On Monday, John Carmack, co-creator of id Software’s Quake franchise, defended Microsoft’s recent AI-generated Quake II demo against criticism from a fan about the technology’s impact on industry jobs, calling it “impressive research work.” Last Friday, Microsoft released a new playable tech demo of a generative AI game engine called WHAMM (World and Human Action…
On Saturday, Meta released its newest Llama 4 multimodal AI models in a surprise weekend move that caught some AI experts off guard. The announcement touted Llama 4 Scout and Llama 4 Maverick as major advancements, with Meta claiming top performance in their categories and an enormous 10 million token context window for Scout. But…
A technique that hostile nation-states and financially motivated ransomware groups are using to hide their operations poses a threat to critical infrastructure and national security, the National Security Agency has warned. The technique is known as fast flux. It allows decentralized networks operated by threat actors to hide their infrastructure and survive takedown attempts that…
The tech market lost 29,000 jobs in March, even as the unemployment rate for tech-related jobs slipped 0.1% to 3.1%, according to an analysis of US Labor Department data released today. At the same time, tech sector employment fell by 8,428 jobs last month, driven largely by job cuts in tech services and telecommunications, according…
We are still within the sequence of energies described in Newton’s Third Law of Motion, “every action has an equal and opposite reaction.” In this case, Apple, already badly bruised by Trump’s tariffs and their impact on its business, will now take another kicking as nations react to those oddly calculated trade taxes. Europe is gunning for…
When Google announced Tuesday that end-to-end encrypted messages were coming to Gmail for business users, some people balked, noting it wasn’t true E2EE as the term is known in privacy and security circles. Others wondered precisely how it works under the hood. Here’s a description of what the new service does and doesn’t do, as…
Apple’s leadership is no doubt scrambling to identify a silver lining (if there is one) as the storm of US President Donald J. Trump’s punishing range of global tariffs rains heavily across the company’s supply chain. Even Apple’s attempt to mitigate the impact of anticipated tariffs on Chinese goods with big investments in manufacturing in India, Thailand, and elsewhere wasn’t enough. …
On Tuesday, the Wikimedia Foundation announced that relentless AI scraping is putting strain on Wikipedia’s servers. Automated bots seeking AI model training data for LLMs have been vacuuming up terabytes of data, growing the foundation’s bandwidth used for downloading multimedia content by 50 percent since January 2024. It’s a scenario familiar across the free and…
Who doesn’t love Google Maps? The Maps Android app helps those of us with oatmeal for brains find our way anywhere, without having to fire any neurons or exercise any synapses. It even helps us find places to pick up tasty cuisine — like, uh, oatmeal (yum!). But there’s much more to Google Maps than…
A major European cloud provider organization has committed additional funding to drive a push towards what it calls “sovereign, Trump-proof cloud services.” “Many cloud customers, including European public administrations, are concerned that foreign governments have too much power to demand data, impose tariffs and restrict services on the cloud infrastructures they use,” said the statement…