Amazon plans to release its first TV streaming device powered by Vega OS later this year while courting major publishers to bring their apps to the platform, according to Lowpass, which cites sources familiar with the company's plans and multiple leaks.

Vega, a Linux-based operating system, may eventually replace Amazon's Android-based Fire OS across its device ecosystem. The company has already implemented Vega in three products: the Echo Show 5 and Echo Hub smart displays, as well as the Echo Spot smart clock/speaker. The tech giant has moved more cautiously in transitioning its TV hardware to Vega, having previously delayed a Vega-powered streaming stick originally slated for release in late 2024.

Longtime Slashdot reader schwit1 shares a report from the Associated Press: Google has been branded an abusive monopolist by a federal judge for the second time in less than a year, this time for illegally exploiting some of its online marketing technology to boost the profits fueling an internet empire currently worth $1.8 trillion. The ruling issued Thursday by U.S. District Judge Leonie Brinkema in Virginia comes on the heels of a separate decision in August that concluded Google's namesake search engine has been illegally leveraging its dominance to stifle competition and innovation. [...] The next step in the latest case is a penalty phase that will likely begin late this year or early next year. The same so-called remedy hearings in the search monopoly case are scheduled to begin Monday in Washington D.C., where Justice Department lawyers will try to convince U.S. District Judge Amit Mehta to impose a sweeping punishment that includes a proposed requirement for Google to sell its Chrome web browser.

Brinkema's 115-page decision centers on the marketing machine that Google has spent the past 17 years building around its search engine and other widely used products and services, including its Chrome browser, YouTube video site and digital maps. The system was largely built around a series of acquisitions that started with Google's $3.2 billion purchase of online ad specialist DoubleClick in 2008. U.S. regulators approved the deals at the time they were made before realizing that they had given the Mountain View, California, company a platform to manipulate the prices in an ecosystem that a wide range of websites depend on for revenue and provides a vital marketing connection to consumers.

The Justice Department lawyers argued that Google built and maintained dominant market positions in a technology trifecta used by website publishers to sell ad space on their webpages, as well as the technology that advertisers use to get their ads in front of consumers, and the ad exchanges that conduct automated auctions in fractions of a second to match buyer and seller. After evaluating the evidence presented during a lengthy trial that concluded just before Thanksgiving last year, Brinkema reached a decision that rejected the Justice Department's assertions that Google has been mistreating advertisers while concluding the company has been abusing its power to stifle competition to the detriment of online publishers forced to rely on its network for revenue.

"For over a decade, Google has tied its publisher ad server and ad exchange together through contractual policies and technological integration, which enabled the company to establish and protect its monopoly power in these two markets." Brinkema wrote. "Google further entrenched its monopoly power by imposing anticompetitive policies on its customers and eliminating desirable product features." Despite that rebuke, Brinkema also concluded that Google didn't break the law when it snapped Doubleclick nor when it followed up that deal a few years later by buying another service, Admeld. The Justice Department "failed to show that the DoubleClick and Admeld acquisitions were anticompetitive," Brinkema wrote. "Although these acquisitions helped Google gain monopoly power in two adjacent ad tech markets, they are insufficient, when viewed in isolation, to prove that Google acquired or maintained this monopoly power through exclusionary practices." That finding may help Google fight off any attempt to force it to sell its advertising technology to stop its monopolistic behavior.

Meta has disabled Apple Intelligence features across its iOS applications, including Facebook, WhatsApp, and Threads, according to Brazilian tech blog Sorcererhat Tech. The block affects Writing Tools, which enable text creation and editing via Apple's AI, as well as Genmoji generation. Users cannot access these features via the standard text field interface in Meta apps. Instagram Stories have also lost previously available keyboard stickers and Memoji functionality.

While Meta hasn't explained the decision, it likely aims to drive users toward Meta AI, its own artificial intelligence service that offers similar text and image generation capabilities. The move follows failed negotiations between Apple and Meta regarding Llama integration into Apple Intelligence, which reportedly collapsed over privacy disagreements. The companies also maintain ongoing disputes regarding App Store policies.

Nintendo's lawyers systematically dismantled Atari Games in a landmark 1989 legal battle that reshaped the gaming industry, killing off the Tengen brand until its surprise resurrection recently.

When Atari Games (operating as Tengen) attempted to circumvent Nintendo's control by reverse-engineering the NES security system, Nintendo's legal team discovered a fatal flaw in their rival's approach: Atari had fraudulently obtained Nintendo's proprietary code from the Copyright Office by falsely claiming they were defendants in a nonexistent lawsuit.

Though courts ultimately established that reverse engineering was legal under fair use principles, Atari's deception proved catastrophic. The judge invoked the centuries-old "unclean hands" doctrine, ruling that Atari could not claim fair use protection after approaching the court in bad faith.

"As a result of its lawyers' filthy hands, Atari was barred from manufacturing games for the NES. Nintendo, with its stronger legal team, subsequently 'bled Atari to death,'" writes tech industry attorney Julien Mailland. The court ordered the recall of Tengen's "Tetris" version, now a rare collector's item.

After a 30-year absence, Tengen Games returned in July 2024 with "Zed and Zee" for the NES, finally achieving what its predecessor was legally prohibited from doing.

LG is partnering with Zenapse to integrate AI-driven emotional intelligence into its smart TVs, enabling hyper-targeted ads based on viewers' psychological traits, emotions, and behaviors. Ars Technica reports: The upcoming advertising approach comes via a multi-year licensing deal with Zenapse, a company describing itself as a software-as-a-service marketing platform that can drive advertiser sales "with AI-powered emotional intelligence." LG will use Zenapse's technology to divide webOS users into hyper-specific market segments that are supposed to be more informative to advertisers. LG Ad Solutions, LG's advertising business, announced the partnership on Tuesday.

The technology will be used to inform ads shown on LG smart TVs' homescreens, free ad-supported TV (FAST) channels, and elsewhere throughout webOS, per StreamTV Insider. LG will also use Zenapse's tech to "expand new software development and go-to-market products," it said. LG didn't specify the duration of its licensing deal with Zenapse. Zenapse's platform for connected TVs (CTVs), ZenVision, is supposed to be able to interpret the types of emotions shown in the content someone is watching on TV, partially by using publicly available information about the show's or movie's script and plot, StreamTV Insider reported. ZenVision also analyzes viewer behavior, grouping viewers based on their consumption patterns, the publication noted. Under the new partnership, ZenVision can use data that LG has gathered from the automatic content recognition software in LG TVs.

With all this information, ZenVision will group LG TV viewers into highly specified market segments, such as "goal-driven achievers," "social connectors," or "emotionally engaged planners," an LG spokesperson told StreamTV Insider. Zenapse's website for ZenVision points to other potential market segments, including "digital adopters," "wellness seekers," "positive impact & environment," and "money matters." Companies paying to advertise on LG TVs can then target viewers based on the ZenVision-specified market segments and deliver an "emotionally intelligent ad," as Zenapse's website puts it.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from 404 Media: As part of the company's months-long obsession with catching employees leaking internal developments to the press, staff at Wordpress parent company Automattic recently noticed individually-unique watermarks on internal sites, according to employees who spoke to 404 Media. Automattic added the watermarks to an internal employee communications platform called P2. P2 is a WordPress product other workplaces can also use. There are hundreds of P2 sites across teams at Automattic alone; many are team-specific, but some are company-wide for announcements. The watermarks in Automattic's P2 instance are nearly invisible, rendered as a pattern overlaid on the site's white page backgrounds. Zooming in or manually changing the background color reveals the pattern. If, for example, a journalist published a screenshot leaked to them that was taken from P2, Automattic could theoretically identify the employee who shared it.

In October, as part of a series of buyout offers meant to test employee's loyalty to his leadership, Automattic CEO Matt Mullenweg issued a threat for anyone speaking to the press, saying they should "exit gracefully, or be fired tomorrow with no severance." Earlier this month, the company laid off nearly 300 people. [...] It's not clear when the watermarks started appearing on P2, and Automattic has not responded to a request for comment. But Mullenweg has been warring with web hosting platform WP Engine -- and as the story has developed, seemingly with his own staff -- since last year. [...] One Automattic employee told me they don't think anyone is shocked by the watermarking, considering Mullenweg's ongoing campaign to find leakers, but that it's still adding to the uncertain, demoralized environment at the company. "Can't help but feel even more paranoid now," they said.

More than half of the top privately held AI companies based in the U.S. have at least one immigrant founder, according to an analysis from the Institute for Progress. From the report: The IFP analysis of the top AI-related startups in the Forbes AI 2025 list found that 25 -- or 60% -- of the 42 companies based in the U.S. were founded or co-founded by immigrants. The founders of those companies "hail from 25 countries, with India leading (nine founders), followed by China (eight founders) and then France (three founders). Australia, the U.K., Canada, Israel, Romania, and Chile all have two founders each."

Among them is OpenAI -- whose co-founders include Elon Musk, born in South Africa, and Ilya Sutskever, born in Russia -- and Databricks, whose co-founders were born in Iran, Romania and China. The analysis echoes previous findings about the key role foreign-born scientists and engineers have played in the U.S. tech industry and the broader economy.

Figma has confidentially filed for an IPO with the SEC, marking a major move more than a year after scrapping its $20 billion acquisition deal with Adobe due to regulatory pushback. CNBC reports: Figma's software is popular among designers inside companies who need to collaborate on prototypes for websites and apps. The company was valued at $12.5 billion in a 2024 tender offer. "There are two paths that venture-funded startups go down," Dylan Field, Figma's co-founder and CEO, said in an interview with The Verge last year. "You either get acquired or you go public. And we explored thoroughly the acquisition route."

The announcement lands at a precarious moment for the tech IPO market, which has been largely dormant since late 2021. The Trump presidency was expected to revive new offerings due to promises of less burdensome regulations.

Alamo Drafthouse will not implement Meta's new Movie Mate technology during the April 30 nationwide rerelease of Blumhouse's "M3GAN," Variety reports. The specialty theater chain confirmed it will maintain its strict no-phones policy despite Universal's promotion of the second-screen experience, with staff instructed to remove patrons attempting to access the feature during screenings.

Movie Mate represents Meta's first integration of its interactive movie technology, which operates via Instagram direct messaging. Users message the film's official account to activate a chatbot delivering "sneak peeks, exclusive recorded messages from directors and talent" synchronized with the screening. The "M3GAN" event serves as Meta's technological debut ahead of potential wider theatrical implementation.

Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg considered resetting all Facebook users' friend connections to boost the platform's declining relevance, according to internal emails revealed Monday in a landmark FTC antitrust trial. In a 2022 message to executives, Zuckerberg proposed "wiping everyone's graphs and having them start again," referring to users' friend networks. Facebook head Tom Alison questioned the idea's viability, citing Instagram's reliance on friend connections. Zuckerberg later testified that the plan was never implemented and that Facebook has "evolved" from its original purpose.

The FTC argues Meta violated competition laws by acquiring Instagram ($1B) and WhatsApp ($19B) as part of a "buy or bury" strategy outlined in Zuckerberg's 2008 email stating, "It is better to buy than compete."

FCC Chairman Brendan Carr has issued a stark ultimatum to European allies, telling them to choose between US and Chinese communications technology. In an interview with Financial Times, Carr urged "allied western democracies" to "focus on the real long-term bogey: the rise of the Chinese Communist party." The warning comes as European governments question Starlink's reliability after Washington threatened to switch off its services in Ukraine.

UK telecoms BT and Virgin Media O2 are currently trialing Starlink's satellite internet technology but haven't signed full agreements. "If you're concerned about Starlink, just wait for the CCP's version, then you'll be really worried," said Carr. Carr claimed Europe is "caught" between Washington and Beijing, with a "great divide" emerging between "CCP-aligned countries and others" in AI and satellite technology. He also accused the European Commission of "protectionism" and an "anti-American" attitude while suggesting Nokia and Ericsson should relocate manufacturing to the US to avoid Trump's import tariffs.

Longtime Slashdot reader AmiMoJo shares the news that China has halted all rare earth exports globally -- including to the U.S., Japan, and Germany. Fortune reports: After Trump unveiled his "Liberation Day" tariffs on April 2, China retaliated on April 4 with its own duties as well as export controls on several rare earth minerals and magnets made from them. So far, those export controls have translated to a halt across the board, cutting off the U.S. and other countries, according to the New York Times. That's because any exports of the minerals and magnets now require special licenses, but Beijing has yet to fully establish a system for issuing them, the report said.

In the meantime, shipments of rare earths have been halted at many ports, with customs officials blocking exports to any country, including to the U.S. as well as Japan and Germany, sources told theÂTimes. China's Ministry of Commerce issued export restrictions alongside the General Administration of Customs, prohibiting Chinese businesses from any engagement with U.S. firms, especially defense contractors. While the Trump administration unveiled tariff exemptions on a range of key tech imports late Friday night, China's magnet exports were still halted through the weekend, industry sources told the Times. Beijing's export halt is notable because China has a stranglehold on global supplies of rare earths and magnets derived from them. They also represent an asymmetric advantage in that rare earths constitute a small share of China's exports but have an outsize impact on trade partners like the U.S., which relies on them as critical inputs for the auto, chip, aerospace, and defense industries.

Several crosswalk buttons in Palo Alto and nearby cities were hacked over the weekend to play deepfake-style satirical audio clips mimicking Elon Musk and Mark Zuckerberg. Authorities have disabled the altered systems, but the identity of the prankster remains unknown. SFGATE reports: Videos of the altered crosswalks began circulating on social media throughout Saturday and Sunday. [...] A city employee was the first to report an issue with one of the signals at University Avenue and High Street in downtown Palo Alto, Horrigan-Taylor told SFGATE via email. Officials later discovered that as many as 12 intersections in downtown Palo Alto had been affected.

"The impact is isolated," Horrigan-Taylor said. "Signal operations are otherwise unaffected, and motorists are reminded to always exercise caution around pedestrians." Officials told the outlet they've removed any devices that were tampered with and the compromised voice-over systems have since been disabled, with footage obtained by SFGATE showing several were covered in caution tape, blinking constantly and unpressable.

Meta said the company plans to start using data collected from its users in the European Union to train its AI systems. Engadget reports: Starting this week, the tech giant will begin notifying Europeans through email and its family of apps of the fact, with the message set to include an explanation of the kind of data it plans to use as part of the training. Additionally, the notification will link out to a form users can complete to opt out of the process. "We have made this objection form easy to find, read, and use, and we'll honor all objection forms we have already received, as well as newly submitted ones," says Meta.

The company notes it will only use data it collects from public posts and Meta AI interactions for training purposes. It won't use private messages in its training sets, nor any interactions, public or otherwise, made by users under the age of 18. As for why the company wants to start using EU data now, it claims the information will allow it to fine tune its future models to better serve Europeans. "We believe we have a responsibility to build AI that's not just available to Europeans, but is actually built for them. That's why it's so important for our generative AI models to be trained on a variety of data so they can understand the incredible and diverse nuances and complexities that make up European communities," Meta states.

"That means everything from dialects and colloquialisms, to hyper-local knowledge and the distinct ways different countries use humor and sarcasm on our products. This is particularly important as AI models become more advanced with multi-modal functionality, which spans text, voice, video, and imagery."

America's Department of Energy launched a federally funded R&D center in 1946 called the Argonne National Laboratory, and its research became the basis for all of the world's commercial nuclear reactors.

But it's now developed an AI-based tool that can "help operators run nuclear plants," reports the Wall Street Journal, citing comments from a senior nuclear engineer in the lab's nuclear science and engineering division: Argonne's plan is to offer the Parameter-Free Reasoning Operator for Automated Identification and Diagnosis, or PRO-AID, to new, tech-forward nuclear builds, but it's also eyeing the so-called dinosaurs, some of which are being resurrected by companies like Amazon and Microsoft to help power their AI data centers. The global push for AI is poised to fuel a sharp rise in electricity demand, with consumption from data centers expected to more than double by the end of the decade, the International Energy Agency said Thursday. The owners of roughly a third of U.S. nuclear plants are in talks with tech companies to provide electricity for those data centers, the Wall Street Journal has reported.

PRO-AID performs real-time monitoring and diagnostics using generative AI combined with large language models that notify and explain to staff when something seems amiss at a plant. It also uses a form of automated reasoning — which uses mathematical logic to encode knowledge in AI systems — to mimic the way a human operator asks questions and comes to understand how the plant is operating [according to Richard Vilim, a senior nuclear engineer within the lab's nuclear science and engineering division].

The tool can also help improve the efficiency of the personnel needed to operate a nuclear plant, Vilim said. That's especially important as older employees leave the workforce. "If we can hand off some of these lower-level capabilities to a machine, when someone retires, you don't need to replace him or her," he said... Part of the efficiency in updating technology will come from consolidating the monitoring staff at a utility's nuclear plants at a single, centralized location — much as gas-powered plants already do.
It hasn't found its way into a commercial nuclear plant yet, the article acknowledges. But the senior nuclear engineer points out that America's newer gas-powered plants ended up being more automated with digital monitoring tools. Meanwhile the average age of America's 94 operating nuclear reactors is 42 years old, and "nearly all" of them have had their licenses extended, according to the article. (Those nuclear plants still provide almost 20% of America's electricity.)

Remember how last weekend Meta claimed its "Maverick" AI model (in the newly-released Llama-4 series) beat GPT-4o and Gemini Flash 2 "on all benchmarks... This thing is a beast."

And then how within a day several AI researchers pointed out that even Meta's own announcement admitted the Maverick tested on LM Arena was an "experimental chat version," as TechCrunch pointed out. ("As we've written about before, for various reasons, LM Arena has never been the most reliable measure of an AI model's performance. But AI companies generally haven't customized or otherwise fine-tuned their models to score better on LM Arena — or haven't admitted to doing so, at least.")

Friday TechCrunch on what happened when LMArena tested the unmodified release version of Maverick (Llama-4-Maverick-17B-128E-Instruct).

It ranked 32nd.

"For the record, older models like Claude 3.5 Sonnet, released last June, and Gemini-1.5-Pro-002, released last September, rank higher," notes the tech site Neowin.

"AMD processors were instrumental in achieving a new world record," reports Tom's Hardware, "during a recent Ansys Fluent computational fluid dynamics simulation run on the Frontier supercomputer at the Oak Ridge National Laboratory."

The article points out that Frontier was the fastest supercomputer in the world until it was beaten by Lawrence Livermore Lab's El Capitan — with both computers powered by AMD GPUs: According to a press release by Ansys, it ran a 2.2-billion-cell axial turbine simulation for Baker Hughes, an energy technology company, testing its next-generation gas turbines aimed at increasing efficiency. The simulation previously took 38.5 hours to complete on 3,700 CPU cores. By using 1,024 AMD Instinct MI250X accelerators paired with AMD EPYC CPUs in Frontier, the simulation time was slashed to 1.5 hours. This is more than 25 times faster, allowing the company to see the impact of the changes it makes on designs much more quickly...

Given those numbers, the Ansys Fluent CFD simulator apparently only used a fraction of the power available on Frontier. That means it has the potential to run even faster if it can utilize all the available accelerators on the supercomputer. It also shows that, despite Nvidia's market dominance in AI GPUs, AMD remains a formidable competitor, with its CPUs and GPUs serving as the brains of some of the fastest supercomputers on Earth.

UPDATE (4/13): Smartphones, computer monitors, semiconductors, and various other electronics will be exempt from U.S. President Trump's tariffs, CNN reported Saturday, "according to a US Customs and Border Protection notice posted late Friday." But then Sunday morning America's commerce secretary insisted "a special-focus type of tariff" was coming for those products, ABC News reported. (President Trump "is saying they're exempt from the reciprocal tariffs," the commerce secretary told an interviewer, "but they're included in the semiconductor tariffs, which are coming in probably a month or two.... This is not like a permanent sort of exemption.")

CNN had reported that several other products also received an exemption which "applies to products entering the United States or removed from warehouses as early as April 5, according to the notice." Roughly 90% of Apple's iPhone production and assembly is based in China, according to Wedbush Securities' estimates. Counterpoint Research, a firm that monitors global smartphone shipments, estimated Apple has up to six weeks of inventory in the United States. Once that supply runs out, prices would have been expected to go up...

Semiconductors and microchips are among the products heavily outsourced to factories in Asia due to lower costs. Those electronic parts are now exempt, according to the Friday notice. That could help Asian chipmakers, such as Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company (TSMC), South Korea's Samsung and SK Hynix.
The exemptions were believed to also include solar cells, memory cards, and computers, according to the BBC. "It was not clear whether technology imports from China would still be hit by a 20% tariff that was not part of the reciprocal tariffs announced on 2 April..."

Thanks to Slashdot readers Alain Williams and Mr. Dollar Ton for sharing the news.

A former Facebook employee/whistleblower alleges Meta's AI model Lllama was used to help DeepSeek.

The whistleblower — former Facebook director of global policy Sarah Wynn-Williams — testified before U.S. Senators on Wednesday. CBS News found this earlier response from Meta: In a statement last year on Llama, Meta spokesperson Andy Stone wrote, "The alleged role of a single and outdated version of an American open-source model is irrelevant when we know China is already investing over 1T to surpass the US technologically, and Chinese tech companies are releasing their own open AI models as fast, or faster, than US ones."

Wynn-Williams encouraged senators to continue investigating Meta's role in the development of artificial intelligence in China, as they continue their probe into the social media company founded by Zuckerberg. "The greatest trick Mark Zuckerberg ever pulled was wrapping the American flag around himself and calling himself a patriot and saying he didn't offer services in China, while he spent the last decade building an $18 billion business there," she said.
The testimony also left some of the lawmakers skeptical of Zuckerberg's commitment to free speech after the whistleblower also alleged Facebook worked "hand in glove" with the Chinese government to censor its platforms: In her almost seven years with the company, Wynn-Williams told the panel she witnessed the company provide "custom built censorship tools" for the Chinese Communist Party. She said a Chinese dissident living in the United States was removed from Facebook in 2017 after pressure from Chinese officials. Facebook said at the time it took action against the regime critic, Guo Wengui, for sharing someone else's personal information. Wynn-Williams described the use of a "virality counter" that flagged posts with over 10,000 views for review by a "chief editor," which Democratic Sen. Richard Blumenthal of Connecticut called "an Orwellian censor." These "virality counters" were used not only in Mainland China, but also in Hong Kong and Taiwan, according to Wynn-Williams's testimony.

Wynn-Williams also told senators Chinese officials could "potentially access" the data of American users.

Germany will get a new "super-high-tech ministry" responsible for research, technology, and aerospace, according to the coalition agreement published by the incoming government this week. From a report: The announcement is one of several nods to science in the 144-page agreement, unveiled on 9 April following weeks of negotiations between the center-right Christian Democrats (CDU) and its sister party, the Christian Social Union in Bavaria (CSU) -- who together won the most seats in February's federal elections -- and the center-left Social Democrats. The agreement is expected to be formally approved by the three parties by early May, paving the way for CDU leader Friedrich Merz to be elected chancellor.

[...] The new agreement lists a number of scientific priorities for the new government, including support for artificial intelligence, quantum technologies, biotechnology, microchip development and production, and fusion energy. "Our goal is that the world's first fusion reactor should be realized in Germany," the text states. It also mentions personalized medicine, oceans research, and sustainability research as "strategic" areas. But the agreement does not include any budget estimates, and observers caution it is unclear where the money for new programs would come from. The agreement does affirm current commitments to increase the budgets of the country's main research organizations by 3% per year through 2030.