A wide range of businesses, internet users, academics and even human rights experts defended Big Tech's liability shield in a pivotal Supreme Court case about YouTube algorithms, with some arguing that excluding AI-driven recommendation engines from federal legal protections would cause sweeping changes to the open internet. From a report: The diverse group weighing in at the Court ranged from major tech companies such as Meta, Twitter and Microsoft to some of Big Tech's most vocal critics, including Yelp and the Electronic Frontier Foundation. Even Reddit and a collection of volunteer Reddit moderators got involved. In friend-of-the-court filings, the companies, organizations and individuals said the federal law whose scope the Court could potentially narrow in the case -- Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act -- is vital to the basic function of the web. Section 230 has been used to shield all websites, not just social media platforms, from lawsuits over third-party content.

The question at the heart of the case, Gonzalez v. Google, is whether Google can be sued for recommending pro-ISIS content to users through its YouTube algorithm; the company has argued that Section 230 precludes such litigation. But the plaintiffs in the case, the family members of a person killed in a 2015 ISIS attack in Paris, have argued that YouTube's recommendation algorithm can be held liable under a US antiterrorism law. In their filing, Reddit and the Reddit moderators argued that a ruling enabling litigation against tech-industry algorithms could lead to future lawsuits against even non-algorithmic forms of recommendation, and potentially targeted lawsuits against individual internet users.

Google is laying off 12,000 workers, or about 6% of its workforce, becoming the latest tech company to trim staff as the economic boom that the industry rode during the COVID-19 pandemic ebbed. From a report: CEO Sundar Pichai informed staff Friday at the Silicon Valley giant about the cuts in an email that was also posted on the company's news blog. The firings adds to tens of thousands of other job losses recently announced by Microsoft, Amazon, Facebook parent Meta and other tech companies as they tighten their belts amid a darkening outlook for the industry. Just this month, there have been at least 48,000 job cuts announced by major companies in the sector.

"Over the past two years we've seen periods of dramatic growth," Pichai wrote. "To match and fuel that growth, we hired for a different economic reality than the one we face today." He said the layoffs reflect a "rigorous review" carried out by Google of its operations. The jobs being eliminated "cut across Alphabet, product areas, functions, levels and regions," Pichai said. In a regulatory filing late last year, the company said that it employed nearly 187,000 people. Pichai said that Google, founded nearly a quarter of a century ago, was "bound to go through difficult economic cycles."

According to the latest official Android distribution numbers from Google, Android 13 is running on 5.2% of all devices less than six months after launch. 9to5Google reports: According to Android Studio, devices running Android 13 now account for 5.2% of all devices. Meanwhile Android 12 and 12L now account for 18.9% of the total, a significant increase from August's 13.5% figure. Notably, while Google's chart does include details about Android 13, it doesn't make a distinction between Android 12 and 12L. Looking at the older versions, we see that usage of Android Oreo has finally dropped below 10%, with similar drops in percentage down the line. Android Jelly Bean, which previously weighed in at 0.3%, is no longer listed, while KitKat has dropped from 0.9% to 0.7%. Android 13's 5.2% distribution number "is better than it sounds," writes Ryan Whitwam via ExtremeTech: These numbers show an accelerating pickup for Google's new platform versions. If you look back at stats from the era of Android KitKat and Lollipop, the latest version would only have a fraction of this usage share after half a year. That's because the only phones running the new software would be Google's Nexus phones, plus maybe one or two new devices from OEMs that worked with Google to deploy the latest software as a marketing gimmick.

The improvements are thanks largely to structural changes in how Android is developed and deployed. For example, Project Treble was launched in 2017 to re-architect the platform, separating the OS framework from the low-level vendor code. This made it easier to update devices without waiting on vendors to provide updated drivers. We saw evidence of improvement that very year, and it's gotten better ever since.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from NBC News: For nearly a year and a half, a Massachusetts high school has been lit up around the clock because the district can't turn off the roughly 7,000 lights in the sprawling building. The lighting system was installed at Minnechaug Regional High School when it was built over a decade ago and was intended to save money and energy. But ever since the software that runs it failed on Aug. 24, 2021, the lights in the Springfield suburbs school have been on continuously, costing taxpayers a small fortune.

"We are very much aware this is costing taxpayers a significant amount of money," Aaron Osborne, the assistant superintendent of finance at the Hampden-Wilbraham Regional School District, told NBC News. "And we have been doing everything we can to get this problem solved." Osborne said it's difficult to say how much money it's costing because during the pandemic and in its aftermath, energy costs have fluctuated wildly. "I would say the net impact is in the thousands of dollars per month on average, but not in the tens of thousands," Osborne said. That, in part, is because the high school uses highly efficient fluorescent and LED bulbs, he said. And, when possible, teachers have manually removed bulbs from fixtures in classrooms while staffers have shut off breakers not connected to the main system to douse some of the exterior lights.

But there's hope on the horizon that the lights at Minnechaug will soon be dimmed. Paul Mustone, president of the Reflex Lighting Group, said the parts they need to replace the system at the school have finally arrived from the factory in China and they expect to do the installation over the February break. "And yes, there will be a remote override switch so this won't happen again," said Mustone, whose company has been in business for more than 40 years.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from the Associated Press: The European Union's digital policy chief warned TikTok's boss Thursday that the social media app will have to fall in line with tough new rules for online platforms set to take effect later this year. EU Commissioner Thierry Breton held a video call with Shou Zi Chew, the CEO of TikTok, the popular Chinese-owned video sharing app that's coming under increasing scrutiny from Western authorities over fears about data privacy, cybersecurity and misinformation. The two discussed the company's plans to comply with the bloc's Digital Services Act, which is set to take effect for the biggest online companies in September. The act is a set of sweeping rules that will require platforms to reduce harmful online content and combat online risks.

"With younger audiences comes greater responsibility," Breton said, according to a readout of the call. "It is not acceptable that behind seemingly fun and harmless features, it takes users seconds to access harmful and sometimes even life-threatening content." Breton added that, with millions of young users in Europe, TikTok has a "special responsibility" to ensure its content is safe. [...] Breton said he is also concerned about allegations TikTok is spying on journalists and transferring reams of personal user data outside of Europe, in violation of the 27-country bloc's strict privacy rules.

Bretaon said he "explicitly conveyed" to Shou that TikTok needs to "step up efforts to comply" with EU rules on data protection, copyright as well as the Digital Services At, which includes provisions for heavy fines or even a ban from the EU for repeat offenses that threaten the people's lives or safety. "We will not hesitate to adopt the full scope of sanctions to protect our citizens if audits do not show full compliance," he said.

Microsoft has started testing Tabs in Notepad with Windows Insiders on the Dev Channel today. Thurrott reports: The update to the Notepad will start rolling out to all Dev Channel testers today alongside the new Windows 11 preview build 25281, which brings a couple of other changes. Tabs in Notepad was "a top requested feature from the community," the Windows Insider team emphasized today. The app now supports dragging a tab out into a separate window, and a new setting also lets users choose whether files should open in a new tab or a new window by default.

"There are also new keyboard shortcut keys to support managing tabs as well as some improvements to managing unsaved files, like automatically generating the file name/tab title based on content and a refreshed unsaved changes indicator," the Windows Insider team explained. Microsoft is still working to fix issues causing some keyboard shortcuts to not work as expected, and performance will also remain a priority for the team.

An anonymous reader shares a report: Microsoft's Windows 10 operating system has been available on the retail market for over seven years and was superseded by Windows 11 in October 2021. However, despite its age, Windows 10 remains the most popular version of Windows, with a global market share of 67.95% in December 2022 compared to 16.97% for Windows 11, according to StatCounter. But it now looks like Microsoft is ready to put the brakes on issuing new Windows 10 licenses to everyday consumers. Microsoft's official product pages for Windows 10 Home and Windows 10 Pro now include the following disclaimer: "January 31, 2023 will be the last day this Windows 10 download is offered for sale. Windows 10 will remain supported with security updates that help protect your PC from viruses, spyware, and other malware until October 14, 2025."

Last week, Reed Wilen, an elite gamer who uses the handle "Chicago" in Rocket League, a popular vehicular-soccer game, encountered a strange and troubling new opponent. From a report: The player seemed like a novice at first, moving their rocket-powered vehicle in a hesitant and awkward way. Then they caught and balanced the ball perfectly on the hood of their car, and dribbled it with superhuman skill towards the goal at high speed. Not only was the other driver clearly a bot -- it was also ridiculously good. "It is very confusing to play against," Wilen says. "Its perfect dribbling would cause havoc on almost every player." Wilen is one of a number of elite Rocket League players to have recently encountered the bot in competitive play. It is not yet good enough to beat all comers, but it can play to a high level, allowing less skilled players to cheat their way to a higher ranking.

Rocket League is frenetic and extremely tricky to play. Each player controls a car capable of impossible acrobatics inside an arena where gravity and physics are apparently set to ludicrous mode. The objective is to use your vehicle to maneuver a giant ball past your opponent and into their goal, a task that requires considerable skill and patience. Sometimes two players work together as a team, making huge leaps, desperate parries, and accidentally colliding, all while trying to anticipate and counter their opponents' own antics. Top Rocket League players will often launch their cars through the air to move the ball toward the goal, but Wilen says the bot he faced appears to have been trained specifically to carry it on the ground. "The bot doesn't really flip around too often and doesn't jump in the air," he says, apparently because it hasn't been programmed to, or learned how to do so. "Instead, it waits for the ball to come down, where it catches it on top of the car and performs a perfect dribble towards the opposing team's net," Wilen says.

The bot that Wilen and others have come up against is called Nexto. It picked up the ability to dribble and score using an artificial intelligence approach known as reinforcement learning, which has underpinned research breakthroughs that let computers master other difficult games such as Go and Starcraft. The technique has also been applied to more practical areas, including chip design and data center cooling in recent years. Reinforcement learning entails creating a program that can perform a task at a basic level and improve by responding to feedback as it practices. The company behind Rocket League, Psyonix, part of Epic Games, allows players to deploy bots to practice against. In 2020 it made an application programming interface (API) available to help developers build bots more easily. Last April, a group of Rocket League enthusiasts with coding skills announced RLGym, an open source library for building reinforcement-learning bots for Rocket League. Later in the year, the group released several open source AI bots -- including an especially skilled dribbler called Nexto.

Google has been dealt a significant blow in one of its key overseas markets. India's Supreme Court on Thursday declined to block an antitrust order that requires the Android-maker to make a series of changes that could topple its financial viability. From a report: India's apex court rejected to block the ruling against Google by the nation's antitrust watchdog Competition Commission of India. The court extended the deadline for enforcement of CCI's order by one week, however. The matter will now go back to the country's appellate tribunal, the National Company Law Appellate Tribunal (NCLAT), where Google previously failed to secure any relief.

The Supreme Court has directed NCLAT to make its decision by March 31. The challenge for Google is that unless NCLAT reaches a decision in Google's favor by this month, the tech giant will have to make a series of changes to Android. [...] The CCI has ordered Google to not require licensing of its Play Store to be linked with mandating installation of several Google apps such as Chrome and YouTube. The watchdog has also ordered Google to allow removal of all its apps from phones and give smartphone users the ability to change their search engine provider. The CCI also fined Google $162 million in its first order.

The cases could significantly affect the power and responsibilities of social media platforms. From a report: For years, giant social networks like Facebook, Twitter and Instagram have operated under two crucial tenets. The first is that the platforms have the power to decide what content to keep online and what to take down, free from government oversight. The second is that the websites cannot be held legally responsible for most of what their users post online, shielding the companies from lawsuits over libelous speech, extremist content and real-world harm linked to their platforms. Now the Supreme Court is poised to reconsider those rules, potentially leading to the most significant reset of the doctrines governing online speech since U.S. officials and courts decided to apply few regulations to the web in the 1990s.

On Friday, the Supreme Court is expected to discuss whether to hear two cases that challenge laws in Texas and Florida barring online platforms from taking down certain political content. Next month, the court is scheduled to hear a case that questions Section 230, a 1996 statute that protects the platforms from liability for the content posted by their users. The cases could eventually alter the hands-off legal position that the United States has largely taken toward online speech, potentially upending the businesses of TikTok, Twitter, Snap and Meta, which owns Facebook and Instagram. "It's a moment when everything might change," said Daphne Keller, a former lawyer for Google who directs a program at Stanford University's Cyber Policy Center.

Ubisoft CEO Yves Guillemot faced tough questions from some exhausted and fed-up staff about recent missteps and future plans in a company-wide Q&A session on Wednesday. The meeting comes just a week after the Assassin's Creed publisher announced new cancellations, delays, and cost-cutting measures, and told employees "the ball is in your court" to help get the $3 billion company back on track. From a report: "The ball is now in our court -- for years it has been in your court so why did you mishandle the ball so badly so we, the workers, have to fix it for you?" read one upvoted question on a list submitted in advance through corporate communication channels and viewed by Kotaku. It was a reference to a now infamous email Guillemot sent to staff last week that appeared to shift blame for the publisher's recent mistakes and hold lower-level employees accountable for fixing the situation.

Guillemot opened the meeting by apologizing. "I heard your feedback and I'm sorry this was perceived that way," Guillemot said, according to sources present who were not authorized to speak to press. "When saying 'the ball is in your court' to deliver our lineup on time and at the expected level of quality, I wanted to convey the idea that more than ever I need your talent and energy to make it happen. This is a collective journey that starts of course with myself and with the leadership team to create the conditions for all of us to succeed together." While that clarification resonated with some developers, others who spoke with Kotaku still feel management is out of touch and found little in the meeting to reassure them.

The artificial-intelligence (AI) chatbot ChatGPT that has taken the world by storm has made its formal debut in the scientific literature -- racking up at least four authorship credits on published papers and preprints. Journal editors, researchers and publishers are now debating the place of such AI tools in the published literature, and whether it's appropriate to cite the bot as an author. From a report: Publishers are racing to create policies for the chatbot, which was released as a free-to-use tool in November by tech company OpenAI in San Francisco, California. ChatGPT is a large language model (LLM), which generates convincing sentences by mimicking the statistical patterns of language in a huge database of text collated from the Internet. The bot is already disrupting sectors including academia: in particular, it is raising questions about the future of university essays and research production. Publishers and preprint servers contacted by Nature's news team agree that AIs such as ChatGPT do not fulfil the criteria for a study author, because they cannot take responsibility for the content and integrity of scientific papers. But some publishers say that an AI's contribution to writing papers can be acknowledged in sections other than the author list.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from ArsTechnica: We've said it before, and we'll say it again: USB-C is confusing. A USB-C port or cable can support a range of speeds, power capabilities, and other features, depending on the specification used. Today, USB-C can support various data transfer rates, from 0.48Gbps (USB 2.0) all the way to 40Gbps (USB4, Thunderbolt 3, and Thunderbolt 4). Things are only about to intensify, as today the USB Implementers Forum (USB-IF) published the USB4 Version 2.0 spec. It adds optional support for 80Gbps bidirectional bandwidth as well as the optional ability to send or receive data at up to 120Gbps. The USB-IF first gave us word of USB4 Version 2.0 in September, saying it would support a data transfer rate of up to 80Gbps in either direction (40Gbps per lane, four lanes total), thanks to a new physical layer architecture (PHY) based on PAM-3 signal encoding. For what it's worth, Intel also demoed Thunderbolt at 80Gbps but hasn't released an official spec yet.

USB4 Version 2.0 offers a nice potential bump over the original USB4 spec, which introduced optional support for 40Gbps operation. You just have to be sure to check the spec sheets to know what sort of performance you're getting. Once USB4 Version 2.0 products come out, you'll be able to hit 80Gbps with USB-C passive cables that currently operate at 40Gbps, but you'll have to buy a new cable if you want a longer, active 80Gbps. In a statement to CNET, USB-IF said they don't expect to see supporting products for the new spec for "at least 12 to 18 months."

The USB Implementers Forum also updated the USB Type-C Cable and Connector and USB Power Delivery specifications today to accommodate USB4 Version 2.0.

Boston Dynamics released a demo of its humanoid robot Atlas, showing it pick up and deliver a bag of tools to a construction worker. While Atlas could already run and jump over complex terrain, the new hands, or rudimentary grippers, "give the robot new life," reports TechCrunch. From the report: The claw-like gripper consists of one fixed finger and one moving finger. Boston Dynamics says the grippers were designed for heavy lifting tasks and were first demonstrated in a Super Bowl commercial where Atlas held a keg over its head. The videos released today show the grippers picking up construction lumber and a nylon tool bag. Next, the Atlas picks up a 2x8 and places it between two boxes to form a bridge. The Atlas then picks up a bag of tools and dashes over the bridge and through construction scaffolding. But the tool bag needs to go to the second level of the structure -- something Atlas apparently realized and quickly throws the bag a considerable distance. Boston Dynamics describes this final maneuver: 'Atlas' concluding move, an inverted 540-degree, multi-axis flip, adds asymmetry to the robot's movement, making it a much more difficult skill than previously performed parkour." A behind the scenes video describing how Atlas is able to recognize and interact with objects is also available on YouTube.

Google is officially shutting down its Stadia cloud gaming service today, Wednesday, January 18, after having failed to gain the traction that the company was expecting. Google servers that host the service are due to shut down at 11:59 p.m. Pacific Time. MacRumors reports: Launched in November 2019, the service was designed to allow for cloud-based gaming across a range of devices, including PCs, Chromebooks, Macs, iPhones, and iPads. Reports began emerging in early 2021 of Stadia's underwhelming uptake among gamers, shortly after Google's decision to kill its only in-house Stadia game development studio, Stadia Games and Entertainment (SG&E), only two years into its life. Since announcing the shutdown in September 2022, Google has promised to refund any and all Stadia purchases. They've also recently offered a tool to make Stadia controller capable of using Bluetooth, allowing them to be used with other gaming platforms.

Researchers at Carnegie Mellon University developed a method for detecting the three dimensional shape and movements of human bodies in a room, using only WiFi routers. From a report: To do this, they used DensePose, a system for mapping all of the pixels on the surface of a human body in a photo. DensePose was developed by London-based researchers and Facebook's AI researchers. From there, according to their recently-uploaded preprint paper published on arXiv, they developed a deep neural network that maps WiFi signals' phase and amplitude sent and received by routers to coordinates on human bodies. Researchers have been working on "seeing" people without using cameras or expensive LiDAR hardware for years. In 2013, a team of researchers at MIT found a way to use cell phone signals to see through walls; in 2018, another MIT team used WiFi to detect people in another room and translate their movements to walking stick-figures.

The smartphone industry capped off another dismal year with a 17% year over year drop for Q4. That number puts the full year's shipping figures 11% below 2021, per new numbers from Canalys, which refer to it as "an extremely challenging year for all vendors." From a report: It's been one thing after another from the industry. Slowing figures pre-dated 2020, while the pandemic and its various knock-on effects have continued tossing up roadblocks. For 2022, the same macroeconomic headwinds that have impacted practically every facet of life took their own toll on the industry. Notably, the figures for the quarter and the year were at their lowest in nearly a decade. The firm tells TechCrunch, "we have to go back to 2013 to find lower numbers -- and back then the market situation was very different as the technology was a lot more emerging." Apple returned to the top spot for Q4, at a quarter of the total market. Samsung held onto No. 2, but still captured the top spot for the entirety of 2022.

Apple has postponed the launch of its lightweight augmented-reality glasses indefinitely due to technical challenges, but is still planning to unveil its first mixed-reality headset this year, Bloomberg News reported on Tuesday. Reuters reports: The iPhone maker's mixed-reality headset - which combines both augmented and virtual reality -- is set to launch in this year's spring event, Bloomberg said, adding that the device will cost around $3,000. Apple's mixed-reality device would compete with the likes of Meta Platforms' Quest Pro virtual and mixed-reality headset, which it launched late last year for $1,500, half of the Apple device's reported price.

The Cupertino, California-based company now plans to focus on lowering the price of the follow-up version of its mixed-reality device, expected as soon as 2024 or early 2025, instead of working on the AR glasses, according to the report. Apple will aim to do so by using chips on par with those in the iPhone rather than components found in higher-end Mac computers.

Discord has acquired the Gas social app, a poll-based app for friends to share compliments with each other. "The app is designed for anonymous compliments and positive affirmations or, as kids say, gassing your friends up," reports The Verge. From the report: Gas has polls that ask users to vote for things like the most beautiful person they've met or the classmate that isn't afraid to get in trouble. It has soared in popularity among high schoolers since launching in August. One of the co-creators of TBH, a very similar teenager app acquired and shut down by Facebook, created Gas, which has caught the attention of more than 1 million daily active users and 30,000 new users per hour in October.

"Gas' founders have a proven track record of creating exciting apps and experiences, and we're thrilled to work with their team to take things to the next level," says Discord in a blog post announcing the Gas acquisition. "At this time, Gas will continue as its own standalone app and the Gas team will be joining Discord to help our efforts to continue to grow across new and core audiences." Discord hasn't disclosed the terms of its Gas acquisition, but it's clearly part of a broader and continued effort to target communities and users outside of just gaming.

According to new research, Google is working on a new Bluetooth tracker device to compete with Apple's AirTags. 9to5Google reports: Since 2021, Google has included ultra-wideband (UWB) connectivity in its high-end "Pro" phones like the Pixel 6 Pro and Pixel 7 Pro. For now, the hardware has only been used for niche cases like unlocking a luxury car or sending files to a friend, but it's been clear that Google intends for UWB to be used more often. [...] To build up its own "Finder Network," compete with Apple AirTags, and potentially make UWB more useful on Pixel phones, Google is reportedly developing its own tracking accessory. The information comes courtesy of Android researcher and frequent Pixel leaker Kuba Wojciechowski.

The tracker is said to be in development under the codename "Grogu" -- a reference to the popular Star Wars series "The Mandalorian" -- alongside the alternate names "GR10" and "Groguaudio." The only other tidbits that have been uncovered so far suggest that the Nest team is seemingly taking lead on the development and that the tracker may be available in multiple colors. The "Groguaudio" codename suggests that Google's tracker would potentially come equipped with a speaker. On Apple's AirTags, a built-in speaker serves as both a privacy measure and a location aid, as if you move someone else's AirTag after it's been separated from them, it will beep. This is just one of many potential privacy issues that Google will need to work through before launching a tracker accessory like this one.