According to a job listing spotted by AFTVNews, Amazon makes it clear that the company plans to ditch Android for its own "VegaOS" operating system. "The new platform is said to rely on React Native and would require new apps to be built," reports 9to5Google. From the report: As spotted by AFTVNews, a job listing from Amazon was looking for a "Fire TV Experience Software Development Engineer." The job listing's description makes it abundantly clear that a key part of the role is focused on the transition from Android to the rumored "VegaOS," because it quite literally says that's what is happening, with Amazon saying that Fire TV is transitioning from "FOS/Android" (Fire OS/Android) to "native/Rust" and even explicitly mentioning React Native. The listing, which has since been removed, provides extremely strong evidence of Amazon's plans, which is probably why it was so quickly removed.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Bloomberg: Meta is poised to become Wall Street's top comeback kid. It was only a couple of years back the Facebook owner suffered the single biggest market value destruction in stock-market history. But the company has come a long way since then, on Thursday it dazzled shareholders with yet another impressive quarterly earnings report as the social media giant focuses on cutting back costs and shoring up billions in profits. The stock rose as much as 21% Friday, poised to add roughly $200 billion to its market capitalization. This would be the biggest single-session market value addition, eclipsing the $190 billion gains made by Apple and Amazon in 2022.

"Solid execution, faster growth, and increased capital structure efficiency improve the outlook from here," Brian Nowak, an analyst at Morgan Stanley, wrote in a note Friday. "Meta's AI pipeline for both users and advertisers is robust, with more tools set to launch and scale throughout '24," he added. Meta, which reduced headcount by 22% in 2023, unveiled plans for a $50 billion stock buyback, and announced its first quarterly dividend on Thursday, a sign to investors that it has money to spare and a reason for them to stick around. While the company is making big cost cuts, it continues to spend aggressively on artificial intelligence advancements, namely in generative AI but also on the background technologies to help feed its social media products and power its ad targeting.

Layoffs are being mentioned on US earnings calls at the highest rate since the pandemic -- and as Meta Platforms shows, such cost cutting can pay off for investors. Bloomberg: Efforts by the Facebook parent to slash costs and refocus its business upended the lives of thousands of workers, but has since helped propel its stock 340% from a 2022 low. With an economic soft landing being the base case for many, positioning by firms to protect margins -- particularly in the technology sector -- is being welcomed by investors. Mentions of job cuts and synonyms per earnings calls this season have jumped to the highest levels since the second quarter of 2020, according to a Bloomberg transcript analysis of S&P 1500 Composite Index firms. For the technology industry in particular, "more recent cuts come out of a position of strength," said Wolf von Rotberg, equity strategist at Bank J. Safra Sarasin. "Confidence in the sector appears high that growth can persist even with a smaller workforce," he said.

Apple has tossed another crumb to investors wondering when the world will get to see some 'Made in Cupertino' GenAI: Expect Apple to reveal what it's been working on in this buzzy slice of AI "later this year," per CEO Tim Cook. TechCrunch: During an earnings call yesterday, Apple's chief exec emphasized its ongoing investment in AI, alongside other -- as he put it -- "groundbreaking innovation," such as the technologies which underpin Apple's Vision Pro VR/AR headset, saying: "We continue to spend a tremendous amount of time and effort and we're excited to share the details of our ongoing work in that space later this year." Very unusual for Apple to publicly admit anything in its future roadmap.

Apple's Vision Pro virtual reality headset officially launched in the U.S. on Friday. Customers who preordered the headset will begin to receive it or pick it up at Apple Store locations. CNBC adds: Apple CEO Tim Cook appeared at the company's flagship Fifth Avenue store in New York City on Friday morning to celebrate the headset's release. Speaking to CNBC's Jim Cramer at the event about the Vision Pro's high sticker price, Cook called it "tomorrow's technology today." The Vision Pro starts at $3,500.

"People can spread their payments out over time, and so that's one affordability kind of thing," Cook said, referring to a monthly financing plan that buyers can choose. "It's chock-full of invention. It's got 5,000 patents on it. We think we priced it at the right level considering the value of it," Cook added.

Mozilla claims in a new 74-page research report that Microsoft "repeatedly uses harmful design" and "dark patterns" to push users toward Microsoft Edge and away from rival browsers like Mozilla's Firefox or Google's Chrome browser. PCMag: "Microsoft uses the harmful preselection, visual interference, trick wording, and disguised ads patterns to skew user choice," the report argues, adding that "Microsoft's harmful design practices mean users are unable to download, install, use, or set as default an alternative browser without interference." The researchers claim this harms consumers because they can experience "distortion of choice," lose trust in the broader tech industry, and even possibly experience "emotional distress" as a result of Microsoft's efforts.

For the study, user experiences were tested on Windows 10 Home and Windows 11 Pro as well as the Windows 11 Home Insider Preview Version. The UK-based testers did not attempt to use a VPN to change or hide their IP addresses during their investigation. While Microsoft recently said it will allow users in the European Union to uninstall Edge as part of its efforts to comply with the Digital Markets Act (DMA), it's unclear whether US, UK, or other users around the globe could ever get the same option. Some Windows 11 users can remove five other apps that come preinstalled, however.

Google has removed links to page caches from its search results page, the company's search liaison Danny Sullivan has confirmed. From a report: "It was meant for helping people access pages when way back, you often couldn't depend on a page loading," Sullivan wrote on X. "These days, things have greatly improved. So, it was decided to retire it."

The cache feature historically let you view a webpage as Google sees it, which is useful for a variety of different reasons beyond just being able to see a page that's struggling to load. SEO professionals could use it to debug their sites or even keep tabs on competitors, and it can also be an enormously helpful news gathering tool, giving reporters the ability to see exactly what information a company has added (or removed) from a website, and a way to see details that people or companies might be trying to scrub from the web. Or, if a site is blocked in your region, Google's cache can work as a great alternative to a VPN.

Shiftall, the Japan-based VR hardware creator, is no longer owned by Panasonic, as the company has been effectively sold off to the Tokyo-based company CREEK & RIVER. From a report: As first noted by tech analyst and YouTuber Brad Lynch, Panasonic today announced it has transferred all shares of Shiftall to the Tokyo-based company CREEK & RIVER Co., Ltd., which specializes in outsourcing, consulting, content management and distribution services. Acquired by Panasonic in 2018, Shiftall primarily focused on niche consumer devices, but shifted over the years to focusing on VR hardware, such as its MeganeX PC VR headset, HaritoraX wireless body trackers, FlipVR motion controllers, and mutalk soundproof microphones.

Mark Zuckerberg explaining why Meta open-sources its AI on an earnings call Thursday: I know that some people have questions about how we benefit from open sourcing, the results of our research and large amounts of compute. So I thought it might be useful to lay out the strategic benefits here. The short version is that open sourcing improves our models. And because there's still significant work to turn our models into products because there will be other open-source models available anyway, we find that there are mostly advantages to being the open-source leader, and it doesn't remove differentiation for our products much anyway. And more specifically, there are several strategic benefits.

First, open-source software is typically safer and more secure as well as more compute-efficient to operate due to all the ongoing feedback, scrutiny and development from the community. Now this is a big deal because safety is one of the most important issues in AI. Efficiency improvements and lowering the compute costs also benefit everyone, including us.

Second, open-source software often becomes an industry standard. And when companies standardize on building with our stack, that then becomes easier to integrate new innovations into our products. That's subtle, but the ability to learn and improve quickly is a huge advantage. And being an industry standard enables that.

Third, open source is hugely popular with developers and researchers. And we know that people want to work on open systems that will be widely adopted. So this helps us recruit the best people at Meta, which is a very big deal for leading in any new technology area. And again, we typically have unique data and build unique product integrations anyway, so providing infrastructure like Llama as open source doesn't reduce our main advantage. This is why our long-standing strategy has been to open source general infrastructure and why I expect it to continue to be the right approach for us going forward.

Visual effects artists working on James Cameron's Avatar movies have voted to unionize in a National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) election. From the Hollywood Reporter: Of an eligible 88 workers at Walt Disney Studios subsidiary TCF US Productions 27, Inc. who assist with productions for Cameron's Lightstorm Entertainment, 57 voted to join the union and 19 voted against, while two ballots were void. These workers include creatures costume leads and environment artists as well as others in the stage, environments, render, post viz, sequence, turn over and kabuki departments. Management and labor now have a few days to file any objections, and if none are raised, the election results will be certified.

This bargaining unit doesn't include employees of VFX facility vendors, notably Weta FX, which is the lead VFX house on the Avatar films and employs the vast majority of the more than 1,000 artists who work on a typical Avatar movie. But unionizing the group represents a major inroad for the VFX industry labor movement, believes one VFX industry source who spoke with THR. "While insignificant as a number, this is the core team that answers to Jim Cameron," says the source. "They are not necessarily impressive in size, but in influence."

The workers first went public with their organizing bid in December, when they filed for a union election with the NLRB. At the time, participating workers said in public statements that they were aiming to gain comparable benefits and pay to their unionized peers and have greater input into in working conditions. "Every one of my coworkers has dedicated so much time, creativity and passion to make these films a reality. So when you see them struggling to cover their health premiums, or being overworked because they took on multiple roles, or are just scraping by on their wages ... you cannot keep silent," said kabuki lead Jennifer Anaya.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from TechCrunch: The pace is picking up for the Apple Vison Pro apps ahead of the spatial computing device's Friday launch as developers ready their apps for the new platform. While just last week, only 150-plus apps had been specifically designed for the Vision Pro so far, according to a third-party analysis of the App Store, Apple announced today that more than 600 new apps and games are being readied for the Vison Pro ahead of its debut. These join the more than 1 million already compatible apps across iOS and iPadOS, the company says. [...]

The company says more than 600 apps and games have been designed to take advantage of the Vision Pro's capabilities and its 3D user interface that's navigated using your eyes, hands and voice. Several streaming apps have already announced their support, including Disney+, ESPN, MLB, PGA Tour, Max, Discovery+, Amazon Prime Video, Paramount+, Peacock, Pluto TV, Tubi, Fubo, Crunchyroll, Red Bull TV, IMAX, TikTok and MUBI. The PGA Tour Vision app offers a golf game with real-time shot tracking across models of real golf courses, while the NBA app will allow streaming up to five broadcasts live or on-demand at once, Apple notes. Red Bull TV will include 3D maps of races. Soccer fans will also be able to stream MLS Season Pass via Apple's own Apple TV app. That app will offer access to Apple's Originals, more than 200 3D movies and Apple Immersive Video.

Snap is recalling all 71,000 of its Pixy flying selfie camera drones because their batteries pose a fire hazard. The Verge reports: Snap and the US Consumer Product Safety Commission say you should "immediately stop using the Pixy Flying Camera, remove the battery and stop charging it" now that there have been four reports of the battery bulging, one fire, and one "minor injury." Then, you can get a full refund for the entire drone and / or any batteries you own -- sounds like we're talking at least $185 back to you, unless you bought it on sale. You don't need a receipt: you can apply for the refund even if you got it as a gift. You can fill out this form to receive a prepaid return label to return the drone. Snap says you will need to safely dispose of the batteries yourself.

Google is bringing generative AI to Google Maps, promising to help users find cool places through the use of large language models (LLM). From a report: The feature will answer queries for restaurant or shopping recommendations, for example, using its LLM to "analyze Maps' detailed information about more than 250 million places and trusted insights from our community of over 300 million contributors to quickly make suggestions for where to go." Google says the feature will first become available in the US, but there's no word yet on when other countries will also get it.

An anonymous reader shares a report: Microsoft's adoption of Rust continues apace if a posting on the IT titan's careers website is anything to go by. Although headcount at Microsoft might currently be down -- by two percent compared to the previous year -- recruitment persists at the Windows giant. In this case, the company is forming a team of Rustaceans to tackle a platform move away from C#.

The job, a principal software architect for Microsoft 365, has responsibilities that include "guiding technical direction, design and implementation of Rust component libraries, SDKs, and re-implementation of existing global scale C# based services to Rust." According to the post, the job lurks within the Substrate App Platform group, part of the Microsoft 365 Core Platform organization. The Substrate does the heavy lifting behind the scenes for Microsoft's cloud services, making a rewrite into Rust quite a statement of intent. Microsoft said: "We are forming a new team focused on enabling the adoption of the Rust programming language as the foundation to modernizing global scale platform services, and beyond."

Google's Bard chatbot is adding AI image generation, catching up on a feature that rival ChatGPT Plus has had for months. From a report: Users can prompt Bard to generate photos using Google's Imagen 2 text-to-image model. Bard, now powered by Google's Gemini Pro large language model, was always going to have image generation. It was assumed the more powerful Gemini Ultra model would power it; however, that model remains in development.

Google has been positioning Bard as a worthy competitor to OpenAI's ChatGPT Plus, which runs GPT-4 and lets users generate images thanks to DALL-E 3 integration. Both chatbots perform well, but Bard's lack of text-to-image features gave ChatGPT Plus a bit of an edge. People can use the updated Bard with Imagen 2 at no cost, unlike ChatGPT Plus, which relies on a paid subscription.

Identity management company Okta said on Thursday in a message to employees that it would lay off 400 employees, about 7% of the company's headcount. From a report: CEO Todd McKinnon said in his message that the "reality is that costs are still too high." Okta is only the latest tech company to trim headcount in the opening weeks of 2024. Nearly 24,000 tech workers lost their jobs in January alone, even as many tech companies saw their stock prices continue to grow.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Wired: Stretching thousands upon thousands of miles under your feet, a web of fibrous ears is listening. Whether you walk over buried fiber optics or drive a car across them, above-ground activity creates a characteristic vibration that ever-so-slightly disturbs the way light travels through the cables. With the right equipment, scientists can parse that disturbance to identify what the source was and when exactly it was roaming there. This quickly proliferating technique is known as distributed acoustic sensing, or DAS, and it's so sensitive that researchers recently used it to monitor the cacophony of a mass cicada emergence. Others are using the cables as an ultra-sensitive instrument for detecting volcanic eruptions and earthquakes: Unlike a traditional seismometer stuck in one place, a web of fiber optic cables can cover a whole landscape, providing unprecedented detail of Earth's rumblings at different locations. Now scientists are experimenting with bringing DAS to a railroad near you.

When a train runs along a section of track, it creates vibrations that analysts can monitor over time -- if that signal suddenly changes, it might indicate a problem with the rail, like a crack, or a snapped tie. Or if on a mountain pass a rockslide blasts across the track, DAS might "hear" that too, warning railroad operators of a problem that human eyes hadn't yet glimpsed. More gradual changes in the signal might betray the development of faults in track alignment. It just so happens that fiber optic cables already run along many railways to connect all the signaling equipment or for telecommunications. "You're utilizing the already available facilities and infrastructure for that, which can reduce the cost," says engineer Hossein Taheri, who is studying DAS for railroads at Georgia Southern University. "There could be some railroads where they don't have the fiber, and you need to lay down. But yes, most of them, usually they do already have it."

To tap into that fiber, you need a device called an interrogator, which fires laser pulses down the cables and analyzes the tiny bits of light that bounce back. So, say a rock hits the track 20 miles away from the interrogator. That creates a characteristic ground vibration that disturbs the fiber optics near the track, which shows up in the light signal. Because scientists know the speed of light, they can precisely measure the time it took for that signal to travel back to their interrogator, pinpointing the distance to the disturbance to within 10 meters, or about 30 feet. For a given stretch of track, you'd have already analyzed the DAS signals for a length of time, building a vibration profile for a normal, healthy railway. When the DAS data suddenly starts showing something different, you might have an issue, which shows up like an EKG picking up a problem with a human heartbeat. "What we're doing is profiling the track, looking for changes in the acoustic signature," says Daniel Pyke, a rail expert and spokesperson for Sensonic, which develops DAS technology for railroads. "We know what track should sound like, we know what a train should sound like. And we know that if it's changing -- so let's say this joint is coming loose -- that needs someone to go and fix it before it becomes a problem."

Dan Robinson reports via The Register: Quantum companies received 50 percent less venture cap funding last year as investors switched to generative AI or shied away from risky bets on Silicon Valley startups. Progress in quantum computing is being made, but practical applications of the technology are still likely years away. Investment in quantum technology reached a high of $2.2 billion in 2022, as confidence (or hype) grew in this emerging market, but that funding fell to about $1.2 billion last year, according to the latest State of Quantum report, produced by The Quantum Insider, with quantum computing company IQM, plus VCs OpenOcean and Lakestar. The picture is even starker in the US, where there was an 80 percent decline in venture capital for quantum, while the APAC region dropped by 17 percent, and EMEA grew slightly by three percent.

But the report denies that we have reached a "quantum winter," comparable with the "AI winter" periods of scarce funding and little progress. Instead, the quantum industry continues to progress towards useful quantum systems, just at a slower pace, and the decline in funding must be seen as part of broader venture capital trends, it insists. "Calendar year 2023 was an interesting year with regards to quantum," Heather West, research manager for Quantum Computing, Infrastructure Systems, Platforms, and Technology at IDC told The Register. "With the increased interest in generative AI, we started to observe that some of the funding that was being invested into quantum was transferred to AI initiatives and companies. Generative AI was seen as the new disruptive technology which end users could use immediately to gain an advantage or value, whereas quantum, while expected to be a disruptive technology, is still very early in development," West told The Register.

Gartner Research vice president Matthew Brisse agreed. "It's due to the slight shift of CIO priorities toward GenAI. If organizations were spending 10 innovation dollars on quantum, now they are spending five. Not abandoning it, but looking at GenAI to provide value sooner to the organization than quantum," he told us. Meanwhile, venture capitalists in America are fighting shy of risky bets on Silicon Valley startups and instead keeping their powder dry as they look to more established technology companies or else shore up their existing portfolio of investments, according to the Financial Times.

Jess Weatherbed reports via The Verge: Bullitt Group, the UK-based smartphone manufacturer behind the rugged handsets of Cat, Land Rover, and Motorola, has seemingly shut down. On Monday, Mobile World Live spotted several Bullitt Group employees on LinkedIn saying that the company folded on January 26th after a "critical planned restructuring" failed. The Telegraph reported earlier this month that the company was on the brink of insolvency. Bullitt Group has yet to issue an official statement confirming the closure. The manufacturer previously told The Telegraph that it planned to transfer its satellite connectivity business and all 100 of its employees to a new company owned by its creditors, though one former employee now claims the entire workforce has been laid off.

Founded in 2009, Bullitt found its niche producing mobile devices and accessories for other companies. The most notable are the hardy, rugged handsets like the Land Rover Explore and Motorola Defy series, though it also made more traditional smartphones like the Kodak Ektra. In recent years, the company placed greater focus on satellite connectivity projects like the Motorola Defy Satellite Link as it struggled to compete against larger phone providers like Apple and Samsung.

In an interview with The Register, author and activist Cory Doctorow offers potential solutions to stop "enshittification," an age-old phenomenon that has become endemic in the tech industry. It's when a platform that was once highly regarded and user-friendly gradually deteriorates in quality, becoming less appealing and more monetized over time. Then, it dies. Here's an excerpt from the interview, conducted by The Register's Iain Thomson: [...] Doctorow explained that the reasons for enshittification are complex, and not necessarily directly malicious -- but a product of the current business environment and the state of regulation. He thinks the way to flush enshittification is enforcing effective competition. "We need to have prohibition and regulation that prohibits the capital markets from funding predatory pricing," he explained. "It's very hard to enter the market when people are selling things below cost. We need to prohibit predatory acquisitions. Look at Facebook: buying Instagram, and Mark Zuckerberg sending an email saying we're buying Instagram because people don't like Facebook and they're moving to Instagram, and we just don't want them to have anywhere else to go."

The frustrating part of this is that the laws needed to break up the big tech monopolies that allow enshittification, and encourage competition, are already on the books. Doctorow lamented those laws haven't been enforced. In the US, the Clayton Act, the Federal Trade Act, and the Sherman Act are all valid, but have either not been enforced or are being questioned in the courts. However, in the last few years that appears to be changing. Recent actions by increasingly muscular regulatory agencies like the FTC and FCC are starting to move against the big tech monopolies, as well as in other industry sectors. What's more, Doctorow pointed out, these are not just springing from the Democratic administration but are being actively supported by an increasing number of Republicans. He cited Lina Khan, appointed as chair of the FTC in part thanks to the support of Republican politicians seeking change (although the GOP now regularly criticizes her positions).

The sheer size of the largest tech companies certainly gives them an advantage in cases like these, Doctorow opined, noting that we've seen this in action more than 20 years ago. "Think back to the Napster era, and compare tech and entertainment. Entertainment was very concentrated into about seven big firms and they had total unity and message discipline," Doctorow recalled. "Tech was a couple of hundred firms, and they were much larger -- like an order of magnitude larger in aggregate than entertainment. But their messages were all over the place, and they were contradicting each other. And so they just lost, and they lost very badly." Doctorow discusses the detrimental effects of mega-companies on innovation and security, noting how growth strategies focused on raising costs and reducing value can lead to vulnerabilities and employee demoralization. "Remember when tech workers dreamed of working for a big company before striking out on their own to put that big company out of business? Then that dream shrank to working for a few years, quitting and doing a fake startup to get hired back by your old boss in the world's most inefficient way to get a raise," he told the Def Con crowd last August. "Next it shrank even further. You're working for a tech giant your whole life but you get free kombucha and massages. And now that dream is over and all that's left is work with a tech giant until they fire your ass -- like those 12,000 Googlers who got fired six months after a stock buyback that would have paid their salaries for the next 27 years. We deserve better than this."

Additionally, Doctorow emphasizes the growing movement toward labor organizing in the tech industry, which could be a pivotal factor in reversing the trend of enshittification. "We're so much closer to tech unionization than we were just a few years ago. Yeah, it's still nascent, and yes, it's easy to double small numbers, but the strength is doubling very quickly and in a very heartening way," Doctorow told The Register. "We're really at a turning point. And some of it is coming from the kind of solidarity like you see with warehouse workers and tech workers."

Ultimately, Doctorow argues it should be possible to reintroduce a more competitive and innovative tech industry environment, where the interests of users, employees, and investors are better balanced.