Supported by conversations with nearly a dozen former employees, 9to5Mac details the downfall of Brydge -- "a once thriving startup making popular keyboard accessories for iPad, Mac, and Microsoft Surface products." An anonymous reader shares an excerpt from the report: According to nearly a dozen former Brydge employees who spoke to 9to5Mac, Brydge has gone through multiple rounds of layoffs within the past year after at least two failed acquisitions. As it stands today, Brydge employees have not been paid salaries since January. Customers who pre-ordered the company's most recent product have been left in the dark since then as well. Its website went completely offline earlier this year, and its social media accounts have been silent since then as well. Those former Brydge employees largely attribute the company's failure to mismanagement during growth, misleading statements from its two co-CEOs, and an overall hostile working environment that led to a high turnover rate.

Last year, BMW announced plans to charge a $18 per month subscription for heated seats. Now, Mercedes is considering making better EV engine performance an added subscription surcharge. "Mercedes-Benz electric vehicle owners in North America who want a little more power and speed can now buy 60 horsepower for just $60 a month or, on other models, 80 horsepower for $90 a month," reports CNN. "They won't have to visit a Mercedes dealer to get the upgrade either, or even leave their own driveway. The added power, which will provide a nearly one second decrease in zero-to-60 acceleration, will be available through an over-the-air software patch." Techdirt reports: If you don't want to pay monthly, Mercedes will also let you pay a one time flat fee (usually several thousand dollars) to remove the artificial restrictions they've imposed on your engine. That's, of course, creating additional upward pricing funnel efforts on top of the industry's existing efforts to upsell you on a rotating crop of trims, tiers, and options you probably didn't want.

It's not really clear that regulators have any interest in cracking down on charging dumb people extra for something they already owned and paid for. After all, ripping off gullible consumers is effectively now considered little more than creative marketing by a notable segment of government "leaders" (see: regulatory apathy over misleading hidden fees in everything from hotels to cable TV).

Gmail is starting to show more ads on mobile devices and the web. "Starting on mobile, we've observed that Google is now showing ads within your inbox's 'Updates' filter," reports 9to5Google. "That automatic filter is designed to capture emails regarding orders, select promotions, billing statements, and more. Now, Gmail is starting to show two ads at the top of the 'Updates' tab, just like it does on the other tabs." From the report: Beyond that, it also appears that Gmail is starting to mix its ads on desktop throughout the list of emails under Gmail tabs -- they're at least not showing in the main inbox. Dozens of reports on Twitter show the change just in the past two days, though we haven't been able to replicate it in our own inbox. Some users also report seeing more ads in general, instead of the two that Google would typically show.

There doesn't appear to be any new setting to change the placement of ads in the inbox lists, and it's not even clear if this is a change that Google is rolling out to all users. In any case, though, the overwhelming opinion seems to be negative regarding the change -- which is fully understandable.

AI startup Hugging Face and ServiceNow Research, ServiceNow's R&D division, have released StarCoder, a free alternative to code-generating AI systems along the lines of GitHub's Copilot. From a report: Code-generating systems like DeepMind's AlphaCode; Amazon's CodeWhisperer; and OpenAI's Codex, which powers Copilot, provide a tantalizing glimpse at what's possible with AI within the realm of computer programming. Assuming the ethical, technical and legal issues are someday ironed out (and AI-powered coding tools don't cause more bugs and security exploits than they solve), they could cut development costs substantially while allowing coders to focus on more creative tasks.

According to a study from the University of Cambridge, at least half of developers' efforts are spent debugging and not actively programming, which costs the software industry an estimated $312 billion per year. But so far, only a handful of code-generating AI systems have been made freely available to the public -- reflecting the commercial incentives of the organizations building them (see: Replit). StarCoder, which by contrast is licensed to allow for royalty-free use by anyone, including corporations, was trained on over 80 programming languages as well as text from GitHub repositories, including documentation and programming notebooks. StarCoder integrates with Microsoft's Visual Studio Code code editor and, like OpenAI's ChatGPT, can follow basic instructions (e.g., "create an app UI") and answer questions about code.

Forget your hook, line and sinker. An Israeli foodtech company says it has 3D printed the first ever ready-to-cook fish fillet using animal cells cultivated and grown in a laboratory. From a report: Lab-grown beef and chicken have drawn attention as a way to sidestep the environmental toll of farming and tackle concerns over animal welfare, but few companies have forayed into seafood. Israel's Steakholder Foods has now partnered with Singapore-based Umami Meats to make fish fillets without the need to stalk dwindling fish populations. Umami Meats extracts cells - for now from grouper - and grows them into muscle and fat. Steakholder Foods then adds them to a 'bio-ink' suited for special 3D printers. The outcome: a narrow fillet that mimics the properties of sea-caught fish.

Umami hopes to bring its first products to market next year, starting in Singapore and then, pending regulation, countries like the United States and Japan. Cell cultivation alone is still too expensive to match the cost of traditional seafood, so for now the fish cells are diluted with plant-based ingredients in the bio-ink. "As time goes by, the complexity and level of these products will be higher, and the prices linked to producing them will decrease," said Arik Kaufman, the chief executive of Steakholder Foods.

Sonos and Alphabet's Google will face off in a San Francisco federal trial on Monday over claims that Google copied Sonos' patented smart-speaker technology in wireless audio devices like Google Home and Chromecast Audio. From a report: The case is part of a sprawling intellectual property dispute between the former business partners that includes other lawsuits in the U.S., Canada, France, Germany and the Netherlands. Sonos has asked the court for $90 million in damages from Google in the San Francisco case, down from $3 billion after U.S. District Judge William Alsup narrowed the case, according to a Google court filing. Sonos alleges Google infringed two of its patents related to multi-room wireless audio. Google spokesperson Jose Castaneda said the case relates to "some very specific features that are not commonly used," and that Sonos "mischaracterized our partnership and technology."

Eric Berger writes via Ars Technica: A consortium of nearly every major European satellite company announced Tuesday that it plans to bid for a proposed satellite constellation to provide global communications. Essentially, such a constellation would provide the European Union with connectivity from low-Earth orbit similar to what SpaceX's Starlink offers. The bid, which includes large players such as Airbus Defence and Space, Eutelsat, SES, and Thales Alenia Space, comes in response to a request by the European Union for help in constructing a sovereign constellation to provide secure communications for government services, including military applications.

European Union Commissioner Thierry Breton announced the continent's plans for this constellation -- known as Infrastructure for Resilience, Interconnectivity and Security by Satellite, or IRIS^2 -- last November. The European Union will provide 2.4 billion euro, with additional contributions expected from the European Space Agency and private investments. "IRIS^2 establishes space as a vector of our European autonomy, a vector of connectivity and a vector of resilience," Breton said at the time. "It heightens Europe's role as a true space power. With a clear ambition and sense of direction."

The partnership announced Tuesday, which also includes Deutsche Telekom, Hispasat, OHB, Orange, Hisdesat, and Telespazio, will aim to create a state-of-the-art satellite constellation based on a multi-orbit architecture. Although it is top-heavy with established industry players, the partnership said it will encourage startups in the European space sector to join the coalition. This is in response to a desire by Breton to broaden the European commercial space sector. At present, Europe estimates the cost of this constellation at about 6 billion euro and desires it to be ready to provide global coverage by the year 2027.

Internet users are turning to VPN services as a means to circumvent Utah's new law requiring porn sites to verify users' ages. The spike in VPN searches appears to be directly related to Pornhub's decision on Tuesday to completely disable its websites for people living in the state. TechRadar reports: Google searches for virtual private networks (VPNs) have been skyrocketing since, with a peak registered on May 3, the day the new law came into force. By downloading a VPN service, pornography fans will be able to keep accessing Pornhub and similar sites with ease. That's because a virtual private network is security software able to spoof users' IP address (digital location and device identifier). Hence a surge of interest in VPNs across Utah as people will simply need to connect to a server located in a US state or foreign country where the restriction isn't yet enforced.

"Utah's age-verification law shows a worrying trend to further restrict digital freedoms and disregard data privacy across the US," said a spokesperson of secure VPN provider Private Internet Access (PIA). "Private Internet Access is a long-time advocate of greater digital privacy, and we urge lawmakers to consider other ways of protecting children online, including education, guidance from parents, and open conversations about safe internet usage, rather than relying on increasingly intrusive digital regulations which disregard people's privacy and online freedom." You can see the spike in "virtual private network" searches via Google Trends.

"Search queries for VPN were at peak popularity in Utah just before 4 a.m. EST Tuesday, according to the trends data," notes Newsweek. "Other related queries in the past week include searches for VPN extensions like Hola and Fox Speed."

Following the announcement of the bill in March, El Salvador President Nayib Bukele signed a law today eliminating income, property, capital gains, and other tariffs on technology innovations. Watcher Guru reports: The announcement reinforces El Salvador's perspective as a haven for technology development. Additionally, Bukele stated that the new act protects "technology innovations, software and app programming, AI, computer, and communications hardware manufacturing."

The Innovations and Technology Manufacturing Incentives Act will likely attract tech developments to the country. Moreover, the elimination of taxes presents an economic benefit to a host of companies. Conversely, El Salvador continues to maintain its commitment to a variety of tech innovations that are being developed.

Waymo is doubling its commercial robotaxi service area in the Phoenix metro area to include Scottsdale, nearly all of Tempe and larger sections of Chandler and Mesa. The updated service area is 180 square miles, or about one-third of the 517-square-mile Phoenix metro area. "Importantly, it connects downtown to Arizona State University in Tempe and other East Valley suburbs," adds TechCrunch. From the report: The former Google self-driving project under Alphabet is also adding a second location that accesses the Phoenix Sky Harbor International Airport. Riders can already get to the airport by taking a Waymo robotaxi to the 44th Street Phoenix SkyTrain Station, which has frequent round-the-clock trains to the main terminals. Waymo robotaxis will now pick up and drop off passengers at the new 24th Street PHX SkyTrain Station.

A larger service area, particularly one that allows for riders to take driverless Waymo vehicles from one suburb to downtown or to the airport, is critical for the company to grow its business and generate more revenue. The expansion will also help the company scale beyond the 10,000 autonomous trips that public riders take each week in Phoenix and San Francisco combined, Waymo Chief Product Officer Saswat Panigrahi said in a media briefing. Panigrahi did not disclose what percentage of those rides were in Phoenix, where it can charge. "We're clearly excited about the trajectory we're going to be on and we believe we can hit 10x of that scale by next summer, roughly," Panigrahi said.

While the systemic brutality used by Colombian police to quell national protests in 2021 was real and is well documented, photos recently used by Amnesty International to highlight the issue were not. The international human rights advocacy group has come under fire for posting images generated by artificial intelligence in order to promote their reports on social media -- and has since removed them. From a report: The images, including one of a woman being dragged away by police officers, depict the scenes during protests that swept across Colombia in 2021. But any more than a momentary glance at the images reveals that something is off. The faces of the protesters and police are smoothed-off and warped, giving the image a dystopian aura. The tricolour carried by the protester has the right colours -- red, yellow and blue -- but in the wrong order, and the police uniform is outdated.

Amnesty and other observers have documented hundreds of cases of human rights abuses committed by Colombian police during the wave of unrest in 2021, among them violence, sexual harassment and torture. Their research has raised awareness of the heavy-handedness of Colombian police and contributed to the growing acceptance of the need for reform. But photojournalists and media scholars warned that the use of AI-generated images could undermine Amnesty's own work and feed conspiracy theories.

For years Google published scientific research that helped jump-start its competitors. But now it's lurched into defensive mode. From a report: In February, Jeff Dean, Google's longtime head of artificial intelligence, announced a stunning policy shift to his staff: They had to hold off sharing their work with the outside world. For years Dean had run his department like a university, encouraging researchers to publish academic papers prolifically; they pushed out nearly 500 studies since 2019, according to Google Research's website. But the launch of OpenAI's groundbreaking ChatGPT three months earlier had changed things. The San Francisco start-up kept up with Google by reading the team's scientific papers, Dean said at the quarterly meeting for the company's research division. Indeed, transformers -- a foundational part of the latest AI tech and the T in ChatGPT -- originated in a Google study.

Things had to change. Google would take advantage of its own AI discoveries, sharing papers only after the lab work had been turned into products, Dean said, according to two people with knowledge of the meeting, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to share private information. The policy change is part of a larger shift inside Google. Long considered the leader in AI, the tech giant has lurched into defensive mode -- first to fend off a fleet of nimble AI competitors, and now to protect its core search business, stock price, and, potentially, its future, which executives have said is intertwined with AI. In op-eds, podcasts and TV appearances, Google CEO Sundar Pichai has urged caution on AI. "On a societal scale, it can cause a lot of harm," he warned on "60 Minutes" in April, describing how the technology could supercharge the creation of fake images and videos. But in recent months, Google has overhauled its AI operations with the goal of launching products quickly, according to interviews with 11 current and former Google employees, most of whom spoke on the condition of anonymity to share private information.

The rumors are true: next week, Google will introduce its first foldable phone, the Pixel Fold, during the Google I/O 2023 event. From a report: Google hasn't revealed any specs for the device, but a brief teaser video shows off a full-size outer display on a phone that opens up similarly to Samsung's Galaxy Z Fold devices. The camera bar on the back is similar to other Pixel devices but doesn't stick out as prominently, reflecting what we've seen in leaked marketing materials and even a hands-on video.

CNBC reported in April that the Pixel Fold would be a 5.8-inch phone that folds out into a 7.6-inch tablet, with a Google Tensor G2 processor, weigh 10oz, and have "the most durable hinge on a foldable," along with a price that's over $1,700. Samsung's latest foldable, the Z Fold 4, launched with a price of $1,799. We had expected to see it last year, but the Fold didn't make the cut for I/O in 2022. Rumors about its launch -- and how it fits in with Google's XL plans for Android apps that work across screens of various sizes -- haven't slowed down in the year since.

Shopify said on Thursday it would lay off 20% of employees and would sell its logistics business to Flexport, as the e-commerce company pushes to cut costs further and refocus on its core business. From a report: Shopify's first quarter revenue increased 25% from the same period last year to $1.5 billion, topping the company's own guidance for revenue growth in the high-teen percentages. Executives said on Thursday they expected revenue for the second quarter to grow at a similar rate to the first quarter. It reported free cash flow of $86 million, after burning cash in the year-earlier period, and projected free cash flow profitability for the rest of the year.

Discord is making "big changes" to how identities work on the platform, a move that will force you to change your username. From a report: Up until now, the company has appended four-digit tags to identities as a way to distinguish people with the same username. However, the new system will give everyone a unique username, much like Twitter, Instagram and other services. "The whole point of these changes is that we want to make it a lot easier for you and all the new users coming to Discord to connect and hang out with friends," co-founder Stanislav Vishnevskiy wrote in a blog post. "We know that your username and identity are important, and we understand that some of you may not like this change and disagree with it." The original aim with the four-digit tags was to allow you to choose any username you wanted, but it has now become "technical debt," according to Discord. The company said that the usernames are "too complicated or obscure" for people to remember.

Microsoft is making its Bing GPT-4 chatbot available to everyone today, no more waitlist necessary. From a report: All you need to do is sign in to the new Bing or Edge with your Microsoft account, and you'll now access the open preview version that's powered by GPT-4. Microsoft is also massively upgrading Bing Chat with lots of new features and even plug-in support. Microsoft is now adding more smart features to Bing Chat, including image and video results, new Bing and Edge Actions feature, persistent chat and history, and plug-in support. The plug-in support will be the key addition for developers and for the future of Bing Chat.

The White House on Thursday announced its first new initiatives aimed at taming the risks of artificial intelligence since a boom in A.I.-powered chatbots has prompted growing calls to regulate the technology. From a report: The National Science Foundation plans to spend $140 million on new research centers devoted to A.I., White House officials said. The administration also pledged to release draft guidelines for government agencies to ensure that their use of A.I. safeguards "the American people's rights and safety," adding that several A.I. companies had agreed to make their products available for scrutiny in August at a cybersecurity conference. The announcements came hours before Vice President Kamala Harris and other administration officials were scheduled to meet with the chief executives of Google, Microsoft, OpenAI, the maker of the popular ChatGPT chatbot, and Anthropic, an A.I. start-up, to discuss the technology.

A senior administration official said on Wednesday that the White House planned to impress upon the companies that they had a responsibility to address the risks of new A.I. developments.The White House has been under growing pressure to police A.I. that is capable of crafting sophisticated prose and lifelike images. The explosion of interest in the technology began last year when OpenAI released ChatGPT to the public and people immediately began using it to search for information, do schoolwork and assist them with their job. Since then, some of the biggest tech companies have rushed to incorporate chatbots into their products and accelerated A.I. research, while venture capitalists have poured money into A.I. start-ups.

In a policy reversal, Starlink no longer plans to charge data overage fees to standard residential users who exceed 1TB of monthly usage. Ars Technica reports: When SpaceX's Starlink division first announced the data cap in November 2022, it said that residential customers would get 1TB of "priority access data" each month. After using 1TB, customers could keep accessing the Internet at slower (but unspecified) speeds or pay $0.25 per gigabyte for "additional priority access." This was originally supposed to take effect in December, but Starlink delayed the change to February and then to April.

But now, Starlink's list of support FAQs no longer mentions the residential data cap and the current version of the fair use policy says that standard service plan users have unlimited data. The previous version of the Starlink fair use policy described the 1TB residential cap and optional $0.25-per-gigabyte overage fees. Starlink sent an email to users that said, "Good news! Your Starlink subscription will remain unlimited and will no longer be deprioritized after 1TB of data use." Nathan Owens, a Netflix engineer who frequently tweets about Starlink, posted a screenshot of the email yesterday.

Montana Governor Greg Gianforte has returned an "amendatory veto" to the legislature regarding the state's unconstitutional "ban TikTok" bill, proposing alternative draft language that inadvertently could ban all social media platforms in the state due to poor drafting. The revised language targets any social media application that collects personal information and provides it to a foreign adversary, but since most social media networks collect such information and share it with entities in foreign countries, it would effectively ban all social media in Montana. Techdirt reports: As [1st Amendment lawyer Ari Cohn] points out, the new draft targets any "social media application" that allows for "the collection of personal information or data" and allows for "the personal information or data to be provided to a foreign adversary or a person or entity located within a country designated as a foreign adversary." Now, some might think that sounds reasonable, but the details here matter. And the details reveal that EVERY social media network collects such information and provides it to people located in countries designated as a foreign adversary. And that's because "personal information" is a very broad term, as is "provided." [Ari writes:]

"'Surely,' you might think, 'that just covers the data platforms amass by monitoring and tracking us, right?' Perhaps not. The bill doesn't define the term, so who knows what it means in their heads. But we have an idea of what it means out in the real (online) world, by way of the regulations implementing the Children's Online Privacy Protection Act (COPPA). Those regulations include in the definition of 'personal information' things like: First and last name; Online contact information; A screen or user name where it functions in the same manner as online contact information. In other words, the types of information that accompany virtually every piece of content posted on social media. If a platform allows that kind of information to be provided to any foreign adversary or a person or entity located within a foreign adversary, it is banned from Montana.

Do you know who might be persons located within a country designated as a foreign adversary? Users. Users who are provided the kinds of 'personal information' that are inherent in the very concept of social media. So, effectively, the bill would ban any social media company that allows any user in China, Russia, Iran, or Cuba to see content from a Montana user (and this is a generous reading, nothing in the bill seems to require that the data/information shared be from a Montana resident). On top of it, each time a user from one of those countries accesses content, platforms would be subject to a $10,000 fine. Do you know which platforms allow people in those countries to access content posted in the United States? All of them. Congratulations, Montana Governor Greg Gianforte. You just managed to accidentally ban all social media for Montanans. Good work."

According to DigiTimes, TSMC will charge an extra 30% more for chips made in American than for chips made in Taiwan. Tom's Hardware reports: TSMC has started discussions with customers about orders and pricing for both overseas plants, which are set to begin commercial production in late 2024. Industry insiders believe that prices of chips produced on TSMC's N4 and N5 process technologies in the U.S. will be 20% -- 30% higher than those in Taiwan, while older process chips produced in Japan's Kumamoto facility on N28/N22 as well as N16/N12 nodes may cost 10% - 15% more than similar chips fabbed in Taiwan.

While American chip designers certainly won't appreciate higher costs on chip production in the U.S., it is likely that they will make chips aimed at government and less price-sensitive applications in Arizona. Therefore, they should be able to pass those extra costs on to their customers without risking their competitive positions. Given the high construction and operational costs of fabs in Japan and the U.S., TSMC is going to pass those extra expenses on to customers to maintain its gross margin target of 53%.