The U.S. government is seeking to break up Google's advertising technology business after a judge ruled the company holds an illegal monopoly over ad tools for publishers, marking the second such antitrust case following a similar request to divest Chrome. The Guardian reports: "We have a defendant who has found ways to defy" the law, US government lawyer Julia Tarver Wood told a federal court in Virginia, as she urged the judge to dismiss Google's assurance that it would change its behavior. "Leaving a recidivist monopolist" intact was not appropriate to solve the issue, she added. [...] The US government specifically alleged that Google controls the market for publishing banner ads on websites, including those of many creators and small news providers.

The hearing in a Virginia courtroom was scheduled to plan out the second phase of the trial, set for September, in which the parties will argue over how to fix the ad market to satisfy the judge's ruling. The plaintiffs argued in the first phase of the trial last year that the vast majority of websites use Google ad software products which, combined, leave no way for publishers to escape Google's advertising technology and pricing.

The district court judge Leonie Brinkema agreed with most of that reasoning, ruling last month that Google built an illegal monopoly over ad software and tools used by publishers, but partially dismissed the argument related to tools used by advertisers. The US government said it would use the trial to recommend that Google should spin off its ad publisher and exchange operations, as Google could not be trusted to change its ways. "Behavioral remedies are not sufficient because you can't prevent Google from finding a new way to dominate," Tarver Wood said.

Google countered that it would recommend that it agree to a binding commitment that it would share information with advertisers and publishers on its ad tech platforms. Google lawyer Karen Dunn did, however, acknowledge the "trust issues" raised in the case and said the company would accept monitoring to guarantee any commitments made to satisfy the judge. Google is also arguing that calls for divestment are not appropriate in this case, which Brinkema swiftly refused as an argument. The judge urged both sides to mediate, stressing that coming to a compromise solution would be cost-effective and more efficient than running a weeks-long trial.

An anonymous reader shares a report: In the nearly two months since former Google chief executive Eric Schmidt acquired Relativity Space, the billionaire has not said much publicly about his plans for the launch company. However, his intentions for Relativity now appear to be increasingly clear: He wants to have the capability to launch a significant amount of computing infrastructure into space.

We know this because Schmidt appeared before the House Committee on Energy and Commerce during a hearing in April, speaking on the future of AI and US competitiveness. Among the topics raised then was the need for more electricity -- both renewable and non-renewable -- to power data centers that will facilitate the computing needs for AI development and applications. Schmidt noted that an average nuclear power plant in the United States generates 1 gigawatt of power.

"People are planning 10 gigawatt data centers," Schmidt said. "Gives you a sense of how big this crisis is. Many people think that the energy demand for our industry will go from 3 percent to 99 percent of total generation. One of the estimates that I think is most likely is that data centers will require an additional 29 gigawatts of power by 2027, and 67 more gigawatts by 2030. These things are industrial at a scale that I have never seen in my life."

Redis, the popular in-memory data store, has returned to open source licensing with Redis 8 now available under the AGPL v3 license. The move reverses last year's controversial shift to proprietary licensing schemes (RSALv2 and SSPLv1) that aimed to force major cloud providers to pay for offering Redis as a managed service.

The decision follows significant market pressure, including AWS, Google, and Oracle backing the Valkey fork, which gained momentum in the open source community.

Redis believes the AGPL license provides sufficient protection from cloud providers while satisfying open source requirements. Redis 8 will incorporate vector sets and integrate previously separate Redis Stack features including JSON, Time Series, and probabilistic data support.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from TechCrunch: Epic Games is taking a victory lap. After notching a big win against Apple in a years-long legal dispute, Epic announced that its Epic Games Store will allow developers to open webshops, which can offer players out-of-app purchases to circumvent fees from Apple and Google. [...] With the Epic Games Store's new webshops feature, other developers will be more easily able to follow suit.

Usually, Epic takes a 12% share of a developer's earnings from the Epic Games Store, which is still a better deal than what developers get from Apple. But starting in June, Epic Games will not take a cut from the first $1 million each game earns annually. Only after a game eclipses $1 million in revenue will Epic begin taking a cut. "With new legal rulings in place, developers will be able to send players from games to make digital purchases from webshops on any platform that allows it, including iOS in the European Union and United States," Epic said.

A "small percentage" of Google's users in the US will begin seeing an AI Mode tab in Google Search "in the coming weeks," the company said Thursday, marking the tool's first deployment outside the company's experimental Labs environment.

Unlike traditional search results that display URLs based on user queries, AI Mode generates conversational responses from Google's search index. The feature will appear as a dedicated tab positioned before the standard "All," "Images," and other search filters. The deployment represents Google's direct challenge to LLM-powered search engines like Perplexity and ChatGPT.

AI Mode differs from existing AI Overviews in Google Search, which merely insert AI summaries between the search box and web results.

Nvidia publicly criticized AI startup Anthropic on Thursday over claims about Chinese smuggling tactics, just days before the Biden-era "AI Diffusion Rule" takes effect on May 15. The confrontation highlights growing tensions between AI hardware providers and model developers over export controls.

"American firms should focus on innovation and rise to the challenge, rather than tell tall tales that large, heavy, and sensitive electronics are somehow smuggled in 'baby bumps' or 'alongside live lobsters,'" an Nvidia spokesperson said, responding to Anthropic's Wednesday blog post.

The Amazon and Google-backed AI startup had called for tighter restrictions and enforcement, arguing that "maintaining America's compute advantage through export controls is essential for national security." Anthropic specifically proposed lowering export thresholds for Tier 2 countries to prevent China from gaining ground in AI development.

Nvidia countered that policy shouldn't be used to limit competitiveness: "China, with half of the world's AI researchers, has highly capable AI experts at every layer of the AI stack. America cannot manipulate regulators to capture victory in AI."

An anonymous reader shares a report: A new paper from AI lab Cohere, Stanford, MIT, and Ai2 accuses LM Arena, the organization behind the popular crowdsourced AI benchmark Chatbot Arena, of helping a select group of AI companies achieve better leaderboard scores at the expense of rivals.

According to the authors, LM Arena allowed some industry-leading AI companies like Meta, OpenAI, Google, and Amazon to privately test several variants of AI models, then not publish the scores of the lowest performers. This made it easier for these companies to achieve a top spot on the platform's leaderboard, though the opportunity was not afforded to every firm, the authors say.

"Only a handful of [companies] were told that this private testing was available, and the amount of private testing that some [companies] received is just so much more than others," said Cohere's VP of AI research and co-author of the study, Sara Hooker, in an interview with TechCrunch. "This is gamification." Further reading: Meta Got Caught Gaming AI Benchmarks.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from TechCrunch: Apple sent notifications this week to several people who the company believes were targeted with government spyware, according to two of the alleged targets. In the past, Apple has sent similar notifications to targets and victims of spyware, and directed them to contact a nonprofit that specializes in investigating such cyberattacks. Other tech companies, like Google and WhatsApp, have in recent years also periodically sent such notifications to their users. As of Wednesday, only two people appear to have come forward to reveal they were among those who received the notifications from Apple this week.

One is Ciro Pellegrino, an Italian journalist who works for online news outlet Fanpage. Pellegrino wrote in an article that he received an email and a text message from Apple on Tuesday notifying him that he was targeted with spyware. The message, according to Pellegrino, also said he wasn't the only person targeted. "Today's notification is being sent to affected users in 100 countries," the message read, according to Pellegrino's article. "Did this really happen? Yes, it is not a joke," Pellegrino wrote.

The second person to receive an Apple notification is Eva Vlaardingerbroek, a Dutch right-wing activist, who posted on X on Wednesday. "Apple detected a targeted mercenary spyware attack against your iPhone," the Apple alert said, according to a screenshot shown in a video that Vlaardingerbroek posted on X. "This attack is likely targeting you specifically because of who you are or what you do. Although it's never possible to achieve absolute certainty when detecting such attacks, Apple has high confidence in this warning -- please take it seriously." Reacting to the notification, Vlaardingerbroek said that this was an "attempt to intimidate me, an attempt to silence me, obviously."

Google is investing in training over 100,000 new U.S. electricians through a $10 million grant, aiming to address a critical labor shortage driven by AI-fueled data center growth and rising electricity demands. Reuters reports: A lack of access to power supplies has become the biggest problem for giant technology companies racing to develop artificial intelligence in energy-intensive data centers, which are driving up U.S. electricity demand after nearly 20 years of stagnation. The situation has led President Donald Trump to declare a national energy emergency aimed at speeding up permitting for generation and transmission projects.

Google's funding, which includes a $10 million grant for electrical worker nonprofits, is the latest in a series of recent moves by giant technology companies to alleviate power project backlogs and electricity shortfalls across the United States. [...] The Google grant will be used for electrician apprenticeship programs and the training of existing workforce through organizations, including the Electrical Training Alliance, International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers and the National Electrical Contractors Association. It could increase the pipeline of electrical workers by 70% by the end of the decade, the company said. "This initiative with Google and our partners at NECA and the Electrical Training Alliance will bring more than 100,000 sorely needed electricians into the trade to meet the demands of an AI-driven surge in data centers and power generation," said Kenneth Cooper, international president of the IBEW labor union.

Alphabet CEO Sundar Pichai told a judge who found that Google illegally monopolizes online search that a Justice Department proposal to share search data with rivals would be a "de facto" divestiture of the company's search engine. From a report: If Google were required to share both its search data and the information on how it ranks results, rivals could reverse engineer "every aspect of our technology," Pichai testified on Wednesday.

"The proposal on data sharing is so far reaching, so extraordinary," Pichai said. It "feels like de facto divestiture of search" and its entire intellectual property and technology over 25 years of research, he said. During testimony in federal court in Washington, Pichai asserted that a package of antitrust remedies proposed by the government is too extreme and will undermine Google's ability to compete in the market.

Google Play's app marketplace has seen a dramatic 47% drop in available apps -- from 3.4 million to 1.8 million -- since the start of 2024. An analysis by app intelligence provider Appfigures attributes the decline to stricter quality standards, expanded human reviews, and increased enforcement against low-quality and deceptive apps. TechCrunch reports: In July 2024, Google announced it would raise the minimum quality requirements for apps, which may have impacted the number of available Play Store app listings.

Instead of only banning broken apps that crashed, wouldn't install, or run properly, the company said it would begin banning apps that demonstrated "limited functionality and content." That included static apps without app-specific features, such as text-only apps or PDF file apps. It also included apps that provided little content, like those that only offered a single wallpaper. Additionally, Google banned apps that were designed to do nothing or have no function, which may have been tests or other abandoned developer efforts.

Reached for comment, Google confirmed that its new policies were factors here, which also included an expanded set of verification requirements, required app testing for new personal developer accounts, and expanded human reviews to check for apps that try to deceive or defraud users. In addition, the company pointed to other 2024 investments in AI for threat detection, stronger privacy policies, improved developer tools, and more. As a result, Google prevented 2.36 million policy-violating apps from being published on its Play Store and banned more than 158,000 developer accounts that had attempted to publish harmful apps, it said. TechCrunch also notes that a new trader status rule, which went into effect in the EU this February, could be another contributing factor. It requires developers to display their names and addresses in their app listings, and failure to comply would see their apps removed from EU app stores.

In a blog post yesterday, Master I-ranked human GeoGuessr player Sam Patterson said that OpenAI's o3 model outscored him in a head-to-head match, "correctly identifying all five countries and twice landing within a few hundred meters." Geoguessing is a game -- most popularly known through the platform GeoGuessr -- where players are dropped into a random location in Google Street View and must figure out where in the world they are using only visual clues from the environment. With the release of its newest AI models, o3 and o4-mini, OpenAI now does a surprisingly good job of analyzing uploaded images to determine their locations using nothing but subtle visual clues.

"Even when I embedded fake GPS coordinates in the image EXIF, the model ignored the spoof and still pinpointed the real locations, showing its performance comes from visual reasoning and on-the-fly web sleuthing -- not hidden metadata," says Patterson. From the post: I notice that it often does a lot of unnecessary and repetitive cropping, and will sometimes spend way too much time on something unimportant. A human is very good at knowing what matters, and o3 is less knowledgeable about what things it should focus on. It got distracted by advertising multiple times. However, most of what it says about things like signs and road lines appears to be accurate, or at least close enough to truth that they meaningfully add up. Given the end result of these excellent guesses, it seems to arrive at the guesses from that information.

If it's using other information to arrive at the guess, then it's not metadata from the files, but instead web search. It seems likely that in the Austria round, the web search was meaningful, since it mentioned the website named the town itself. It appeared less meaningful in the Ireland round. It was still very capable in the rounds without search.

So to put a bow on this:
- The o3 model isn't smoke and mirrors, tricking us by only using EXIF data. It's at a comparable Geoguessr skill level to Master I or better players now (at least according to my own ~20 or so rounds of testing).
- Humans still hold a big edge in decision time -- most of my guesses were 4 min.
- Spoofing EXIF data doesn't throw off the model.

Whether you view this as dystopian or as a technological marvel -- or both -- you can't claim it's a parlor trick.

Hackers working for governments were responsible for the majority of attributed zero-day exploits used in real-world cyberattacks last year, per new research from Google. From a report: Google's report said that the number of zero-day exploits -- referring to security flaws that were unknown to the software makers at the time hackers abused them -- had dropped from 98 exploits in 2023 to 75 exploits in 2024.

But the report noted that of the proportion of zero-days that Google could attribute -- meaning identifying the hackers who were responsible for exploiting them -- at least 23 zero-day exploits were linked to government-backed hackers. Among those 23 exploits, 10 zero-days were attributed to hackers working directly for governments, including five exploits linked to China and another five to North Korea.

Nixplay has dramatically reduced its free cloud storage offering for digital photo frame users from the original 10GB to just 500MB. The previously announced update, which took effect last week, also removed the formerly free ability to sync Google Photos albums. Users whose accounts already exceed the new 500MB limit will find their content "restricted from sharing or viewing" unless they edit their library or purchase a subscription. Nixplay now offers two paid tiers: Nixplay Lite at $19.99 annually for 100GB storage and Nixplay Plus at $29.99 yearly for unlimited storage.

Ruby on Rails creator and Basecamp CTO David Heinemeier Hansson, makes a case for why Google shouldn't be forced to sell Chrome: First, Chrome won the browser war fair and square by building a better surfboard for the internet. This wasn't some opportune acquisition. This was the result of grand investments, great technical prowess, and markets doing what they're supposed to do: rewarding the best. Besides, we have a million alternatives. Firefox still exists, so does Safari, so does the billion Chromium-based browsers like Brave and Edge. And we finally even have new engines on the way with the Ladybird browser.

Look, Google's trillion-dollar business depends on a thriving web that can be searched by Google.com, that can be plastered in AdSense, and that now can feed the wisdom of AI. Thus, Google's incredible work to further the web isn't an act of charity, it's of economic self-interest, and that's why it works. Capitalism doesn't run on benevolence, but incentives.

We want an 800-pound gorilla in the web's corner! Because Apple would love nothing better (despite the admirable work to keep up with Chrome by Team Safari) to see the web's capacity as an application platform diminished. As would every other owner of a proprietary application platform. Microsoft fought the web tooth and nail back in the 90s because they knew that a free, open application platform would undermine lock-in -- and it did!

Its goal was to "support workers to reclaim the power of future-making". A 2022 pilot project saw over 25 Amazon workers meeting online "to discuss how science fiction shed light on their working conditions and futures." 13 of them then continued meeting regularly in 2023 with the "Worker as Futurist" project (funded by Canada's Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council, according to an article by the project's leaders in the socialist magazine Jacobin). "Our team of scholars, teachers, writers, and activists has been able to pay Amazon workers (warehouse workers, drivers, copy editors, MTurk workers, and more) to participate in a series of skill-building writing workshops and information sessions...."

And when it was over, "the participants were supported to draft the stories they wanted to tell about The World After Amazon...."

Six months ago they held the big launch event for the book's print edition, while also promising that "you can read the workers' stories online, or download the book as a PDF or an ebook, all for free." The Amazon-worker stories have tempting titles like "The Museum of Prime", "The Dark Side of Convenience", and even "The Iron Uprising." ("In a dystopian future of corporate power, humans and robots come together in resistance and in love.")

And the project also created a 13-episode podcast offering "interviews with experts on Amazon, activists and organizers, science fiction writers and others dedicated to reclaiming the future from corporate control." As they wrote in Jacbon: This isn't finding individual commercial or literary success, but dignity, imagination, and common struggle... Our "Worker as Futurist" project returns the power of the speculative to workers, in the name of discovering something new about capitalism and the struggle for something different...

We must envision the futures we want in order to mobilize and fight for them together, rather than cede that future to those who would turn the stars into their own private sandbox... The rank-and-file worker — the target of daily exploitation, forced to build their boss's utopia — may have encrypted within them the key to destroying his world and building a new one.

"Google's DeepMind UK team reportedly seeks to unionize," reports TechCrunch: Around 300 London-based members of Google's AI-focused DeepMind team are seeking to unionize with the Communication Workers Union, according to a Financial Times report that cites three people involved with the unionization effort.

These DeepMind employees are reportedly unhappy about Google's decision to remove a pledge not to use AI for weapons or surveillance from its website. They're also concerned about the company's work with the Israeli military, including a $1.2 billion cloud computing contract that has prompted protests elsewhere at Google.
At least five DeepMind employees quit, according to the report (out of a 2,000 total U.K. staff members).

"A small group of around 200 employees of Google and its parent company Alphabet previously announced that they were unionizing," the article adds, "though as a union representing just a tiny slice of the total Google workforce, it lacked the ability to collectively bargain."

"Not so long ago, working in tech meant job security, extravagant perks and a bring-your-whole-self-to-the-office ethos rare in other industries," writes the Wall Street Journal.

But now tech work "looks like a regular job," with workers "contending with the constant fear of layoffs, longer hours and an ever-growing list of responsibilities for the same pay." Now employees find themselves doing the work of multiple laid-off colleagues. Some have lost jobs only to be rehired into positions that aren't eligible for raises or stock grants. Changing jobs used to be a surefire way to secure a raise; these days, asking for more money can lead to a job offer being withdrawn.

The shift in tech has been building slowly. For years, demand for workers outstripped supply, a dynamic that peaked during the Covid-19 pandemic. Big tech companies like Meta and Salesforce admitted they brought on too many employees. The ensuing downturn included mass layoffs that started in 2022...

[S]ome longtime tech employees say they no longer recognize the companies they work for. Management has become more focused on delivering the results Wall Street expects. Revenue remains strong for tech giants, but they're pouring resources into costly AI infrastructure, putting pressure on cash flow. With the industry all grown up, a heads-down, keep-quiet mentality has taken root, workers say... Tech workers are still well-paid compared with other sectors, but currently there's a split in the industry. Those working in AI — and especially those with Ph.D.s — are seeing their compensation packages soar. But those without AI experience are finding they're better off staying where they are, because companies aren't paying what they were a few years ago.
Other excepts from the Wall Street Journal's article:

• "I'm hearing of people having 30 direct reports," says David Markley, who spent seven years at Amazon and is now an executive coach for workers at large tech companies. "It's not because the companies don't have the money. In a lot of ways, it's because of AI and the narratives out there about how collapsing the organization is better...."

• In some cases, companies post record revenue while still trimming head count.

• Google co-founder Sergey Brin told a group of employees in February that 60 hours a week was the sweet spot of productivity, in comments reported earlier by the New York Times.

• One recruiter at Meta who had been laid off by the company was rehired into her old role last year, but with a catch: She's now classified as a "short-term employee." Her contract is eligible for renewal, but she doesn't get merit pay increases, promotions or stock. The recruiter says she's responsible for a volume of work that used to be spread among several people. The company refers to being loaded with such additional responsibilities as "agility."

• More than 50,000 tech workers from over 100 companies have been laid off in 2025, according to Layoffs.fyi, a website that tracks job cuts and crowdsources lists of laid off workers...

Even before those 50,000 layoffs in 2025, Silicon Valley's Mercury News was citing some interesting statistics from economic research/consulting firm Beacon Economics. In 2020, 2021 and 2022, the San Francisco Bay Area added 74,700 tech jobs But then in 2023 and 2024 the industry had slashed even more tech jobs -- 80,200 -- for a net loss (over five years) of 5,500.

So is there really a cutback in perks and a fear of layoffs that's casting a pall over the industry? share your own thoughts and experiences in the comments. Do you agree with the picture that's being painted by the Wall Street Journal?

They told their readers that tech workers are now "just like the rest of us: miserable at work."

Slashdot reader itwbennett writes: Personal health information on 4.7 million Blue Shield California subscribers was unintentionally shared between Google Analytics and Google Ads between April 2021 and January 2025 due to a misconfiguration error. Security consultant and SANS Institute instructor Brandon Evans points to two lessons to take from this debacle:

- Read the documentation of any third party service you sign up for, to understand the security and privacy controls;
- Know what data is being collected from your organization, and what you don't want shared.

"If there is a concern by the organization that Google Ads would use this information, they should really consider whether or not they should be using a platform like Google Analytics in the first place," Evans says in the article. "Because from a technical perspective, there is nothing stopping Google from sharing the information across its platform...

"Google definitely gives you a great bunch of controls, but technically speaking, that data is within the walls of that organization, and it's impossible to know from the outside how that data is being used."

"Google-owned YouTube's revenue last year was estimated to be $54.2 billion," reports the Los Angeles Times, "which would make it the second-largest media company behind Walt Disney Co., according to a recent report from research firm MoffettNathanson, which called YouTube 'the new king of all media.'" YouTube, run by Chief Executive Neal Mohan since 2023, accounted for 12% of U.S. TV viewing in March, more than other rival streaming platforms including Netflix and Tubi, according to Nielsen... More people are watching YouTube on TV sets rather than on smartphones and computer screens, consuming more than 1 billion hours on average of YouTube content on TV daily, the company said on its website.
When YouTube first started its founders envisioned it as a dating site, according to the article, "where people would upload videos and score them. When that didn't work, the founders decided to open up the platform for all sorts of videos." And since this was 20 years ago, "Users drove traffic to YouTube by sharing videos on MySpace."

But the article includes stories of people getting rich through YouTube's sharing of ad revenue: Patrick Starrr, who produces makeup tutorial videos, said he made his first $1 million through YouTube at the age of 25. He left his job at retailer MAC Cosmetics in Florida and moved to L.A...

[Video creator Dhar Mann] started posting videos on YouTube in 2018 with no film background. Mann previously had a business that sold supplies to grow weed. Today, his company, Burbank-based Dhar Mann Studios, operates on 125,000 square feet of production space, employs roughly 200 people and works with 2,000 actors a year on family friendly programs that touch on how students and families deal with topics such as bullying, narcolepsy, chronic inflammatory bowel disease and hoarding. Mann made $45 million last year, according to Forbes estimates. The majority of his company's revenue comes through YouTube.
He tells the Times "I don't think it's just the future of TV — it is TV, and the world is catching on."

And then there's this... "My mom would always give me so much crap about it — she would say, 'Why do you want to do YouTube?'" said Chucky Appleby, now an executive at MrBeast. His reply: "Mom, you can make a living from this." MrBeast's holding company, Beast Industries, which employs more than 400 people, made $473 million in revenue last year, according to Business Insider. In the last 28 days, MrBeast content — which includes challenges and stunt videos — received 3.6 billion views on YouTube, Appleby said.

Appleby, 28, said he's since bought a Jeep for his mom.