Researchers at Georgia Tech have developed a prototype pipeline for the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) that can "distill" binary executables into human-intelligible code so that it can be updated and deployed in "weeks, days, or hours, in some cases." The work is part of a five-year, $10 million project with the agency. The Register reports: After running an executable through the university's "distillation" process, software engineers should be able to examine the generated HAR, figure out what the code does, and make changes to add new features, patch bugs, or improve security, and turn the HAR back into executable code, says GT associate professor and project participant Brendan Saltaformaggio. This would be useful for, say, updating complex software that was written by a contractor or internal team, the source code is no longer or never was to hand and neither are its creators, and stuff needs to be fixed up. Reverse engineering the binary and patching in an update by hand can be a little hairy, hence DARPA's desire for something a bit more solid and automatic. The idea is to use this pipeline to freshen up legacy or outdated software that may have taken years and millions of dollars to develop some time ago.

Saltaformaggio told El Reg his team has the entire process working from start to finish, and with some level of stability, too. "DARPA sets challenges they like to use to test the capabilities of a project," he told us over the phone. "So far we've handled every challenge problem DARPA's thrown at us, so I'd say it's working pretty well." Saltaformaggio said his team's pipeline disassembles binaries into a graph structure with pseudo-code, and presented in a way that developers can navigate, and replace or add parts in C and C++. Sorry, Java devs and Pythonistas: Saltaformaggio tells us that there's no reason the system couldn't work with other programming languages, "but we're focused on C and C++. Other folks would need to build out support for that." Along with being able to deconstruct, edit, and reconstruct binaries, the team said its processing pipeline is also able to comb through HARs and remove extraneous routines. The team has also, we're told, baked in verification steps to ensure changes made to code within hardware ranging from jets and drones to plain-old desktop computers work exactly as expected with no side effects.

The Mozilla Foundation has started a petition to stop the French government from forcing browsers like Mozilla's Firefox to censor websites. "It would set a dangerous precedent, providing a playbook for other governments to also turn browsers like Firefox into censorship tools," says the organization. "The government introduced the bill to parliament shortly before the summer break and is hoping to pass this as quickly and smoothly as possible; the bill has even been put on an accelerated procedure, with a vote to take place this fall." You can add your name to their petition here.

The bill in question is France's SREN Bill, which sets a precarious standard for digital freedoms by empowering the government to compile a list of websites to be blocked at the browser level. The Mozilla Foundation warns that this approach "is uncharted territory" and could give oppressive regimes an operational model that could undermine the effectiveness of censorship circumvention tools.

"Rather than mandate browser based blocking, we think the legislation should focus on improving the existing mechanisms already utilized by browsers -- services such as Safe Browsing and Smart Screen," says Mozilla. "The law should instead focus on establishing clear yet reasonable timelines under which major phishing protection systems should handle legitimate website inclusion requests from authorized government agencies. All such requests for inclusion should be based on a robust set of public criteria limited to phishing/scam websites, subject to independent review from experts, and contain judicial appellate mechanisms in case an inclusion request is rejected by a provider."

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Reuters: The Canadian government on Friday demanded that Meta lift a "reckless" ban on domestic news from its platforms to allow people to share information about wildfires in the west of the country. Meta started blocking news on its Facebook and Instagram platforms for all users in Canada this month in response to a new law requiring internet giants to pay for news articles. Some people fleeing wildfires in the remote northern town of Yellowknife have complained to domestic media that the ban prevented them from sharing important data about the fires.

"Meta's reckless choice to block news ... is hurting access to vital information on Facebook and Instagram," Heritage Minister Pascale St-Onge said in a social media post. "We are calling on them to reinstate news sharing today for the safety of Canadians facing this emergency. We need more news right now, not less," she said. Transport Minister Pablo Rodriguez earlier said the ban meant people did not have access to crucial information. Chris Bittle, a legislator for the ruling Liberal Party, complained on Thursday that "Meta's actions to block news are reckless and irresponsible." Ollie Williams, who runs Yellowknife's Cabin Radio digital radio station, told the Canadian Broadcasting Corp. that people were posting screen shots of information on Facebook since they could not share links to news feeds. A Meta spokesperson responded by saying that the company had activated the "Safety Check" feature on Facebook that allows users to mark that they are safe in the wake of a natural disaster or a crisis.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from BleepingComputer: Google has announced the first open-source quantum resilient FIDO2 security key implementation, which uses a unique ECC/Dilithium hybrid signature schema co-created with ETH Zurich. FIDO2 is the second major version of the Fast IDentity Online authentication standard, and FIDO2 keys are used for passwordless authentication and as a multi-factor authentication (MFA) element. Google explains that a quantum-resistant FIDO2 security key implementation is a crucial step towards ensuring safety and security as the advent of quantum computing approaches and developments in the field follow an accelerating trajectory.

To protect against quantum computers, a new hybrid algorithm was created by combining the established ECDSA algorithm with the Dilithium algorithm. Dilithium is a quantum-resistant cryptographic signature scheme that NIST included in its post-quantum cryptography standardization proposals, praising its strong security and excellent performance, making it suitable for use in a wide array of applications. This hybrid signature approach that blends classic and quantum-resistant features wasn't simple to manifest, Google says. Designing a Dilithium implementation that's compact enough for security keys was incredibly challenging. Its engineers, however, managed to develop a Rust-based implementation that only needs 20KB of memory, making the endeavor practically possible, while they also noted its high-performance potential.

The hybrid signature schema was first presented in a 2022 paper (PDF) and recently gained recognition at the ACNS (Applied Cryptography and Network Security) 2023, where it won the "best workshop paper" award. This new hybrid implementation is now part of the OpenSK, Google's open-source security keys implementation that supports the FIDO U2F and FIDO2 standards. The tech giant hopes that its proposal will be adopted by FIDO2 as a new standard and supported by major web browsers with large user bases. The firm calls the application of next-gen cryptography at the internet scale "a massive undertaking" and urges all stakeholders to move quickly to maintain good progress on that front.

Free and open software have transformed the tech industry. But we still have a lot to work out to make them healthy, equitable enterprises. From a report: When Xerox donated a new laser printer to MIT in 1980, the company couldn't have known that the machine would ignite a revolution. While the early decades of software development generally ran on a culture of open access, this new printer ran on inaccessible proprietary software, much to the horror of Richard M. Stallman, then a 27-year-old programmer at the university.

A few years later, Stallman released GNU, an operating system designed to be a free alternative to one of the dominant operating systems at the time: Unix. The free-software movement was born, with a simple premise: for the good of the world, all code should be open, without restriction or commercial intervention. Forty years later, tech companies are making billions on proprietary software, and much of the technology around us is inscrutable. But while Stallman's movement may look like a failed experiment, the free and open-source software movement is not only alive and well; it has become a keystone of the tech industry.

Long-time Slashdot reader SpzToid shares a report from The Economist: What you notice first is how silent it is," says Kimmo Koski, the boss of the Finnish IT Centre for Science. Dr Koski is describing LUMI -- Finnish for "snow" -- the most powerful supercomputer in Europe, which sits 250km south of the Arctic Circle in the town of Kajaani in Finland. LUMI, which was inaugurated last year, is used for everything from climate modeling to searching for new drugs. It has tens of thousands of individual processors and is capable of performing up to 429 quadrillion calculations every second. That makes it the third-most-powerful supercomputer in the world. Powered by hydroelectricity, and with its waste heat used to help warm homes in Kajaani, it even boasts negative emissions of carbon dioxide. LUMI offers a glimpse of the future of high-performance computing (HPC), both on dedicated supercomputers and in the cloud infrastructure that runs much of the internet. Over the past decade the demand for HPC has boomed, driven by technologies like machine learning, genome sequencing and simulations of everything from stockmarkets and nuclear weapons to the weather. It is likely to carry on rising, for such applications will happily consume as much computing power as you can throw at them. Over the same period the amount of computing power required to train a cutting-edge AI model has been doubling every five months. All this has implications for the environment.

HPC -- and computing more generally -- is becoming a big user of energy. The International Energy Agency reckons data centers account for between 1.5% and 2% of global electricity consumption, roughly the same as the entire British economy. That is expected to rise to 4% by 2030. With its eye on government pledges to reduce greenhouse-gas emissions, the computing industry is trying to find ways to do more with less and boost the efficiency of its products. The work is happening at three levels: that of individual microchips; of the computers that are built from those chips; and the data centers that, in turn, house the computers. [...] The standard measure of a data centre's efficiency is the power usage effectiveness (pue), the ratio between the data centre's overall power consumption and how much of that is used to do useful work. According to the Uptime Institute, a firm of it advisers, a typical data centre has a pue of 1.58. That means that about two-thirds of its electricity goes to running its computers while a third goes to running the data centre itself, most of which will be consumed by its cooling systems. Clever design can push that number much lower.

Most existing data centers rely on air cooling. Liquid cooling offers better heat transfer, at the cost of extra engineering effort. Several startups even offer to submerge circuit boards entirely in specially designed liquid baths. Thanks in part to its use of liquid cooling, Frontier boasts a pue of 1.03. One reason lumi was built near the Arctic Circle was to take advantage of the cool sub-Arctic air. A neighboring computer, built in the same facility, makes use of that free cooling to reach a pue rating of just 1.02. That means 98% of the electricity that comes in gets turned into useful mathematics. Even the best commercial data centers fall short of such numbers. Google's, for instance, have an average pue value of 1.1. The latest numbers from the Uptime Institute, published in June, show that, after several years of steady improvement, global data-centre efficiency has been stagnant since 2018. The report notes that the U.S., Britain and the European Union, among others, are considering new rules that "could force data centers to become more efficient." Germany has proposed the Energy Efficiency Act that would mandate a minimum pue of 1.5 by 2027, and 1.3 by 2030.

According to a new Reuters/Ipsos survey, nearly half of American adults support a ban on TikTok. From the report: TikTok, owned by Chinese tech giant ByteDance and used by tens of millions of Americans, has faced calls from U.S. lawmakers for a nationwide ban over concerns about possible Chinese government influence. Some 47% of respondents to the two-day poll, which concluded on Tuesday, said they at least somewhat supported "banning the social media application, TikTok, from use in the United States," while 36% opposed a ban and 17% said they didn't know.

Fifty-eight percent of Republicans favored a ban, compared to 47% of Democrats, the poll showed. The online Reuters/Ipsos poll was conducted nationwide, collecting responses from 1,005 adults, including 443 Democrats and 346 Republicans. It had a credibility interval, a measure of precision, of about 4 percentage points in either direction. Last month, a Pew Research Center survey found that a majority of Americans (59%) believe the social media app is a threat to the national security of the United States.

On Tuesday, Snapchat's My AI in-app chatbot posted its own Story to the app that appeared to be a photo of a wall and ceiling. It then stopped responding to users' messages, which some Snapchat users found disconcerting. TechCrunch reports: Though the incident made for some great tweets (er, posts), we regret to inform you that My AI did not develop self-awareness and a desire to express itself through Snapchat Stories. Instead, the situation arose because of a technical outage, just as the bot explained. Snap confirmed the issue, which was quickly addressed last night, was just a glitch. (And My AI wasn't snapping photos of your room, by the way). "My AI experienced a temporary outage that's now resolved," a spokesperson told TechCrunch.

However, the incident does raise the question as to whether or not Snap was considering adding new functionality to My AI that would allow the AI chatbot to post to Stories. Currently, the AI bot sends text messages and can even Snap you back with images -- weird as they may be. But does it do Stories? Not yet, apparently. "At this time, My AI does not have Stories feature," a Snap spokesperson told us, leaving us to wonder if that may be something Snap has in the works.

The United States Space Force has activated its first and only unit dedicated to targeting other nations' satellites and the ground stations that support them. Space.com reports: The 75th Intelligence, Surveillance and Reconnaissance Squadron (ISRS) was activated on Aug. 11 at Peterson Space Force Base in Colorado. This unit is part of Space Delta 7, an element of the U.S. Space Force tasked with providing intelligence on adversary space capabilities. It'll do things like analyze the capabilities of potential targets, locate and track these targets as well as participate in "target engagement," which presumably refers to destroying or disrupting adversary satellites, the ground stations that support them and transmissions sent between the two.

Master Sgt. Desiree Cabrera, 75th ISRS operations superintendent, said the new unit will revolutionize the targeting capabilities of not just the Space Force, but also the entire U.S. military: "Not only are we standing up the sole targeting squadron in the U.S. Space Force, we are changing the way targeting is done across the joint community when it comes to space and electromagnetic warfare." The 75th ISRS will also analyze adversary space capabilities including "counterspace force threats," according to the Space Force's statement. Counterspace forces refer to adversary systems aimed at preventing the U.S. from using its own satellites during a conflict.

Bambu's X1C and P1P 3D printers started printing unattended, overnight, and without any additional user input, according to user reports from r/BambuLab and X. The Verge reports: Some woke up to failed prints. Some found a second copy of a previous print. And at least a few found their Bambu X1C or P1P had started smacking itself apart -- damaging components -- while trying to print a second copy atop the object they'd actually asked for. What happened? In an official blog post, Bambu says it's still investigating but suspects that a cloud outage is to blame. The company says its servers had two brief outages on Tuesday morning where the servers couldn't confirm that the printers had actually printed -- but instead of failing gracefully, they wound up sending the same print job again and again until it went through, Bambu's staff believes. "Simply explained, the print job sent to the printer before was trapped on the cloud and had a delayed start," writes Bambu.

When contacted by The Verge, Bambu would not go quite so far as to promise free repairs and replacements for all affected customers but says anyone who's suffered any damage should reach out to Bambu support ASAP. "For damage caused by this incident, we will offer the necessary solutions to our customers impacted by the Cloud Outage, in the form of part replacements or a printer replacement if the situation demands it," spokesperson Taylor Liu tells me.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: A few months ago, an engineer in a data center in Norway encountered some perplexing errors that caused a Windows server to suddenly reset its system clock to 55 days in the future. The engineer relied on the server to maintain a routing table that tracked cell phone numbers in real time as they were being moved from one carrier to the other. A jump of eight weeks had dire consequences because it caused numbers that had yet to be transferred to be listed as having already been moved and numbers that had already been transferred to be reported as pending. "With these updated routing tables, a lot of people were unable to make calls, as we didn't have a correct state!" the engineer, who asked to be identified only by his first name, Simen, wrote in an email. "We would route incoming and outgoing calls to the wrong operators! This meant, e.g., children could not reach their parents and vice versa."

Simen had experienced a similar error last August when a machine running Windows Server 2019 reset its clock to January 2023 and then changed it back a short time later. Troubleshooting the cause of that mysterious reset was hampered because the engineers didn't discover it until after event logs had been purged. The newer jump of 55 days, on a machine running Windows Server 2016, prompted him to once again search for a cause, and this time, he found it. The culprit was a little-known feature in Windows known as Secure Time Seeding. Microsoft introduced the time-keeping feature in 2016 as a way to ensure that system clocks were accurate. Windows systems with clocks set to the wrong time can cause disastrous errors when they can't properly parse time stamps in digital certificates or they execute jobs too early, too late, or out of the prescribed order. Secure Time Seeding, Microsoft said, was a hedge against failures in the battery-powered on-board devices designed to keep accurate time even when the machine is powered down.

"You may ask -- why doesn't the device ask the nearest time server for the current time over the network?" Microsoft engineers wrote. "Since the device is not in a state to communicate securely over the network, it cannot obtain time securely over the network as well, unless you choose to ignore network security or at least punch some holes into it by making exceptions." To avoid making security exceptions, Secure Time Seeding sets the time based on data inside an SSL handshake the machine makes with remote servers. These handshakes occur whenever two devices connect using the Secure Sockets Layer protocol, the mechanism that provides encrypted HTTPS sessions (it is also known as Transport Layer Security). Because Secure Time Seeding (abbreviated as STS for the rest of this article) used SSL certificates Windows already stored locally, it could ensure that the machine was securely connected to the remote server. The mechanism, Microsoft engineers wrote, "helped us to break the cyclical dependency between client system time and security keys, including SSL certificates."

New York City is banning TikTok from city-owned devices and requiring agencies to remove the app within the next 30 days. From a report: The directive issued Wednesday comes after a review by the NYC Cyber Command, which a city official said found that TikTok "posed a security threat to the city's technical networks." Starting immediately, city employees are barred from downloading or using the app and accessing TikTok's website from any city-owned devices.

"While social media is great at connecting New Yorkers with one another and the city, we have to ensure we are always using these platforms in a secure manner," a New York City Hall spokesperson said in a statement to The Verge Wednesday. "NYC Cyber Command regularly explores and advances proactive measures to keep New Yorkers' data safe." The city cited US Office of Management and Budget guidelines discouraging TikTok's use on government devices as well as federal legislation banning the app that was passed earlier this year.

Google is evaluating tools that would use AI to perform tasks that some of its researchers have said should be avoided. From a report: Earlier this year, Google, locked in an accelerating competition with rivals like Microsoft and OpenAI to develop A.I. technology, was looking for ways to put a charge into its artificial intelligence research. So in April, Google merged DeepMind, a research lab it had acquired in London, with Brain, an artificial intelligence team it started in Silicon Valley. Four months later, the combined groups are testing ambitious new tools that could turn generative A.I. -- the technology behind chatbots like OpenAI's ChatGPT and Google's own Bard -- into a personal life coach.

Google DeepMind has been working with generative A.I. to perform at least 21 different types of personal and professional tasks, including tools to give users life advice, ideas, planning instructions and tutoring tips, according to documents and other materials reviewed by The New York Times. The project was indicative of the urgency of Google's effort to propel itself to the front of the A.I. pack and signaled its increasing willingness to trust A.I. systems with sensitive tasks. The capabilities also marked a shift from Google's earlier caution on generative A.I. In a slide deck presented to executives in December, the company's A.I. safety experts had warned of the dangers of people becoming too emotionally attached to chatbots.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from ZDNet: First shown off at 2022 CES, the Masonite M-PWR comes with a built-in Ring video doorbell and Yale smart lock, plus motion-activated LED lights and a door sensor -- all powered by your home's electrical system so there are no batteries to replace. An onboard battery backup keeps the door operational for 24 hours in the event of a power loss. Both doorbell and lock components can be upgraded over time as technology advances. If you were hoping for an all-in-one app, however, you'll be disappointed. To use all the door's features, you need the Yale app, the Ring app, and the M-PWR app.

What's all this technology going to cost you? The fiberglass Masonite M-PWR starts at $4,000 -- and that's for the basic model. Several finishes/designs/glass options are available, with pricing on the higher-end versions reaching $7,000. If you consider that a decent front door, Ring doorbell, and Yale smart lock from the same retailer can be had for under $1,000, this is clearly a door for people who want the finer things. And that price doesn't include installation, something most homeowners can't do on their own as the door needs to be hard-wired. The door has been available in new construction homes since 2022, but this marks the first time you can buy it separately.

According to Adweek, the New York Times updated its Terms of Service on August 3rd to prohibit its content from being used in the development of "any software program, including, but not limited to, training a machine learning or artificial intelligence (AI) system." That includes text, photographs, images, audio/video clips, "look and feel," metadata, and compilations. The Verge reports: The updated terms now also specify that automated tools like website crawlers designed to use, access, or collect such content cannot be used without written permission from the publication. The NYT says that refusing to comply with these new restrictions could result in unspecified fines or penalties. Despite introducing the new rules to its policy, the publication doesn't appear to have made any changes to its robots.txt -- the file that informs search engine crawlers which URLs can be accessed. The move follows a recent update to Google's privacy policy that discloses the search giant reserves the right to scrape just about everything you post online to build its AI tools.

China launched what is thought to be the world's first geosynchronous orbit synthetic aperture radar satellite on Saturday. SpaceNews reports: A Long March 3B rocket lifted off from Xichang Satellite Launch Center in southwest China at 1:36 p.m. Eastern (1736 UTC) Aug. 12. The Land Exploration-4 01 (Ludi Tance-4 (01)) satellite successfully entered geosynchronous transfer orbit, the China Aerospace Science and Technology Corp., (CASC) announced within an hour of liftoff. Few details of the satellite were provided by CASC. However the group's "blue book" outlining plans for 2023 released in January noted the launch of a "high-orbit 20-meter [resolution] SAR satellite."

The L-band synthetic aperture radar (SAR) satellite will provide all-day, all-weather observation of China and surrounding areas, boosting the country's disaster prevention, reduction, and relief capabilities. The land observation satellite series and "high-orbit SAR technology" are listed in the country's Medium and Long Term Development Plan for Civilian Space Infrastructure (2015-2025). The plan includes establishing high and medium resolution optical and synthetic aperture radar constellations for a range of land, marine and atmospheric monitoring. The series is separate from the China High-resolution Earth Observation System (CHEOS), which consists of Gaofen ("high resolution") satellites. China's Gaofen-4 satellite is a GEO optical satellite. SAR at GEO, while providing much lower resolution than satellites in low Earth orbit, can provide constant coverage and imagery despite cloud cover.

It is not yet known what orbital scheme the Land Exploration-4 (01) satellite will enter. An inclined GEO orbit would produce a "figure eight" ground track over the area of intended coverage. Chinese academics from the Beijing Institute of Technology have produced a study of various schemes, while others have published research into modified signal models for GEO SAR. The (01) designation suggests China could launch other SAR satellites into geosynchronous orbits. The satellite was developed by the China Academy of Spacecraft Technology (CAST.)

Tesla is hiring staff for the company's new "first of its kind" data centers. Electrek reports: Tesla has shared a new job posting for a "Sr. Engineering Program Manager, Data Center" role first spotted by Electrek last week. In the job posting, Tesla says that it will build "1st of its kind Data Centers": "This role will lead the end-to-end design and engineering of Tesla's 1st of its kind Data Centers and will be one of the key members of the factory engineering team." Tesla didn't explain how those data centers will be "1st of their kind," which is not something you'd expect in a job posting anyway.

But interestingly, the new effort comes as Tesla has been taking over data centers from Twitter. [...] The Information reported that Tesla has taken over one of the old Twitter data centers leased from NTT Data that the social media company was using in Sacramento. The report also mentions that Tesla is in talks with Prime Data Centers to use another data center that Twitter used to have in Sacramento.

Tesla is seeing its need for data processing increasing rapidly as it tries to take advantage of its growing fleet of millions of vehicles all equipped with cameras in order to improve the neural nets powering its self-driving effort. The automaker is also handling a growing number of connectivity features that it tries to sell to vehicle owners through a $10-a-month "Premium Connectivity" subscription service. On the energy side, Tesla is also handling a lot of data to operate its virtual power plant and its services to distributed energy assets, like Autobidder and Powerhub.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: The US broadband industry is united in opposition to a requirement that Internet service providers list all of their monthly fees. Five lobby groups representing cable companies, fiber and DSL providers, and mobile operators have repeatedly urged the Federal Communications Commission to eliminate the requirement before new broadband labeling rules take effect. The trade associations petitioned the FCC in January to change the rules and renewed their call last week in a filing and in a meeting with FCC officials. The requirement that ISPs list all their monthly fees "would add unnecessary complexity and burdens to the label for consumers and providers and could result in some providers having to create many labels for any given plan," the groups said in the filing on Friday.

The trade groups said the FCC should instead "require providers to include an explanatory statement that such fees may apply and that they vary by jurisdiction, similar to the Commission's treatment of government-imposed taxes," or require "the display of the maximum level of government-imposed fees that might be passed through, so that consumers would not experience bill shock with respect to such fees." The filing was submitted by NCTA-The Internet & Television Association, which represents Comcast, Charter, Cox, and other cable companies. The NCTA's ex parte filing described a meeting with FCC officials that also included wireless industry trade group CTIA and USTelecom, which represents telcos including AT&T, Verizon, Lumen (formerly CenturyLink), Frontier, and Windstream.

Comcast submitted its own filing urging the FCC to scrap the rules in June. The calls to weaken the FCC's truth-in-billing rules angered consumer advocates, as we wrote at the time. "The label hasn't even reached consumers yet, but Comcast is already trying to create loopholes. This request would allow the big ISPs to continue hiding the true cost of service and frustrating customers with poor service," Joshua Stager, policy director at media advocacy group Free Press, told Ars. Congress required the FCC to implement broadband labels with exact prices for Internet service plans in a 2021 law, but gave the FCC some leeway in how to structure the rules. The FCC adopted specific label rules in November 2022. The labels must be displayed to consumers at the point of sale and include monthly price, additional charges, speeds, data caps, additional charges for data, and other information. The FCC rules aren't in force yet because they are subject to a federal Office of Management and Budget (OMB) review under the US Paperwork Reduction Act.

The Delhi High Court has ruled that Google's Ads program falls under the purview of the country's Trademarks Act and the company must remove ads that infringe upon trademarks in a major decision that may redefine online advertising's legal landscape. From a report: The decision), delivered by a division bench of Justice Vibhu Bakhru and Justice Amit Mahajan last week, observed that Google was an "active participant" in the use of the trademarks of proprietors. Google's practice of suggesting competitors' trademarks as keywords to advertisers yielded significant profits for the search giant via keyword sales. This case was spurred by a complaint from logistics firm DRS, which pointed out that searches for its trademark "Agarwal Packers and Movers" returned competitor websites. DRS alleged that Google's ad mechanism exploited its trademark to divert users to rival sites. Upholding the initial order, the division bench directed Google to act on DRS's grievances and remove offending ads.

Google's AI-powered Search Generative Experience (SGE) is getting a major new feature: it will be able to summarize articles you're reading on the web, according to a Google blog post. From a report: SGE can already summarize search results for you so that you don't have to scroll forever to find what you're looking for, and this new feature is designed to take that further by helping you out after you've actually clicked a link. You probably won't see this feature, which Google is calling "SGE while browsing," right away. Google says it's a new feature that's starting to roll out Tuesday as "an early experiment" in its opt-in Search Labs program. (You'll get access to it if you already opted in to SGE, but if you haven't, you can opt in to the feature on its own.) It will be available first in the Google app on Android and iOS, and the company is bringing it to the Chrome browser on desktop "in the days ahead."