Enlarge Several US government agencies are having a busy week for doling out broadband deployment funding to ISPs and state governments. Today, the FCC announced $791.6 million for six broadband providers, covering network expansions to over 350,000 homes and businesses in 19 states. The ISPs will receive the money over 10 years. “This round of...
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AI wins state fair art contest, annoys humans
Enlarge / The winning entry, Théåtre D’opéra Spatial. (credit: Jason Allen) A synthetic media artist named Jason Allen entered AI-generated artwork into the Colorado State Fair fine arts competition and announced last week that he won first place in the Digital Arts/Digitally Manipulated Photography category, Vice reported Wednesday based on a viral tweet. Allen used...
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Chrome extensions with 1.4M installs covertly track visits and inject code
(credit: Chrome) Google has removed browser extensions with more than 1.4 million downloads from the Chrome Web Store after third-party researchers reported they were surreptitiously tracking users’ browsing history and inserting tracking code into specific ecommerce sites they visited. The five extensions flagged by McAfee purport to offer various services, including the ability to stream...
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Microsoft EU cloud revisions just so happen to exclude Google, Amazon
Enlarge / Microsoft says its latest cloud licensing terms are meant to give customers more flexibility and cost control—just not on Amazon, Google, or Alibaba servers. (credit: Getty Images) Facing European antitrust scrutiny, Microsoft has made it easier to virtualize its software on non-Microsoft cloud infrastructure—just so long as that infrastructure isn’t owned by notable...
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California Approves Bill to Punish Doctors Who Spread False Information
Weighing into the fierce national debate over Covid-19 prevention and treatments, the state would be the first to try a legal remedy for vaccine disinformation.
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Google Says Trump’s Truth Social Must Scrub Violent Content to Join Play Store
The social media app is not available on Google’s app store, and the former president’s company and Google are publicly disagreeing about why.
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Organizations are spending billions on malware defense that’s easy to bypass
Enlarge (credit: Getty Images / Aurich Lawson) Last year, organizations spent $2 billion on products that provide Endpoint Detection and Response, a relatively new type of security protection for detecting and blocking malware targeting network-connected devices. EDRs, as they’re commonly called, represent a newer approach to malware detection. Static analysis, one of two more traditional...
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France reveals hidden swimming pools with AI, taxes them
Enlarge (credit: Getty Images) Using an artificial intelligence computer vision system developed by French IT firm Capgemini, the French tax office (often called “Le Fisc“) has identified 20,356 residential swimming pools that had previously gone undeclared. According to The Guardian, this has opened up 10 million euros in additional tax revenue, leading the way to...
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Silicon Valley’s Elite Get Dragged Into Musk-Twitter Trial
More than 100 subpoenas have been issued to techies like Jack Dorsey and Marc Andreessen as Twitter tries to force Elon Musk to complete a $44 billion deal. Law firms are stoked.
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Xi Jinping’s Vision for Tech Self-Reliance in China Runs Into Reality
After heavy national investment in semiconductors to break a dependence on global chips, Mr. Xi seems unhappy with the results.