Leaders of the U.S. House of Representatives committee on China told Apple and Google's parent Alphabet to prepare to remove TikTok from U.S. app stores on January 19, following a federal appeals court decision upholding legislation requiring Chinese-based ByteDance to divest the platform or face a ban.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from 9to5Google: Besides phones and tablets, Android is available on smartwatches, TVs, and even cars. Google today announced Android XR as the next form factor the operating system is coming to. Google is using the catch-all term of extended reality (XR) to describe virtual (VR), mixed (MR), and augmented reality (AR). Android XR is for all device types, including headsets that offer video or optical see-through, screen-less "AI glasses," and AR glasses with displays. Going into Android XR, Google believes it has a proven track record of creating platforms. That is more than just making an operating system for themselves, but also catering to OEM partners, cultivating a developer ecosystem, and managing an app store.

[...] Google says Android XR is the first OS built from the ground up with Gemini. Google and Samsung are starting with the headset, which both consider a good starting point. Samsung has a developer kit called Project Moohan (or "infinity" in Korean) that is lightweight, has an external battery, and powered by the Snapdragon XR2+ Gen 2. Google imagines Android XR headsets as offering an infinite desktop for productivity. In this scenario, you're at a desk with a physical keyboard and mouse. A few partners already have this dev kit and more are being distributed to partners starting this week. Meanwhile, first-party apps like Chrome, YouTube, Google TV, Google Photos, and Google Maps are being optimized for Android XR.

However, glasses are the end goal and frames running Android XR are coming for "directions, translations or message summaries without reaching for your phone," though they are paired like any other wearable. The final realization of this vision is in-lens display. However, Google does not think that displays are a must, and this opens the door to display-less glasses that have microphones and cameras for input, while Gemini capably handles output. Google will "soon begin real-world testing of prototype glasses running Android XR with a small group of users." With today's launch, Google is releasing the Android XR SDK Developer Preview and an Android XR Emulator.

You can get a glimpse into the world of Android XR via this YouTube video.

Google unveiled Gemini 2.0 yesterday, almost exactly one year after Google's initial Gemini launch. The new release offers enhanced multimodal capabilities like native image and audio output, real-time tool use, and advanced reasoning to enable agentic experiences, such as acting as a universal assistant or research companion. VentureBeat reports: During a recent press conference, Tulsee Doshi, director of product management for Gemini, outlined the system's enhanced capabilities while demonstrating real-time image generation and multilingual conversations. "Gemini 2.0 brings enhanced performance and new capabilities like native image and multilingual audio generation," Doshi explained. "It also has native intelligent tool use, which means that it can directly access Google products like search or even execute code."

The initial release centers on Gemini 2.0 Flash, an experimental version that Google claims operates at twice the speed of its predecessor while surpassing the capabilities of more powerful models. This represents a significant technical achievement, as previous speed improvements typically came at the cost of reduced functionality. Perhaps most significantly, Google introduced three prototype AI agents built on Gemini 2.0's architecture that demonstrate the company's vision for AI's future. Project Astra, an updated universal AI assistant, showcased its ability to maintain complex conversations across multiple languages while accessing Google tools and maintaining contextual memory of previous interactions. [...]

For developers and enterprise customers, Google introduced Project Mariner and Jules, two specialized AI agents designed to automate complex technical tasks. Project Mariner, demonstrated as a Chrome extension, achieved an impressive 83.5% success rate on the WebVoyager benchmark for real-world web tasks -- a significant improvement over previous attempts at autonomous web navigation. Supporting these advances is Trillium, Google's sixth-generation Tensor Processing Unit (TPU), which becomes generally available to cloud customers today. The custom AI accelerator represents a massive investment in computational infrastructure, with Google deploying over 100,000 Trillium chips in a single network fabric.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Tom's Hardware, written by Avram Piltch: Microsoft's Recall feature recently made its way back to Windows Insiders after having been pulled from test builds back in June, due to security and privacy concerns. The new version of Recall encrypts the screens it captures and, by default, it has a "Filter sensitive information," setting enabled, which is supposed to prevent it from recording any app or website that is showing credit card numbers, social security numbers, or other important financial / personal info. In my tests, however, this filter only worked in some situations (on two e-commerce sites), leaving a gaping hole in the protection it promises.

When I entered a credit card number and a random username / password into a Windows Notepad window, Recall captured it, despite the fact that I had text such as "Capital One Visa" right next to the numbers. Similarly, when I filled out a loan application PDF in Microsoft Edge, entering a social security number, name and DOB, Recall captured that. (Note that all info in these screenshots is made up). I also created my own HTML page with a web form that said, explicitly, "enter your credit card number below." The form had fields for Credit card type, number, CVC and expiration date. I thought this might trigger Recall to block it, but the software captured an image of my form filled out, complete with the credit card data. Recall did refuse to capture the credit card fields on the payment pages of Pimoroni and Adafruit. "So, when it came to real-world commerce sites that I visited, Recall got it right," adds Piltch. "However, what my experiment proves is that it's pretty much impossible for Microsoft's AI filter to identify every situation where sensitive information is on screen and avoid capturing it."

Harvard University announced Thursday it's releasing a high-quality dataset of nearly one million public-domain books that could be used by anyone to train large language models and other AI tools. From a report: The dataset was created by Harvard's newly formed Institutional Data Initiative with funding from both Microsoft and OpenAI. It contains books scanned as part of the Google Books project that are no longer protected by copyright.

Around five times the size of the notorious Books3 dataset that was used to train AI models like Meta's Llama, the Institutional Data Initiative's database spans genres, decades, and languages, with classics from Shakespeare, Charles Dickens, and Dante included alongside obscure Czech math textbooks and Welsh pocket dictionaries. Greg Leppert, executive director of the Institutional Data Initiative, says the project is an attempt to "level the playing field" by giving the general public, including small players in the AI industry and individual researchers, access to the sort of highly-refined and curated content repositories that normally only established tech giants have the resources to assemble. "It's gone through rigorous review," he says.

Leppert believes the new public domain database could be used in conjunction with other licensed materials to build artificial intelligence models. "I think about it a bit like the way that Linux has become a foundational operating system for so much of the world," he says, noting that companies would still need to use additional training data to differentiate their models from those of their competitors.

An anonymous reader shares a report: Russia has reportedly cut some regions of the country off from the rest of the world's internet for a day, effectively siloing them, according to reports from European and Russian news outlets reshared by the US nonprofit Institute for the Study of War (ISW) and Western news outlets.

Russia's communications authority, Roskomnadzor, blocked residents in Dagestan, Chechnya, and Ingushetia, which have majority-Muslim populations, ISW says. The three regions are in southwest Russia near its borders with Georgia and Azerbaijan. People in those areas couldn't access Google, YouTube, Telegram, WhatsApp, or other foreign websites or apps -- even if they used VPNs, according to a local Russian news site.

Russian digital rights NGO Roskomsvoboda told TechRadar that most VPNs didn't work during the shutdown, but some apparently did. It's unclear which ones or how many actually worked, though. Russia has been increasingly blocking VPNs more broadly, and Apple has helped the country's censorship efforts by taking down VPN apps on its Russian App Store. At least 197 VPNs are currently blocked in Russia, according to Russian news agency Interfax.

Google has announced an experimental AI-powered code agent called "Jules" that can automatically fix coding errors for developers. From a report: Jules was introduced today alongside Gemini 2.0, and uses the updated Google AI model to create multi-step plans to address issues, modify multiple files, and prepare pull requests for Python and Javascript coding tasks in GitHub workflows.

Microsoft introduced a similar experience for GitHub Copilot last year that can recognize and explain code, alongside recommending changes and fixing bugs. Jules will compete against Microsoft's offering, and also against tools like Cursor and even Claude and ChatGPT's coding abilities. Google's launch of a coding-focused AI assistant is no surprise -- CEO Sundar Pichai said in October that more than a quarter of all new code at the company is now generated by AI.

"Jules handles bug fixes and other time-consuming tasks while you focus on what you actually want to build," Google says in its blog post. "This effort is part of our long-term goal of building AI agents that are helpful in all domains, including coding."

Google today unveiled Project Mariner, its first AI agent capable of autonomously navigating web browsers, operating through a Chrome extension that controls cursor movements and form-filling to replicate human interactions online.

The Gemini-powered prototype, developed by Google's DeepMind division, is initially available to a select group of testers. During demos, the agent performed tasks like creating shopping carts on grocery websites, though with noticeable five-second delays between actions. The system captures browser screenshots and processes them through Gemini in the cloud to generate navigation commands.

It operates only in Chrome's active tab, requiring users to observe its actions rather than running in the background. Project Mariner achieved an 83.5% success rate on the WebVoyager benchmark for web-based tasks. The agent has built-in limitations, including inability to complete purchases, accept cookies, or agree to terms of service. Google Labs Director Jaclyn Konzelmann described the project as a "fundamentally new UX paradigm shift" that could transform how users interact with websites. The company said it is engaging with web ecosystem stakeholders as development continues.

An anonymous reader shares a report: Google recently asked the U.S. government to break up Microsoft's exclusive agreement to host OpenAI's technology on its cloud servers, according to a person who has been directly involved in the effort. The conversation took place after the Federal Trade Commission, one of the primary federal antitrust enforcement agencies, asked Google about Microsoft's business practices as part of a broader investigation, this person said.

Firms that compete with Microsoft in renting out cloud servers, including Google and Amazon, want to host OpenAI's artificial intelligence themselves so their cloud customers don't need to also tap Microsoft servers to get access to the startup's technology, this person said.

Google has achieved a major breakthrough in quantum error correction that could enable practical quantum computers by 2030, the company announced in a paper published Monday in Nature. The research demonstrated significant error reduction when scaling up from 3x3 to 7x7 grids of quantum bits, with errors dropping by half at each step. The advance addresses quantum computing's core challenge of maintaining stable quantum states, which typically last only microseconds.

Google's new quantum chip, manufactured in-house, maintains quantum states for nearly 100 microseconds -- five times longer than previous versions. The company aims to build a full-scale system with about 1 million qubits, projecting costs around $1 billion by decade's end.

IBM, Google's main rival, questioned the scalability of Google's "surface code" error correction approach, claiming it would require billions of qubits. IBM is pursuing an alternative three-dimensional design requiring new connector technology expected by 2026. The breakthrough parallels the first controlled nuclear chain reaction in 1942, according to MIT physics professor William Oliver, who noted that both achievements required years of engineering to realize theoretical predictions from decades earlier.

Further reading: Google: Meet Willow, our state-of-the-art quantum chip.

Microsoft AI CEO Mustafa Suleyman predicts conversational AI will become the primary way people interact with technology, replacing traditional web browsers and search engines within the next few years. In an interview with The Verge, Suleyman, who oversees Microsoft's consumer AI products including Bing and Copilot, called current search interfaces "completely broken" and "a total pain," arguing that voice-based AI interactions will prove "100 times easier" for users. He said: The UI that you experience is going to be automagically produced by an LLM in three or five years, and that is going to be the default. And they'll be representing the brands, businesses, influencers, celebrities, academics, activists, and organizations, just as each one of those stakeholders in society ended up getting a podcast, getting a website, writing a blog, maybe building an app, or using the telephone back in the day.

The technological revolution produces a new interface, which completely shuffles the way that things are distributed. And some organizations adapt really fast and they jump on board and it kind of transforms their businesses and their organizations, and some don't. There will be an adjustment. We'll look back by 2030 and be like, "Oh, that really was the kind of moment when there was this true inflection point because these conversational AIs really are the primary way that we have these interactions." And so, you're absolutely right. A brand and a business are going to use that AI to talk to your personal companion AI because I don't really like doing that kind of shopping. And some people do, and they'll do that kind of direct-to-consumer browsing experience. Many people don't like it, and it's actually super frustrating, hard, and slow.

And so, increasingly you'll come to work with your personal AI companion to go and be that interface, to go and negotiate, find great opportunities, and adapt them to your specific context. That'll just be a much more efficient protocol because AIs can talk to AIs in super real-time. And by the way, let's not fool ourselves. We already have this on the open web today. We have behind-the-scenes, real-time negotiation between buyers and sellers of ad space, or between search ranking algorithms. So, there's already that kind of marketplace of AIs. It's just not explicitly manifested in language. It's operating in vector space.

Bruce Perens, original co-founder of the Open Source Initiative, has responded to questions from Slashdot readers about a new alternative he's developing that hopefully helps "Post Open" developers get paid.

But first, "One of the things that's clear from the Slashdot patter is that people are not aware of what I've been doing, in general," Perens says. "So, let's start by filling that in..."

Read on for the rest of his wide-ranging answers....

Google's app store claims that their text-messaging app Google Messages means "conversations are end-to-end encrypted".

"That is some serious bullshit," argues tech blogger John Gruber: It's shamefully misleading regarding Google Messages's support for end-to-end encryption... Google Messages does support end-to-end encryption, but only over RCS and only if all participants in the chat are using a recent version of Google Messages. But the second screenshot in the Play Store listing flatly declares "Conversations are end-to-end encrypted", full stop...

I realize that "Some conversations are end-to-end encrypted" will naturally spur curiosity regarding which conversations are encrypted and which aren't, but that's the truth. And users of the app should be aware of that. "RCS conversations with other Google Messages users are encrypted" would work.

Then, in the "report card" section of the listing, it states the following:

Data is encrypted in transit
Your data is transferred over a secure connection

Which, again, is only true sometimes. It's downright fraudulent to describe Google Messages's transit security this way.... [D]epending who you communicate with — iPhone users, Android users with old devices, Android users who use other text messaging apps — it's quite likely most of your messages won't be secure... E2EE is never available for SMS, and never available if a participant in the chat is using any RCS client (on Android or Apple Messages) other than Google Messages. That's an essential distinction that should be made clear, not obfuscated.
Gruber's earlier blog post had pointed out that the RCS standard "has no encryption; E2EE RCS chats in Google Messages use Google's proprietary extension and are exclusive to the Google Messages app, so RCS chats between Google Messages and other apps, most conspicuously Apple Messages, are not encrypted."

And in his newer post, Gruber adds, "While I'm at it, it's also embarrassing that Google Voice has no support for RCS at all. It's Google's own app and service, and Google has been the world's most vocal proponent of RCS messaging."

"We're excited to be working with Microsoft to keep Xboxes running longer and out of the waste heap," iFixit's director of sustainability told The Verge. iFixit now sells genuine Xbox parts you can use to repair your Xbox Series X or S and offers official guides to help with fixes [including both the all-digital and disk drive editions]...

iFixit's Microsoft Repair Hub also features iFixit's parts for repairing Microsoft Surface devices, which it started selling in 2023. "Since we launched our Surface parts collaboration with Microsoft last year, we've been helping our customers repair their own Microsoft laptops and tablets — and it's awesome to be able to offer Xbox owners the same opportunity," says Elizabeth Chamberlain, iFixit's director of sustainability.
The article points out that iFixit also sells "nearly every part of the Steam Deck" and "a bunch of repair guides for Valve's handheld PC, too," along with genuine repair parts for Google's Pixel phones and the Pixel Tablet.

"With Microsoft, we've created a one-stop place for guides, tools, and spare parts to make self-service repair accessible to anyone," says iFixit's new web page. "Imagine how different the world would be if repairing every device could be this easy."

"Google says its new AI model family has a curious feature: the ability to 'identify' emotions," writes TechCrunch. And that's raising some concerns... Announced on Thursday, the PaliGemma 2 family of models can analyze images, enabling the AI to generate captions and answer questions about people it "sees" in photos. "PaliGemma 2 generates detailed, contextually relevant captions for images," Google wrote in a blog post shared with TechCrunch, "going beyond simple object identification to describe actions, emotions, and the overall narrative of the scene." Emotion recognition doesn't work out of the box, and PaliGemma 2 has to be fine-tuned for the purpose. Nonetheless, experts TechCrunch spoke with were alarmed at the prospect of an openly available emotion detector...

"Emotion detection isn't possible in the general case, because people experience emotion in complex ways," Mike Cook, a research fellow at Queen Mary University specializing in AI, told TechCrunch. "Of course, we do think we can tell what other people are feeling by looking at them, and lots of people over the years have tried, too, like spy agencies or marketing companies. I'm sure it's absolutely possible to detect some generic signifiers in some cases, but it's not something we can ever fully 'solve.'" The unsurprising consequence is that emotion-detecting systems tend to be unreliable and biased by the assumptions of their designers... "Interpreting emotions is quite a subjective matter that extends beyond use of visual aids and is heavily embedded within a personal and cultural context," said Heidy Khlaaf, chief AI scientist at the AI Now Institute, a nonprofit that studies the societal implications of artificial intelligence. "AI aside, research has shown that we cannot infer emotions from facial features alone...."

The biggest apprehension around open models like PaliGemma 2, which is available from a number of hosts, including AI dev platform Hugging Face, is that they'll be abused or misused, which could lead to real-world harm. "If this so-called emotional identification is built on pseudoscientific presumptions, there are significant implications in how this capability may be used to further — and falsely — discriminate against marginalized groups such as in law enforcement, human resourcing, border governance, and so on," Khlaaf said.
Those concerrns were echoed by a professor in data ethics and AI at the Oxford Internet Institute, Sandra Wachter, who gave this quote to TechCrunch. With models like this, "I can think of myriad potential issues... that can lead to a dystopian future, where your emotions determine if you get the job, a loan, and if you're admitted to uni."

"Elon Musk's AI chatbot Grok is now available to free users on X," reports the Verge: Several users noticed the change on Friday, which gives non-Premium subscribers the ability to send up to 10 messages to Grok every two hours.

xAI launched Grok last year as a "humorous AI assistant," but it was only available to Premium subscribers... Making Grok more widely available might help it compete with the already-free chatbots like OpenAI's ChatGPT, Google Gemini, Microsoft Copilot, and Anthropic's Claude.

Thursday OpenAI released a "smarter, faster" ChatGPT. But there's still competition, notes the tech site Tom's Guide (which is liveblogging December's AI news). "Not to be outdone by OpenAI, this week has seen several big announcements by other AI companies." Google Deepmind unveiled Genie 2, a tool capable of creating limitless 3D environments. It could create playable games based on a single text input.

ElevenLabs announced a new Conversational AI system. It's a voice bot meant to feel like you're making a phone call. Tom's Guide AI editor Ryan Morrison used it to clone his voice to act as technical support for his dad.

OpenAI will probably announce an upgraded Sora video model in the coming days, but we were impressed by the new Hunyuan Video model that released a demo this week. Sora has some serious competition and we're interested in seeing how it competes.

"Okay, we're doing this," begins a new announcement at The Verge: Today we're launching a Verge subscription that lets you get rid of a bunch of ads, gets you unlimited access to our top-notch reporting and analysis across the site and our killer premium newsletters, and generally lets you support independent tech journalism in a world of sponsored influencer content. It'll cost $7 / month or $50 / year — and for a limited time, if you sign up for the annual plan, we'll send you an absolutely stunning print edition of our CONTENT GOBLINS series, with very fun new photography and design... A surprising number of you have asked us to launch something like this, and we're happy to deliver. If you don't want to pay, rest assured that big chunks of The Verge will remain free — we're thinking about subscriptions a lot differently than everyone else...

If you're a Verge reader, you know we've been covering massive, fundamental changes to how the internet works for years now. Most major social media platforms are openly hostile to links, huge changes to search have led to the death of small websites, and everything is covered in a layer of AI slop and weird scams. The algorithmic media ecosystem is now openly hostile to the kind of rigorous, independent journalism we want to do.

A few years ago, we decided the only real way to survive all this was to stand apart and bet on our own website so that we could remain independent of these platforms and their algorithms. We didn't want to write stories to chase Google Search trends or because we thought they'd do well on social media. And we definitely didn't want to compromise our famously strict ethics policy to accept brand endorsement deals from the companies we cover, which almost all of our competitors in the creator economy are forced to do in order to run sustainable businesses...

[W]e intend to keep making this thing together for a long, long time. So many of you like The Verge that we've actually gotten a shocking number of notes from people asking how they can pay to support our work. It's no secret that lots of great websites and publications have gone under over the past few years as the open web falls apart, and it's clear that directly supporting the creators you love is a big part of how everyone gets to stay working on the modern internet. At the same time, we didn't want to simply paywall the entire site — it's a tragedy that traditional journalism is retreating behind paywalls while nonsense spreads across platforms for free.
The print premium for subscribers is described as a "beautiful / deranged print product" that's drawn from a series of articles "about what Google had done to the web, capped off by a feature about search engine optimization titled 'The People Who Ruined the Internet.'" But it ships with a satirical cover that instead proclaims it as "The Verge Guide to Search Engine Optimization". A tongue-in-check announcement explains: [A] year has passed, and we've had a change of heart. Maybe search engine optimization is actually a good thing. Maybe appeasing the search algorithm is not only a sustainable strategy for building a loyal audience, but also a strategic way to plan and produce content. What are journalists, if not content creators? Anyway, SEO community, consider this our apology. And what better way to say "our bad, your industry is not a cesspool of AI slop but a brilliant vision of what a useful internet could look like" than collecting all the things we've learned in one handy print magazine? Which is why I'm proud to introduce The Verge Guide to Search Engine Optimization: All the Tips, Tricks, Hints, Schemes, and Techniques for Promoting High-Quality Content!
Whoops — slip off the cover and the real title appears: "CONTENT GOBLINS" (written in green slime). Again, it's "an anthology of stories about 'content' and the people who 'make' it." In very Verge fashion, we are meeting the moment where the internet has been overrun by AI garbage by publishing a beautifully designed, limited edition print product. (Also, the last time we printed a magazine, it won a very prestigious design award.) Content Goblins collects some of our best stories over the past couple years, capturing the cynical push for the world's great art and journalism to be reduced into units that can be packaged, distributed, and consumed on the internet. Consider Content Goblins as our resistance to that movement. With terrific new art and photography, we're making the case that great reporting is vital and enduring — and worth paying for.

This gorgeous, grotesque magazine can be yours if you commit to an annual subscription to The Verge — while supplies last.

Primarily used by law enforcement, Graykey unlocks mobile devices to extract data from both Android and iOS systems, according to the blog AppleInsider, "though its effectiveness varies depending on the specific hardware and software involved." But while its capabilities are rarely disclosed, "a leak of some Grayshift's internal documents was recently reported on by 404 Media." According to the data, Graykey can only perform "partial" data retrieval from iPhones running iOS 18 and iOS 18.0.1. These versions were released in September and early October, respectively. A partial extraction likely includes unencrypted files and metadata, such as folder structures and file sizes, according to past reports. Notably, Graykey struggles with beta versions of iOS 18.1. Under the latest update, the tool fails to extract any data, as per the documents.

Meanwhile, Graykey's performance with Android phones varies, largely due to the diversity of devices and manufacturers. On Google's Pixel lineup, Graykey can only partially access data from the latest Pixel 9 when in an "After First Unlock" (AFU) state — where the phone has been unlocked at least once since being powered on.
Thanks to long-time Slashdot reader AmiMoJo for sharing the article.

An anonymous reader shares a report: Google Cloud dangled hundreds of million of euros worth of financial incentives to ally itself with an association of European cloud providers that had lodged a complaint against Microsoft, according to confidential documents seen by The Register.

Amit Zavery, the former Vice President of Google Cloud Platform, presented to a selection of members of the Cloud Infrastructure Service Providers in Europe (CISPE) trade body, then to the board and finally to the entire organization, according to sources that asked to remain anonymous.

In the presentation, seen by us, Zavery offered to provide a Members Innovation Fund of $4.2 million, which Google described as $105,000 per member to be used as "immediate funding for projects and license fees of CISPE members to support innovation in open cloud ecosystems." CISPE actually has 36 members now, including Oxya, Leaseweb, UpCloud and AWS -- the latter being the only non-European participant. The number has grown from 27 in July. Google also offered to contribute an additional $10.6 million to the trade association, described in the presentation as "participating and membership resources."