An anonymous reader shared this report from Forbes: On November 20, at approximately 4 p.m. Eastern time, Napster held an online meeting for its shareholders; an estimated 700 of roughly 1,500 including employees, former employees and individual investors tuned in. That's when its CEO John Acunto told everyone he believed that the never-identified big investor — who the company had insisted put in $3.36 billion at a $12 billion valuation in January, which would have made it one of the year's biggest fundraises — was not going to come through.

In an email sent out shortly after, it told existing investors that some would get a bigger percentage of the company, due to the canceled shares, and went on to describe itself as a "victim of misconduct," adding that it was "assisting law enforcement with their ongoing investigations." As for the promised tender offer, which would have allowed shareholders to cash out, that too was called off. "Since that investor was also behind the potential tender, we also no longer believe that will occur," the company wrote in the email.

At this point it seems unlikely that getting bigger stakes in the business will make any of the investors too happy. The company had been stringing its employees and investors along for nearly a year with ever-changing promises of an impending cash infusion and chances to sell their shares in a tender offer that would change everything. In fact, it was the fourth time since 2022 they've been told they could soon cash out via a tender offer, and the fourth time the potential deal fell through. Napster spokesperson Gillian Sheldon said certain statements about the fundraise "were made in good faith based on what we understood at the time. We have since uncovered indications of misconduct that suggest the information provided to us then was not accurate."
The article notes America's Department of Justice has launched an investigation (in which Napster is not a target), while the Securities and Exchange Commission has a separate ongoing investigation from 2022 into Napster's scrapped reverse merger.

While Napster announced they'd been acquired for $207 million by a tech company named Infinite Reality, Forbes says that company faced "a string of lawsuits from creditors alleging unpaid bills, a federal lawsuit to enforce compliance with an SEC subpoena (now dismissed) and exaggerated claims about the extent of their partnerships with Manchester City Football Club and Google. The company also touted 'top-tier' investors who never directly invested in the firm, and its anonymous $3 billion investment that its spokesperson told Forbes in March was in "an Infinite Reality account and is available to us" and that they were 'actively leveraging' it..."

And by the end, "Napster appears to have been scrambling to raise cash to keep the lights on, working with brokers and investment advisors including a few who had previously gotten into trouble with regulators.... If it turns out that Napster knew the fundraise wasn't happening and it benefited from misrepresenting itself to investors or acquirees, it could face much bigger problems. That's because doing so could be considered securities fraud."

"Three years ago, Google removed JPEG XL support from Chrome, stating there wasn't enough interest at the time," writes the blog Windows Report. "That position has now changed." In a recent note to developers, a Chrome team representative confirmed that work has restarted to bring JPEG XL to Chromium and said Google "would ship it in Chrome" once long-term maintenance and the usual launch requirements are met.

The team explained that other platforms moved ahead. Safari supports JPEG XL, and Windows 11 users can add native support through an image extension from Microsoft Store. The format is also confirmed for use in PDF documents. There has been continuous demand from developers and users who ask for its return.

Before Google ships the feature in Chrome, the company wants the integration to be secure and supported over time. A developer has submitted new code that reintroduces JPEG XL to Chromium. This version is marked as feature complete. The developer said it also "includes animation support," which earlier implementations did not offer.

"Fresh from announcing it is building an AI browsing mode in Firefox and laying the groundwork for agentic interactions in the Firefox 145 release, the corp arm of Mozilla is now flexing its AI muscles in the direction of those more likely to care," writes the blog OMG Ubuntu: If you're a developer building AI agents, you can sign up to get early access to Mozilla's TABS API, a "powerful web content extraction and transformation toolkit designed specifically for AI agent builders"... The TABS API enables devs to create agents to automate web interactions, like clicking, scrolling, searching, and submitting forms "just like a human". Real-time feedback and adaptive behaviours will, Mozilla say, offer "full control of the web, without the complexity."

As TABS is not powered by a Mozilla-backed LLM you'll need to connect it to your choice of third-party LLM for any relevant processing... Developers get 1,000 requests monthly on the free tier, which seems reasonable for prototyping personal projects. Complex agentic workloads may require more. Though pricing is yet to be locked in, the TABS API website suggests it'll cost ~$5 per 1000 requests. Paid plans will offer additional features too, like lower latency and, somewhat ironically, CAPTCHA solving so AI can 'prove' it's not a robot on pages gated to prevent automated activities.

Google, OpenAI, and other major AI vendors offer their own agentic APIs. Mozilla is pitching up late, but it plans to play differently. It touts a "strong focus on data minimisation and security", with scraped data treated ephemerally — i.e., not kept. As a distinction, that matters. AI agents can be given complex online tasks that involve all sorts of personal or sensitive data being fetched and worked with.... If you're minded to make one, perhaps without a motivation to asset-strip the common good, Mozilla's TABS API look like a solid place to start.

Google has begun testing sponsored ads inside its Gemini-powered AI Mode, placing labeled "sponsored" links at the bottom of AI-generated responses. Engadget reports: [A] Google spokesperson says the result shown is akin to similar tests it's been running this year. "People seeing ads in AI Mode in the wild is simply part of Google's ongoing tests, which we've been running for several months," the spokesperson said. The push to start offering ads in AI Mode was announced in May. The company also told 9to5Google that there are no current plans to fully update AI Mode to incorporate ads. For now, the software seems to be prioritizing organic links over sponsored links, but we all know how insidious ads can be once the floodgates open...

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Bloomberg: Malaysia's palm oil giants, long-blamed for razing rainforests, fueling toxic haze and driving orangutans to the brink of extinction, are recasting themselves as unlikely champions in a different, potentially greener race: the quest to lure the world's AI data centers to the Southeast Asian country (source paywalled; alternative source). Palm oil companies are earmarking some of the vast tracts of land they own for industrial parks studded with data centers and solar panels, the latter meant to feed the insatiable energy appetites of the former. The logic is simple: data centers are power and land hogs. By 2035, they could demand at least five gigawatts of electricity in Malaysia -- almost 20% of the country's current generation capacity and roughly enough to power a major city like Miami. Malaysia also needs space to house server farms, and palm oil giants control more land than any other private entity in the country.

The country has been at the heart of a regional data center boom. Last year, it was the fastest-growing data center market in the Asia-Pacific region and roughly 40% of all planned capacity in Southeast Asia is now slated for Malaysia, according to industry consultant DC Byte. Over the past four years, $34 billion in data center investments has poured into the country -- Alphabet's Google committed $2 billion, Microsoft announced a $2.2 billion investment and Amazon is spending $6.2 billion, to name a few. The government aims for 81 data centers by 2035. The rush is partly a spillover from Singapore, where a years-long moratorium on new centers forced operators to look north. Johor, just across the causeway, is now a hive of construction cranes and server farms -- including for firms such as Singapore Telecommunications, Nvidia and ByteDance. But delivering on government promises of renewable power is proving harder.

The strains are already being felt in Malaysia's data center capital. Sedenak Tech Park, one of Johor's flagship sites, is telling potential tenants they'll need to wait until the fourth quarter of 2026 for promised water and power hookups under its second-phase expansion, according to DC Byte. The vacancy rate in Johor's live facilities is just 1.1%, according to real estate consultant Knight Frank. Despite its rapid growth, the market is nowhere near saturation, with six gigawatts of capacity expected to be built out over time, said Knight Frank's head of data centers for Asia Pacific, Fred Fitzalan Howard. That potential bottleneck has incentivized palm oil majors such as SD Guthrie Bhd. to pitch themselves as both landowners and green-power suppliers. The $8.9 billion palm oil producer, SD Guthrie, is the world's largest palm oil planter by acreage, with more than 340,000 hectares in Malaysia. "SD Guthrie is pivoting to solar farms and industrial parks, betting that tech giants hungry for server space will prefer sites with ready access to renewable energy," reports Bloomberg. "The company has reserved 10,000 hectares for such projects over the next decade, starting with clearing old rubber estates and low-yielding palm plots in areas near data center and semiconductor investment hubs."

"The company's calculation is based on this: one megawatt of solar requires about 1.5 hectares. Helmy said SD Guthrie wants one gigawatt in operation within three years, enough to power up to 10 hyperscale data centers used for AI computing. The new business is expected to make up about a third of its profits by the end of the decade."

Google's AI infrastructure chief told employees the company must double its AI serving capacity every six months in order to meet demand. In a presentation earlier this month, Amin Vahdat, a vice president at Google Cloud, gave a presentation titled "AI Infrastructure." It included a slide on "AI compute demand" that said: "Now we must double every 6 months.... the next 1000x in 4-5 years." CNBC reports: The presentation was delivered a week after Alphabet reported better-than-expected third-quarter results and raised its capital expenditures forecast for the second time this year, to a range of $91 billion to $93 billion, followed by a "significant increase" in 2026. Hyperscaler peers Microsoft, Amazon and Meta also boosted their capex guidance, and the four companies now expect to collectively spend more than $380 billion this year.

Google's "job is of course to build this infrastructure but it's not to outspend the competition, necessarily," Vahdat said. "We're going to spend a lot," he said, adding that the real goal is to provide infrastructure that is far "more reliable, more performant and more scalable than what's available anywhere else." In addition to infrastructure build-outs, Vahdat said Google bolsters capacity with more efficient models and through its custom silicon. Last week, Google announced the public launch of its seventh generation Tensor Processing Unit called Ironwood, which the company says is nearly 30 times more power efficient than its first Cloud TPU from 2018.

Vahdat said the company has a big advantage with DeepMind, which has research on what AI models can look like in future years. Google needs to "be able to deliver 1,000 times more capability, compute, storage networking for essentially the same cost and increasingly, the same power, the same energy level," Vahdat said. "It won't be easy but through collaboration and co-design, we're going to get there."

Google confirmed in a statement Friday that hackers have stolen the Salesforce-stored data of more than 200 companies in a large-scale supply chain hack. TechCrunch reports: On Thursday, Salesforce disclosed a breach of "certain customers' Salesforce data" -- without naming affected companies -- that was stolen via apps published by Gainsight, which provides a customer support platform to other companies.

In a statement, Austin Larsen, the principal threat analyst of Google Threat Intelligence Group, said that the company "is aware of more than 200 potentially affected Salesforce instances." After Salesforce announced the breach, the notorious and somewhat-nebulous hacking group known as Scattered Lapsus$ Hunters, which includes the ShinyHunters gang, claimed responsibility for the hacks in a Telegram channel, which TechCrunch has seen.

OpenAI CEO Sam Altman told colleagues last month that Google's recent progress in AI could "create some temporary economic headwinds for our company," though he added that OpenAI would emerge ahead, The Information reports [non-paywalled source]. From the report: After OpenAI researchers heard that Google had created a new AI that appears to have leapfrogged OpenAI's in the way it was developed, Altman said in the memo that "we know we have some work to do but we are catching up fast." Still, he cautioned employees that "I expect the vibes out there to be rough for a bit."

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Bloomberg: The world's largest music companies have licensed their works to a music startup called Klay, which is building a streaming service that will allow users to remake songs using artificial intelligence tools. Klay is the first music AI service to reach a deal with all three major record labels, Universal Music Group NV, Sony Music and Warner Music Group Corp., according to people familiar with the deals. Klay plans to announce its agreements in the coming days, said the people, who asked not to be identified discussing confidential plans.

Klay is building a product that will offer the features of a streaming service like Spotify, amplified by AI technology that will let users remake songs in different styles. Klay has licensed the rights to thousands of hit songs so that it can train its large language model. The company has positioned itself as a friend of the industry, offering assurances that the artists and labels will have some control over how their work is used. Klay is led by music producer Ary Attie and also employs former executives from Sony Music and Google's DeepMind, an AI laboratory.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: Google's meme-friendly Nano Banana image-generation model is getting an upgrade. The new Nano Banana Pro is rolling out with improved reasoning and instruction following, giving users the ability to create more accurate images with legible text and make precise edits to existing images. It's available to everyone in the Gemini app, but free users will find themselves up against the usage limits pretty quickly. Nano Banana Pro is part of the newly launched Gemini 3 Pro -- it's actually called Gemini 3 Pro Image in the same way the original is Gemini 2.5 Flash Image, but Google is sticking with the meme-y name. You can access it by selecting Gemini 3 Pro and then turning on the "Create images" option.

Google says the new model can follow complex prompts to create more accurate images. The model is apparently so capable that it can generate an entire usable infographic in a single shot with no weird AI squiggles in place of words. Nano Banana Pro is also better at maintaining consistency in images. You can blend up to 14 images with this tool, and it can maintain the appearance of up to five people in outputs. Google also promises better editing. You can refine your AI images or provide Nano Banana Pro with a photo and make localized edits without as many AI glitches. It can even change core elements of the image like camera angles, color grading, and lighting without altering other elements. Google is pushing the professional use angle with its new model, which has much-improved resolution options. Your creations in Nano Banana Pro can be rendered at up to 4K.

An anonymous reader shares a report: Epishine, a company that makes solar cells optimized for indoor lighting, has announced its technology is being used in a new remote control for Google TV devices, as spotted by 9to5Google. The remote will rely on rechargeable batteries instead of disposable ones, and thanks to the use of solar cells on both sides it may only run out of power when it gets buried and forgotten in the dark abyss of your couch cushions.

Nvidia and Google announced today a new cloud gaming plan called GeForce Now Fast Pass that is exclusive to Chromebooks. Anyone who purchases a new Chromebook will receive a year of the service included with their device at no additional charge. Fast Pass allows Chromebook owners to stream more than 2,000 games from their existing Steam, Epic or Xbox libraries.

The service removes ads and lets users skip the queue that typically adds two minutes or more of wait time on GeForce Now's free tier. Users get 10 hours of cloud gaming each month. Up to five unused hours can roll over to the following month. Nvidia offers other paid plans starting at $9.99 per month that support higher resolutions, faster frame rates, RTX ray-tracing, and access to a larger game library that includes thousands of additional titles. The companies did not announce pricing for Fast Pass after the first year ends.

Android's Quick Share file transfer service can now work with Apple's AirDrop, allowing users to send files between iPhones and Android devices. Google has started rolling out the feature to its Pixel 10 family of smartphones. The cross-platform compatibility includes security protections that the company says independent security experts tested. Google said it built the feature in response to user requests for simpler file sharing between devices regardless of manufacturer. The company plans to expand availability to additional Android devices.

Nvidia blew past earnings expectations with soaring revenue and profit, easing fears of an AI bubble and reinforcing its position as the engine of the global AI boom. From a report: Nvidia's sales grew 62% year-over-year to $57 billion in the October quarter, ahead of the $54.9 billion Wall Street had projected, signaling that demand for AI chips remains strong even as more questions emerge about whether returns from the technology will keep up with the pace of AI infrastructure investments. It posted profits of $31.9 billion, up 65% from the year-ago quarter and also slightly above expectations.

"Blackwell sales are off the charts, and cloud GPUs are sold out," Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang said in a statement, a message that echoes his earlier arguments that fears of an AI bubble are overblown. The company also posted stronger-than-expected sales guidance of around $65 billion for the fourth quarter, another indicator that the AI spending spree isn't slowing anytime soon.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from ZDNet: At KubeCon North America 2025 in Atlanta, the Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF)'s leaders predicted an enormous surge in cloud-native computing, driven by the explosive growth of AI inference workloads. How much growth? They're predicting hundreds of billions of dollars in spending over the next 18 months. [...] Where cloud-native computing and AI inference come together is when AI is no longer a separate track from cloud-native computing. Instead, AI workloads, particularly inference tasks, are fueling a new era where intelligent applications require scalable and reliable infrastructure. That era is unfolding because, said [CNCF Executive Director Jonathan Bryce], "AI is moving from a few 'Training supercomputers' to widespread 'Enterprise Inference.' This is fundamentally a cloud-native problem. You, the platform engineers, are the ones who will build the open-source platforms that unlock enterprise AI."

"Cloud native and AI-native development are merging, and it's really an incredible place we're in right now," said CNCF CTO Chris Aniszczyk. The data backs up this opinion. For example, Google has reported that its internal inference jobs have processed 1.33 quadrillion tokens per month recently, up from 980 trillion just months before. [...] Aniszczyk added that cloud-native projects, especially Kubernetes, are adapting to serve inference workloads at scale: "Kubernetes is obviously one of the leading examples as of the last release the dynamic resource allocation feature enables GPU and TPU hardware abstraction in a Kubernetes context." To better meet the demand, the CNCF announced the Certified Kubernetes AI Conformance Program, which aims to make AI workloads as portable and reliable as traditional cloud-native applications.

"As AI moves into production, teams need a consistent infrastructure they can rely on," Aniszczyk stated during his keynote. "This initiative will create shared guardrails to ensure AI workloads behave predictably across environments. It builds on the same community-driven standards process we've used with Kubernetes to help bring consistency as AI adoption scales." What all this effort means for business is that AI inference spending on cloud-native infrastructure and services will reach into the hundreds of billions within the next 18 months. That investment is because CNCF leaders predict that enterprises will race to stand up reliable, cost-effective AI services.

Microsoft's Copilot AI assistant in Windows 11 fails to replicate the capabilities shown in the company's TV advertisements. The Verge tested Copilot Vision over a week using the same prompts featured in ads airing during NFL games. When asked to identify a HyperX QuadCast 2S microphone visible in a YouTube video -- a task successfully completed in Microsoft's ad -- Copilot gave multiple incorrect answers. The assistant identified the microphone as a first-generation HyperX QuadCast, then as a Shure SM7b on two other occasions. Copilot couldn't identify the Saturn V rocket from a PowerPoint presentation despite the words "Saturn V" appearing on screen. When asked about a cave image from Microsoft's ad, Copilot gave inconsistent responses.

About a third of the time it provided directions to find the photo in File Explorer. On two occasions it explained how to launch Google Chrome. Four times it offered advice about booking flights to Belize. The cave is Rio Secreto in Playa del Carmen, Mexico. Microsoft spokesperson Blake Manfre said "Copilot Actions on Windows, which can take actions on local files, is not yet available." He described it as "an opt-in experimental feature that will be coming soon to Windows Insiders in Copilot Labs, starting with a narrow set of use cases while we optimize model performance and learn." Copilot cannot toggle basic Windows settings like dark mode. When asked to analyze a benchmark table in Google Sheets, it "constantly misread clear-as-day scores both in the spreadsheet and in the on-page review."

Google released Gemini 3 on Tuesday, launching its latest AI model with a breakthrough score of 1501 Elo on the LMArena Leaderboard alongside state-of-the-art performance across multiple benchmarks including 91.9% on GPQA Diamond for PhD-level reasoning and 37.5% on Humanity's Last Exam without tool usage. The model is available starting today in the Gemini app, AI Mode in Search for Google AI Pro, Google AI Studio, Vertex AI and the newly launched Google Antigravity agentic development platform. Third-party platforms including Cursor, GitHub, JetBrains, Manus, and Replit are also gaining access.

Separately, Google said AI Overviews now have 2 billion users every month. Gemini app has topped 650 million users per month.

Every company would be affected if the AI bubble were to burst, the head of Google's parent firm Alphabet has told the BBC. From the report: Speaking exclusively to BBC News, Sundar Pichai said while the growth of artificial intelligence investment had been an "extraordinary moment", there was some "irrationality" in the current AI boom. It comes amid fears in Silicon Valley and beyond of a bubble as the value of AI tech companies has soared in recent months and companies spend big on the burgeoning industry.

Asked whether Google would be immune to the impact of the AI bubble bursting, Mr Pichai said the tech giant could weather that potential storm, but also issued a warning. "I think no company is going to be immune, including us," he said. In a wide-ranging exclusive interview at Google's California headquarters, he also addressed energy needs, slowing down climate targets, UK investment, the accuracy of his AI models, and the effect of the AI revolution on jobs.

Even after disabling remote control and officially ending support for early Nest Learning Thermostats, Google is still receiving detailed sensor and activity data from these devices, including temperature changes, motion, and ambient light. The Verge reports: After digging into the backend, security researcher Cody Kociemba found that the first- and second-generation Nest Learning Thermostats are still sending Google information about manual temperature changes, whether a person is present in the room, if sunlight is hitting the device, and more. Kociemba made the discovery while participating in a bounty program created by FULU, a right-to-repair advocacy organization cofounded by electronics repair technician and YouTuber Louis Rossmann.

FULU challenged developers to come up with a solution to restore smart functionality to Nest devices no longer supported by Google, and that's exactly what Kociemba did with his open-source No Longer Evil project. But after cloning Google's API to create this custom software, he started receiving a trove of logs from customer devices, which he turned off. "On these devices, while they [Google] turned off access to remotely control them, they did leave in the ability for the devices to upload logs. And the logs are pretty extensive," Kociemba tells The Verge. [...] "I was under the impression that the Google connection would be severed along with the remote functionality, however that connection is not severed, and instead is a one-way street," Kociemba says.

NetChoice is suing Virginia to block a new law that limits kids under 16 to one hour of daily social media use unless parents approve more time, arguing the rule violates the First Amendment and introduces serious privacy risks through mandatory age-verification. The Verge reports: In addition to restricting access to legal speech, NetChoice alleges that Virginia's incoming law (SB 854) will require platforms to verify user ages in ways that would pose privacy and security risks. The law requires platforms to use "commercially reasonable methods," which it says include a screen that prompts the user to enter a birth date. However, NetChoice argues that Virginia could go beyond this requirement, citing a post from Governor Youngkin on X, stating "platforms must verify age," potentially referring to stricter methods, like having users submit a government ID or other personal information.

NetChoice, which is backed by tech giants like Meta, Google, Amazon, Reddit, and Discord, alleges that the law puts a burden on minors' ability to engage or consume speech online. "The First Amendment prohibits the government from placing these types of restrictions on accessing lawful and valuable speech, just in the same way that the government can't tell you how long you could spend reading a book, watching a television program, or consuming a documentary," Paul Taske, the co-director of the Netchoice Litigation Center, tells The Verge.

"Virginia must leave the parenting decisions where they belong: with parents," Taske says. "By asserting that authority for itself, Virginia not only violates its citizens' rights to free speech but also exposes them to increased risk of privacy and security breaches."