's face and full body in virtual reality."

A team of more than 1,000 people have been reportedly working on the first version of the device for the past seven years. It's slated to cost "roughly $3,000" when it debuts sometime this spring.

Google's chief executive officer told employees that cuts were made in a bid to act decisively as the company's growth slowed. From a report: In an internal meeting, Sundar Pichai, who is CEO of Google parent Alphabet, said he had consulted with the company's founders and board in making the decision for 6% cuts, according to remarks reviewed by Bloomberg. "If you don't act clearly and decisively and early, we can compound the problem and make it much worse," Pichai said. "These are decisions I needed to make." Further reading: An engineer laid off after over 16 years at Google says 'faceless' tech giants see staff as '100% disposable'.

Amazon and Stripe have signed an agreement that will see the two companies increase their use of each others' services, the companies said. Amazon plans to increase its use of Stripe's payments processing services, whereas Stripe will expand its use of Amazon Web Services.

Big banks are teaming up to launch a digital wallet that people can use to shop online. Wells Fargo, Bank of America, JPMorgan Chase and four other banks are working on a new product that will allow shoppers to pay at merchants' online checkout with a wallet that will be linked to their debit and credit cards. From a report: The digital wallet will be managed by Early Warning Services, the bank-owned company that operates money-transfer service Zelle. The wallet, which doesn't have a name yet, will operate separately from Zelle, EWS said. EWS, whose owners also include Capital One, PNC Financial, U.S. Bancorp and Truist Financial, plans to begin rolling out the new offering in the second half of the year.

One goal of the new service is to compete with third-party wallet operators such as PayPal and Apple's Apple Pay, according to people familiar with the matter. Banks are worried about losing control of their customer relationships. Apple, in particular, poses a big threat. The tech giant has moved further into financial services and is working on a savings account with Goldman Sachs and a buy now, pay later offering.

An anonymous reader shares a report: Earlier this month, OpenAI said it was exploring ways to monetize its AI chatbot ChatGPT, giving users the opportunity to sign up for early access to "ChatGPT Professional." Now, some users say they've been granted access to a pro tier which costs $42 a month. OpenAI hasn't confirmed this is an official test or made any announcements. As OpenAI said earlier this month: "Please keep in mind that this is an early experimental program that is subject to change, and we are not making paid pro access generally available at this time." With that in mind, what does $42 a month get you? According to screenshots shared by users given early access, you get faster response speed, more reliable access (because ChatGPT is down a lot), and "priority access to new features" (whatever they turn out to be).