An anonymous reader quotes a report from Axios: Meta's Mark Zuckerberg, in an appearance on the "Joe Rogan Experience" podcast, criticized the Biden administration for pushing for censorship around COVID-19 vaccines, the media for hounding Facebook to clamp down on misinformation after the 2016 election, and his own company for complying. Zuckerberg's three-hour interview with Rogan gives a clear window into his thinking during a remarkable week in which Meta loosened its content moderation policies and shut down its DEI programs.

The Meta CEO said a turning point for his approach to censorship came after Biden publicly said social media companies were "killing people" by allowing COVID misinformation to spread, and politicians started coming after the company from all angles. Zuckerberg told Rogan, who was a prominent skeptic of the COVID-19 vaccine, that the Biden administration would "call up the guys on our team and yell at them and cursing and threatening repercussions if we don't take down things that are true."

Zuckerberg said that Biden officials wanted Meta to take down a meme of Leonardo DiCaprio pointing at a TV, with a joke at the expense of people who were vaccinated. Zuckerberg said his company drew the line at removing "humor and satire." But he also said his company had gone too far in complying with such requests, and acknowledged that he and others at the company wrongly bought into the idea -- which he said the traditional media had been pushing -- that misinformation spreading on social media swung the 2016 election to Donald Trump. Zuckerberg likened his company's fact-checking process to a George Orwell novel, saying it was "something out of 1984" and led to a broad belief that Meta fact-checkers "were too biased."

"It really is a slippery slope, and it just got to a point where it's just, OK, this is destroying so much trust, especially in the United States, to have this program." He said he was "worried" from the beginning about "becoming this sort of decider of what is true in the world."

Later in the interview, Zuckerberg praised X's "community notes" program and suggested that social media creators were replacing the government and traditional media as arbiters of truth, becoming "a new kind of cultural elite that people look up to."

Further reading: Meta Is Ushering In a 'World Without Facts,' Says Nobel Peace Prize Winner

Automattic is cutting its weekly contributions to WordPress.org from 3,988 hours to 45 hours, escalating tensions with rival WP Engine amid their ongoing legal dispute. The dramatic reduction comes after a federal court granted WP Engine an injunction over Automattic's handling of a disputed plugin.

The company, which runs WordPress.com, blamed the cutback on legal costs from its battle with WP Engine, which CEO Matt Mullenweg previously called a "cancer" to the community. Automattic said remaining contributions will focus on "security and critical updates" through the Five for the Future program.

Mark Zuckerberg's Meta is terminating major DEI programs, effective immediately -- including for hiring, training and picking suppliers. Axios: Meta said it was changing course because the "legal and policy landscape surrounding diversity, equity and inclusion efforts in the United States is changing," per a memo by Janelle Gale, vice president of human resources.

The world's most powerful supercomputer, capable of 2.79 quintillion calculations per second, has been unveiled at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in California, designed primarily to maintain the U.S. nuclear weapons stockpile and run other classified simulations. The $600 million system, named El Capitan, consists of 87 computer racks weighing 1.3 million pounds and draws 30 megawatts of power.

Built by Hewlett-Packard Enterprise using AMD chips, it operates alongside a smaller system called Tuolumne, which ranks tenth globally in computing power. "While we're still exploring the full role AI will play, there's no doubt that it is going to improve our ability to do research and development that we need," said Bradley Wallin, a deputy director at the laboratory.

Sales of electric vehicles in Japan fell 33% year-on-year to 59,736 cars in 2024, the first decline in four years, according to data from car dealers and importers compiled by Nikkei on Thursday. From the report: EVs' share of all vehicle sales fell below 2% in Japan, the lowest among major advanced economies. While global EV sales are still growing, albeit more slowly, Japan's reluctance to adopt EVs is becoming increasingly apparent.

Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang said quantum computers won't be very useful for another 20 years, causing stocks in this emerging sector to plunge more than 40% for a total market value loss of over $8 billion. "If you kind of said 15 years for very useful quantum computers, that'd probably be on the early side. If you said 30, is probably on the late side. But if you picked 20, I think a whole bunch of us would believe it," Huang said during a Q&A with analysts. PCMag reports: The field of quantum computing hasn't gotten nearly as much hype as generative AI and the tech giants promoting it in the past few years. Right now, part of the reason quantum computers aren't currently that helpful is because of their error rates. Nord Quantique CEO Julien Lemyre previously told PCMag that quantum error correction is the future of the field, and his firm is working on a solution. The errors that qubits, the basic unit of information in a quantum machine, currently make result in quantum computers being largely unhelpful. It's an essential hurdle to overcomeâ"but we don't currently know if or when quantum errors will be eliminated.

Chris Erven, CEO and co-founder of Kets Quantum, believes quantum computers will eventually pose a significant threat to cybersecurity. "China is making some of the largest investments in quantum computing, pumping in billions of dollars into research and development in the hope of being the first to create a large-scale, cryptographically relevant machine," Erven tells PCMag in a statement. "Although they may be a few years away from being fully operational, we know a quantum computer will be capable of breaking all traditional cyber defenses we currently use. So they, and others, are actively harvesting now, to decrypt later." "The 15 to 20-year timeline seems very realistic," said Ivana Delevska, investment chief of Spear Invest, which holds Rigetti and IonQ shares in an actively managed ETF. "That is roughly what it took Nvidia to develop accelerated computing."

Plaintiffs in Kadrey v. Meta allege that Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg authorized the team behind the company's Llama AI models to use a dataset of pirated ebooks and articles for training. They further accuse the company of concealing its actions by stripping copyright information and torrenting the data. TechCrunch reports: In newly unredacted documents filed (PDF) with the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California late Wednesday, plaintiffs in Kadrey v. Meta, who include bestselling authors Sarah Silverman and Ta-Nehisi Coates, recount Meta's testimony from late last year, during which it was revealed that Zuckerberg approved Meta's use of a data set called LibGen for Llama-related training. LibGen, which describes itself as a "links aggregator," provides access to copyrighted works from publishers including Cengage Learning, Macmillan Learning, McGraw Hill, and Pearson Education. LibGen has been sued a number of times, ordered to shut down, and fined tens of millions of dollars for copyright infringement.

According to Meta's testimony, as relayed by plaintiffs' counsel, Zuckerberg cleared the use of LibGen to train at least one of Meta's Llama models despite concerns within Meta's AI exec team and others at the company. The filing quotes Meta employees as referring to LibGen as a "data set we know to be pirated," and flagging that its use "may undermine [Meta's] negotiating position with regulators." The filing also cites a memo to Meta AI decision-makers noting that after "escalation to MZ," Meta's AI team "[was] approved to use LibGen." (MZ, here, is rather obvious shorthand for "Mark Zuckerberg.")

The details seemingly line up with reporting from The New York Times last April, which suggested that Meta cut corners to gather data for its AI. At one point, Meta was hiring contractors in Africa to aggregate summaries of books and considering buying the publisher Simon & Schuster, according to the Times. But the company's execs determined that it would take too long to negotiate licenses and reasoned that fair use was a solid defense. The filing Wednesday contains new accusations, like that Meta might've tried to conceal its alleged infringement by stripping the LibGen data of attribution.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: A federal judge this week rejected Google's motion to throw out a class-action lawsuit alleging that it invaded the privacy of users who opted out of functionality that records a users' web and app activities. A jury trial is scheduled for August 2025 in US District Court in San Francisco. The lawsuit concerns Google's Web & App Activity (WAA) settings, with the lead plaintiff representing two subclasses of people with Android and non-Android phones who opted out of tracking. "The WAA button is a Google account setting that purports to give users privacy control of Google's data logging of the user's web app and activity, such as a user's searches and activity from other Google services, information associated with the user's activity, and information about the user's location and device," wrote (PDF) US District Judge Richard Seeborg, the chief judge in the Northern District Of California.

Google says that Web & App Activity "saves your activity on Google sites and apps, including associated info like location, to give you faster searches, better recommendations, and more personalized experiences in Maps, Search, and other Google services." Google also has a supplemental Web App and Activity setting that the judge's ruling refers to as "(s)WAA." "The (s)WAA button, which can only be switched on if WAA is also switched on, governs information regarding a user's '[Google] Chrome history and activity from sites, apps, and devices that use Google services.' Disabling WAA also disables the (s)WAA button," Seeborg wrote. But data is still sent to third-party app developers through the Google Analytics for Firebase (GA4F), "a free analytical tool that takes user data from the Firebase kit and provides app developers with insight on app usage and user engagement," the ruling said. GA4F "is integrated in 60 percent of the top apps" and "works by automatically sending to Google a user's ad interactions and certain identifiers regardless of a user's (s)WAA settings, and Google will, in turn, provide analysis of that data back to the app developer."

Plaintiffs have brought claims of privacy invasion under California law. Plaintiffs "present evidence that their data has economic value," and "a reasonable juror could find that Plaintiffs suffered damage or loss because Google profited from the misappropriation of their data," Seeborg wrote. The lawsuit was filed in July 2020. The judge notes that summary judgment can be granted when "there is no genuine dispute as to any material fact and the movant is entitled to judgment as a matter of law." Google hasn't met that standard, he ruled. In a statement provided to Ars, Google said that "privacy controls have long been built into our service and the allegations here are a deliberate attempt to mischaracterize the way our products work. We will continue to make our case in court against these patently false claims."

BrianFagioli writes: The Linux Foundation has announced the launch of 'Supporters of Chromium-Based Browsers,' an initiative aimed at funding and supporting open development within the Chromium ecosystem. The purpose of this effort is to provide resources and foster collaboration among developers, academia, and tech companies to drive the sustainability and innovation of Chromium projects. Major industry players, including Google, Meta, Microsoft, and Opera, have pledged their support.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Bloomberg: Italy is in advanced talks with Elon Musk's SpaceX for a deal to provide secure telecommunications for the nation's government -- the largest such project in Europe, people with knowledge of the matter said Sunday. Discussions are ongoing, and a final agreement on the five-year contract hasn't been reached, said the people, who asked not to be identified citing confidential discussions. The project has already been approved by Italy's Intelligence Services as well as Italy's Defense Ministry, they said. Italy on Monday confirmed discussions are ongoing, saying no deal had yet been reached. "The talks with SpaceX are part of normal government business," the government said.

The negotiations, which had stalled until recently, appeared to move forward after Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni visited President-elect Donald Trump in Florida on Saturday. The Italian government said the two didn't discuss the issue during their meeting. Italian officials have been negotiating on a $1.6 billion deal aimed at supplying Italy with a full range of top-level encryption for telephone and Internet services used by the government, the people said. The plan also includes communications services for the Italian military in the Mediterranean area as well as the rollout of so-called direct-to-cell satellite services in Italy for use in emergencies like terror attacks or natural disasters, they said. The possible deal has been under review since mid-2023. It's been opposed by some Italian officials concerned about how the services may detract from local carriers.

TikTok has been pushing the platform's sister app, Lemon8, encouraging users to migrate via sponsored posts amid a looming ban. Axios reports: In the last few weeks, Lemon8 has been promoting its app to TikTok users through sponsored TikTok videos. In one sponsored post, TikTok user @miller.dailylife shares a video with a creator saying, "TikTok actually has another backup app. It's called Lemon8 ... and it automatically signs you in with your TikTok so you can still keep the same TikTok name and things like that. And it's supposed to transfer your followers over. ... Once you add Lemon8, it automatically pops up on your TikTok bio, so that people can just click on it. So, just so you guys know, now that they're trying to do this ban, if you want to have somewhere else to go where the government is not 100% controlling what we see, what we consume ... Just go ahead and go on to Lemon8."

In November, TikTok began informing users of its sister app, Lemon8, that beginning late that month Lemon8 would be powered by TikTok, and their TikTok usernames would also be used on Lemon8. "Some of your data on TikTok will be used to power services on lemon8," the notice says. "Your Lemon8 profile link will be shown to your TikTok profile publicly by default," it continues. "You can choose not to show it by editing your TikTok profile." Last March, Lemon8 jumped into the U.S. App Store's Top 10 list shortly after it launched in the U.S. It currently ranks as one of the top-ranking free apps on Apple's app store.

The report notes that the TikTok ban law also applies to other apps owned by TikTok's Chinese parent ByteDance, like Lemon8. "ByteDance could be betting that regulators and app store companies are so focused on TikTok that they won't pay attention to its other apps," says Axios.

BleepingComputer's Sergiu Gatlan reports: "Today, the White House announced the launch of the U.S. Cyber Trust Mark, a new cybersecurity safety label for internet-connected consumer devices. The Cyber Trust Mark label, which will appear on smart products sold in the United States later this year, will help American consumers determine whether the devices they want to buy are safe to install in their homes. It's designed for consumer smart devices, such as home security cameras, TVs, internet-connected appliances, fitness trackers, climate control systems, and baby monitors, and it signals that the internet-connected device comes with a set of security features approved by NIST.

Vendors will label their products with the Cyber Trust Mark logo if they meet the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) cybersecurity criteria. These criteria include using unique and strong default passwords, software updates, data protection, and incident detection capabilities. Consumers can scan the QR code included next to the Cyber Trust Mark labels for additional security information, such as instructions on changing the default password, steps for securely configuring the device, details on automatic updates (including how to access them if they are not automatic), the product's minimum support period, and a notification if the manufacturer does not offer updates for the device. "Americans are worried about the rise of criminals remotely hacking into home security systems to unlock doors, or malicious attackers tapping into insecure home cameras to illicitly record conversations," the Biden administration said on Tuesday.

"The White House launched this bipartisan effort to educate American consumers and give them an easy way to assess the cybersecurity of such products, as well as incentivize companies to produce more cybersecure devise [sic], much as EnergyStar labels did for energy efficiency.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Guardian: The Nobel peace prize winner Maria Ressa has said Meta's decision to end factchecking on its platforms and remove restrictions on certain topics means "extremely dangerous times" lie ahead for journalism, democracy and social media users. The American-Filipino journalist said Mark Zuckerberg's move to relax content moderation on the Facebook and Instagram platforms would lead to a "world without facts" and that was "a world that's right for a dictator."

"Mark Zuckerberg says it's a free speech issue -- that's completely wrong," Ressa told the AFP news service. "Only if you're profit-driven can you claim that; only if you want power and money can you claim that. This is about safety." Ressa, a co-founder of the Rappler news site, won the Nobel peace prize in 2021 in recognition of her "courageous fight for freedom of expression." She faced multiple criminal charges and investigations after publishing stories critical of the former Philippine president Rodrigo Duterte. Ressa rejected Zuckerberg's claim that factcheckers had been "too politically biased" and had "destroyed more trust than they've created."

"Journalists have a set of standards and ethics," Ressa said. "What Facebook is going to do is get rid of that and then allow lies, anger, fear and hate to infect every single person on the platform." The decision meant "extremely dangerous times ahead" for journalism, democracy and social media users, she said. [...] Ressa said she would do everything she could to "ensure information integrity." "This is a pivotal year for journalism survival," she said. "We'll do all we can to make sure that happens."

An anonymous reader shares a report: It looks like Samsung is finally ready to roll out a paid subscription for its AI-powered smartphones, but it might not look like what we were expecting.

According to ETNews, Samsung Electronics vice chair Han Jong-hee has confirmed that the company's AI Subscription Club, which launched last December for some of Samsung's home appliances in South Korea, will soon roll out to both Galaxy phones and the upcoming Ballie AI robot.

"We will apply the subscription service to Galaxy smartphones starting next month," he says. "Ballie will be introduced first in Korea and the US, and we plan to supply it as a subscription in Korea."

Nvidia's AI chips are advancing faster than Moore's Law, the semiconductor industry's historical performance benchmark, according to chief executive Jensen Huang. "Our systems are progressing way faster than Moore's Law," Huang told TechCrunch. Nvidia's chips have improved thousand-fold over the past decade, outpacing Moore's Law's prediction of doubled transistor density every year, Huang said. He adds: We can build the architecture, the chip, the system, the libraries, and the algorithms all at the same time. If you do that, then you can move faster than Moore's Law, because you can innovate across the entire stack.

[...] Moore's Law was so important in the history of computing because it drove down computing costs. The same thing is going to happen with inference where we drive up the performance, and as a result, the cost of inference is going to be less.

Nvidia founder and chief executive Jensen Huang believes "very useful" quantum computers are likely decades away, tempering expectations for the emerging technology. "If you kind of said 15 years for very useful quantum computers, that would probably be on the early side. If you said 30, it's probably on the late side," Huang said during Nvidia's analyst day. "If you picked 20, I think a whole bunch of us would believe it."

An anonymous reader shares a report: Akamai has decided to end its content delivery network services in China, but not because it's finding it hard to do business in the Middle Kingdom. News of Akamai's decision to end CDN services in China emerged in a letter it recently published and sent to customers and partners that opens by reminding them the company has a "commitment to providing world-class delivery and security solutions" -- and must therefore inform them that "Effective June 30, 2026, all China CDN services will reach their decommission date."

Customers are offered a choice: do nothing and then be moved to an Akamai CDN located outside China, or use similar services from Chinese companies Tencent Cloud and Wangsu Science & Technology.

China's Xiangshan project aims to deliver a high-performance RISC-V processor by 2025. If it succeeds, it could be "enormously significant" for three reasons, writes The Register's Simon Sharwood. It would elevate RISC-V from low-end silicon to datacenter-level capabilities, leverage the open-source Mulan PSL-2.0 license to disrupt proprietary chip models like Arm and Intel, and reduce China's dependence on foreign technology, mitigating the impact of international sanctions on advanced processors. From the report: The prospect of a 2025 debut appeared on Sunday in a post to Chinese social media service Weibo, penned by Yungang Bao of the Institute of Computing Technology at the Chinese Academy of Sciences. The academy has created a project called Xiangshan that aims to use the permissively licensed RISC-V ISA to create a high-performance chip, with the Scala source code to the designs openly available.

Bao is a leader of the project, and has described the team's ambition to create a company that does for RISC-V what Red Hat did for Linux -- although he said that before Red Hat changed the way it made the source code of RHEL available to the public. The Xiangshan project has previously aspired to six-monthly releases, though it appears its latest design to be taped out was a second-gen chip named Nanhu that emerged in late 2023. That silicon ran at 2GHz and was built on a 14nm process node. The project has since worked on a third-gen design, named Kunminghu, and published the image [here] depicting an overview of its non-trivial micro-architecture.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Wired: Laptop screens can feel cramped. But what if you could magically get more real estate without having to carry around a portable monitor? That's precisely the purpose of Lenovo's ThinkBook Plus Gen 6 Rollable AI PC -- yes, rollable. It has an OLED display that, with the push of a button, extends the 14-inch screen upward to make for an awkward aspect ratio, but roughly doubles the screen space to 16.7 inches. Two screens are better than one for productivity, but what if one screen could be two but still one? Yes.

It plays a fun animation and some music when it does its rolling thing. You can also activate the rolling action with a palm gesture; once it scans your palm, shift it up or down to raise or lower the screen. (Pressing the button on the keyboard is way faster.) You can take advantage of Windows 11 window snapping features to put apps one on top of the other. I stacked two browser windows, but you can put other apps below too. Considering I'm already that guy who brings a spare portable monitor everywhere, this just seems like a more elegant solution that takes up less space in my bag. And of course, anyone can take advantage of the long aspect ratio to get a better look at documents, PDFs, and web pages.

Lenovo says it has tested the rolling function 30,000 times, and it has performed without flaws, so you can rest a little easier about reliability, though repairing this machine sounds like it will be a task. The whole laptop doesn't feel significantly different from a normal machine, weighing just 3.7 pounds -- that's 1 pound less than the 16-inch MacBook Pro. However, walking with your laptop open in your hand might be weird, as it feels a little top heavy. When closed, it's 19.9 mm thin -- the 16-inch MacBook Pro is 15.4 mm, so Lenovo's machine is thicker, but not as thick as a gaming laptop. Lenovo published a concept video on YouTube.

"Nvidia has officially introduced its highly anticipated GeForce 50 Series graphics cards, accompanied by the debut of DLSS 4 technology," writes Slashdot reader jjslash. "The lineup includes four premium GPUs: the RTX 5080 and RTX 5090 are slated for release on January 30, with the RTX 5070 and RTX 5070 Ti following in February. TechSpot recount of the Jensen Huang keynote tries to differentiate between dubious performance claims and actual expected raw output": The new RTX 5090 flagship comes packing significantly more hardware over its predecessor. Not only does this GPU use Nvidia's new Blackwell architecture, but it also packs significantly more CUDA cores, greater memory bandwidth, and a higher VRAM capacity. The SM count has increased from 128 with the RTX 4090 to a whopping 170 with the RTX 5090 -- a 33% increase in the core size. The memory subsystem is overhauled, now featuring GDDR7 technology on a massive 512-bit bus. With this GDDR7 memory clocked at 28 Gbps, memory bandwidth reaches 1,792 GB/s -- a near 80% increase over the RTX 4090's bandwidth. It also includes 32GB of VRAM, the most Nvidia has ever provided on a consumer GPU. [...]

As for the performance claims... Nvidia has - as usual - used its marketing to obscure actual gaming performance. RTX 50 GPUs support DLSS 4 multi-frame generation, which previous-generation GPUs lack. This means RTX 50 series GPUs can generate double the frames of previous-gen models in DLSS-supported games, making them appear up to twice as "fast" as RTX 40 series GPUs. But in reality, while FPS numbers will increase with DLSS 4, latency and gameplay feel may not improve as dramatically. [...] The claim that the RTX 5070 matches the RTX 4090 in performance seems dubious. Perhaps it could match in frame rate with DLSS 4, but certainly not in raw, non-DLSS performance. Based on Nvidia's charts, the RTX 5070 seems 20-30% faster than the RTX 4070 at 1440p. This would place the RTX 5070 slightly ahead of the RTX 4070 Super for about $50 less, or alternatively, 20-30% faster than the RTX 4070 for the same price. These GeForce 50 series wasn't the only announcement Nvidia made at CES 2025. The chipmaker unveiled a $3,000 personal AI supercomputer, capable of running sophisticated AI models with up to 200 billion parameters. It also announced plans to introduce AI-powered autonomous characters in video games this year, starting with a virtual teammate in the battle royale game PUBG.