samleecole writes: Utah set up an online form for people to accuse other citizens and public establishments of violating the state's recently-enacted transphobic "bathroom bill." The submission form is being flooded with memes and troll comments, and the auditor also left the submissions database open to the public -- without a password, authentication, or any other protections that would keep anyone from viewing other people's submissions.

After 404 Media contacted the auditor's office for comment, they changed the permissions to require authentication. The form link has been posted to Twitter, and people have repeatedly posted screenshots of themselves uploading memes. In the database, those included photos of Barry Wood, characters from Bee Movie, and Shutterstock images of bull testicles. Twitter users have also found a link to the database that the form is connected to, which is hosted on a public Google cloud console bucket that as of Thursday, required no authentication to view. I tested the form, and found that my submission -- a photo of the yelling table cat meme -- appeared instantly in the Google Console bucket. The submission form offers anonymity with the option for the state auditor to contact submitters for more details. I haven't seen names and contact information shared in the database, but comments and image attachments were easily viewable.

Google has asked a U.S. judge not to impose sweeping changes to the Alphabet unit's app store Play that were proposed by "Fortnite" maker Epic Games in the companies' closely-watched antitrust fight. From a report: Google made its filing late on Thursday in San Francisco federal court, where Epic last year persuaded a jury that the tech giant unlawfully stifled competition with its controls over apps downloads on Android devices and payments to developers for in-app transactions. Epic's proposal "would make it nearly impossible for Google to compete," Google's filing said.

The gaming company in March asked U.S. District Judge James Donato in San Francisco to force Google to make it easier for users to download apps from other sources and to allow developers more flexibility in offering and charging for purchases. The Cary, North Carolina-based company also said it should be allowed to bring its Epic Games Store to Android "without delays and barriers." Google agreed in December to pay $700 million to resolve the states' case and, among other reforms, will allow more alternative billing options for in-app purchases.

Google is making its last attempt to fight back against a historic effort by the US Department of Justice to break the tech giant's grip on online search, as the most significant antitrust trial in 25 years comes to a close in Washington. From a report: A federal court in Washington began hearing closing arguments on Thursday after a 10-week trial in which the DoJ accused Alphabet, the parent company of Google, of suppressing search rivals by paying tens of billions annually for anti-competitive agreements with wireless carriers, browser developers and device manufacturers. During the hearing on Thursday, John Schmidtlein, a lawyer from Williams & Connolly representing Google, sought to push back on claims that it had hindered rivals' efforts to gain a foothold in online search, and argued that users had plenty of alternatives.

Unsealed court documents revealed this week that Alphabet paid Apple $20bn in 2022 alone to be the default search engine for its iPhone and Safari browser on its other devices. "Google winning agreements because it has a better product is not a harm to the competitive process, even if it gives it scale to improve its product," Schmidtlein told the court. A lawyer for the government, Kenneth Dintzer, told the court that Google's "anti-competitive conduct harms competition and is self perpetuating." Defaults "are a powerful way to drive searches, otherwise Google wouldn't pay billions of dollars for them," he added.

Amit Mehta, the judge hearing the case, noted that search "today looks a lot different than it didâ 10 to 15 years ago. He pushed back on the DoJ's contention that the quality of search had suffered due to the lack of competition, although he also noted that only two "substantial competitors" had entered the search market in the past decade. "Doesn't that tell us all we need to know in terms of barriers of entry," he asked.

Alphabet paid Apple $20 billion in 2022 for Google to be the default search engine in the Safari browser, according to newly unsealed court documents in the Justice Department's antitrust lawsuit against Google. From a report: The deal between the two tech giants is at the heart of the landmark case, in which antitrust enforcers allege Google has illegally monopolized the market for online search and related advertising. The Justice Department and Google will offer closing arguments in the case Thursday and Friday, with a decision expected later this year.

Google and Apple had hoped to shield the payment amount from public disclosure. At the trial last fall, Apple executives testified that Google paid "billions," without specifying a number. A Google witness later accidentally disclosed that Google pays 36% of the revenue it earns from search ads to Apple. Court documents filed late Tuesday ahead of the closing arguments mark the first public confirmation of the figures by Apple's senior vice president of services, Eddy Cue. Such numbers aren't disclosed by either company in their securities filings. The documents also revealed the importance of the payments to Apple's bottom line. For instance, in 2020, Google's payments to Apple constituted 17.5% of the iPhone maker's operating income.

The Google Phone app is rolling out "Audio Emoji" to some users as part of an incoming update in the beta channel, version 128. As 9to5Google reports, they are "essentially stock sound effects attached to one of six different emoji." The list includes: clapping (applause), laughing, party, crying (trombone), poop, and sting (ba dum tss). From the report: When you, as the caller, select one of these "Audio Emoji," the Google Phone app will play a fun animation while a sound effect plays for a couple of seconds. The sound effect is heard on both ends of the phone call. There does seem to be a limit on how often you can use these sound effects, as there's a bit of a "cooldown" in between that prevents you from playing sounds back to back. That's probably for the best in the case of some of these.

According to CNBC, Google is laying off at least 200 employees from its "Core" teams and moving some roles to India and Mexico. From the report: The Core unit is responsible for building the technical foundation behind the company's flagship products and for protecting users' online safety, according to Google's website. Core teams include key technical units from information technology, its Python developer team, technical infrastructure, security foundation, app platforms, core developers, and various engineering roles. At least 50 of the positions eliminated were in engineering at the company's offices in Sunnyvale, California, filings show. Many Core teams will hire corresponding roles in Mexico and India, according to internal documents viewed by CNBC.

Asim Husain, vice president of Google Developer Ecosystem, announced news of the layoffs to his team in an email last week. He also spoke at a town hall and told employees that this was the biggest planned reduction for his team this year, an internal document shows. "We intend to maintain our current global footprint while also expanding in high-growth global workforce locations so that we can operate closer to our partners and developer communities," Husain wrote in the email. [...] "Announcements of this sort may leave many of you feeling uncertain or frustrated," Husain wrote in the email to developers. He added that his message to developers is that the changes "are in service of our broader goals" as a company. The teams involved in the reorganization have been key to the company's developer tools, an area Google is streamlining as it incorporates more artificial intelligence into the products.

Roblox announced it'll be rolling out virtual billboards with video advertisements that will be displayed in its virtual worlds. Reuters reports: Users will now see billboards featuring content from brands such as e.l.f beauty, Walmart and Warner Bros Discovery, just as they would in real life. That would give advertisers access to Roblox's nearly 72 million daily active users -- half of whom are Gen-Z customers, a population group prized by marketers and businesses.

The company in November began testing the video ads -- that will be served to users who are 13 years and older -- as part of its efforts to reduce reliance on revenue generated from its in-game currency "Robux", which players can use to buy outfits, vehicles and other features inside the company's digital worlds. It charges a fee on all purchases done on its platform, which hosts millions of videogames that are built by its users -- who get a share of any related revenue.

That practice will extend to the ads, with creators of the virtual worlds who opt to show the billboards getting a portion of the revenue Roblox makes from them. Roblox is hoping its large Gen-Z user base will give it an edge in the competitive ad market, where it would have to wrestle for marketing dollars with tech giants such as Google and Meta and smaller players such as Snap.

The US could lose out on valuable AI and tech talent if some of its immigration policies are not modernized, Google says in a letter sent to the Department of Labor. From a report: Google says policies like Schedule A, a list of occupations the government "pre-certified" as not having enough American workers, have to be more flexible and move faster to meet demand in technologies like AI and cybersecurity. The company says the government must update Schedule A to include AI and cybersecurity and do so more regularly.

"There's wide recognition that there is a global shortage of talent in AI, but the fact remains that the US is one of the harder places to bring talent from abroad, and we risk losing out on some of the most highly sought-after people in the world," Karan Bhatia, head of government affairs and public policy at Google, tells The Verge. He noted that the occupations in Schedule A have not been updated in 20 years.

Companies can apply for permanent residencies, colloquially known as green cards, for employees. The Department of Labor requires companies to get a permanent labor certification (PERM) proving there is a shortage of workers in that role. That process may take time, so the government "pre-certified" some jobs through Schedule A. The US Citizenship and Immigration Services lists Schedule A occupations as physical therapists, professional nurses, or "immigrants of exceptional ability in the sciences or arts." While the wait time for a green card isn't reduced, Google says Schedule A cuts down the processing time by about a year.

Microsoft's motivation for investing heavily and partnering with OpenAI came from a sense of falling badly behind Google, according to an internal email released Tuesday as part of the Justice Department's antitrust case against the search giant. Bloomberg: The Windows software maker's chief technology officer, Kevin Scott, was "very, very worried" when he looked at the AI model-training capability gap between Alphabet's efforts and Microsoft's, he wrote in a 2019 message to Chief Executive Officer Satya Nadella and co-founder Bill Gates. The exchange shows how the company's top executives privately acknowledged they lacked the infrastructure and development speed to catch up to the likes of OpenAI and Google's DeepMind.

[...] Scott, who also serves as executive vice president of artificial intelligence at Microsoft, observed that Google's search product had improved on competitive metrics because of the Alphabet company's advancements in AI. The Microsoft executive wrote that he made a mistake by dismissing some of the earlier AI efforts of its competitors. "We are multiple years behind the competition in terms of machine learning scale," Scott said in the email. Significant portions of the message, titled 'Thoughts on OpenAI,' remain redacted. Nadella endorsed Scott's email, forwarding it to Chief Financial Officer Amy Hood and saying it explains "why I want us to do this."

Mishaal Rahman reports via Android Authority: Earlier today, a Senior Staff Software Engineer at Google who, according to their LinkedIn, leads the Android Systems Team and works on Android's Linux kernel fork, submitted a series of patches to AOSP that "remove ACK's support for riscv64." The description of these patches states that "support for risc64 GKI kernels is discontinued."

ACK stands for Android Common Kernel and refers to the downstream branches of the official kernel.org Linux kernels that Google maintains. The ACK is basically Linux plus some "patches of interest to the Android community that haven't been merged into mainline or Long Term Supported (LTS) kernels." There are multiple ACK branches, including android-mainline, which is the primary development branch that is forked into "GKI" kernel branches that correspond to a particular combination of supported Linux kernel and Android OS version. GKI stands for Generic Kernel Image and refers to a kernel that's built from one of these branches. Every certified Android device ships with a kernel based on one of these GKI branches, as Google currently does not certify Android devices that ship with a mainline Linux kernel build.

Since these patches remove RISC-V kernel support, RISC-V kernel build support, and RISC-V emulator support, any companies looking to compile a RISC-V build of Android right now would need to create and maintain their own fork of Linux with the requisite ACK and RISC-V patches. Given that Google currently only certifies Android builds that ship with a GKI kernel built from an ACK branch, that means we likely won't see certified builds of Android on RISC-V hardware anytime soon. Our initial interpretation of these patches was that Google was preparing to kill off RISC-V support in Android since that was the most obvious conclusion. However, a spokesperson for Google told us this: "Android will continue to support RISC-V. Due to the rapid rate of iteration, we are not ready to provide a single supported image for all vendors. This particular series of patches removes RISC-V support from the Android Generic Kernel Image (GKI)." Based on Google's statement, Rahman suggests that "there's still a ton of work that needs to be done before Android is ready for RISC-V."

"Even once it's ready, Google will need to redo the work to add RISC-V support in the kernel anyway. At the very least, Google's decision likely means that we might need to wait even longer than expected to see commercial Android devices running on a RISC-V chip."

theodp writes: Reports of the death of Bill Gates' influence at Microsoft have been greatly exaggerated: "Publicly, [Bill] Gates has been almost entirely out of the picture at Microsoft since 2021, following allegations that he had behaved inappropriately toward female employees. In fact, Business Insider has learned, Gates has been quietly orchestrating much of Microsoft's AI revolution from behind the scenes. Current and former executives say Gates remains intimately involved in the company's operations -- advising on strategy, reviewing products, recruiting high-level executives, and nurturing Microsoft's crucial relationship with Sam Altman, the cofounder and CEO of OpenAI.

In early 2023, when Microsoft debuted a version of its search engine Bing turbocharged by the same technology as ChatGPT, throwing down the gauntlet against competitors like Google, Gates, executives said, was pivotal in setting the plan in motion. While Nadella might be the public face of the company's AI success [...] Gates has been the man behind the curtain."[...] "Today, Gates remains close with Altman, who visits his home a few times a year, and OpenAI seeks his counsel on developments. There's a 'tight coupling' between Gates and OpenAI, a person familiar with the relationship said. 'Sam and Bill are good friends. OpenAI takes his opinion and consult overall seriously.' OpenAI spokesperson Kayla Wood confirmed OpenAI continues to meet with Gates."

Apple has poached dozens of AI experts from Google and has created a secretive European laboratory in Zurich, as the tech giant builds a team to battle rivals in developing new AI models and products. From a report: According to a Financial Times analysis of hundreds of LinkedIn profiles as well as public job postings and research papers, the $2.7tn company has undertaken a hiring spree over recent years to expand its global AI and machine learning team. The iPhone maker has particularly targeted workers from Google, attracting at least 36 specialists from its rival since it poached John Giannandrea to be its top AI executive in 2018.

While the majority of Apple's AI team work from offices in California and Seattle, the tech group has also expanded a significant outpost in Zurich. Professor Luc Van Gool from Swiss university ETH Zurich said Apple's acquisitions of two local AI start-ups -- virtual reality group FaceShift and image recognition company Fashwell -- led Apple to build a research laboratory, known as its "Vision Lab," in the city.

Ahead of its annual I/O developer conference in May, Google has decided to lay off staff across key teams like Flutter, Dart, Python and others. "As we've said, we're responsibly investing in our company's biggest priorities and the significant opportunities ahead," said a Google spokesperson. "To best position us for these opportunities, throughout the second half of 2023 and into 2024, a number of our teams made changes to become more efficient and work better, remove layers, and align their resources to their biggest product priorities. Through this, we're simplifying our structures to give employees more opportunity to work on our most innovative and important advances and our biggest company priorities, while reducing bureaucracy and layers." TechCrunch reports: The company clarified that the layoffs were not company-wide but were reorgs that are part of the normal course of business. Affected employees will be able to apply for other open roles at Google, we're told. [...] Though Google didn't detail headcount, some of the layoffs at Google may have been confirmed in a WARN notice filed on April 24. WARN, or the California Worker Adjustment and Retraining Notification Act, requires employers with more than 100 employees to provide 60-day notice in advance of layoffs. In the filing, Google said it was laying off a total of 50 employees across three locations in Sunnyvale.

On social media, commenters raised concerns with the Python layoffs in particular, given the role that Python tooling plays in AI. But others pointed out that Google didn't eliminate its Python team; it replaced that team with another group based in Munich -- at least according to Python Steering Council member Thomas Wouters in a post on Mastodon last Thursday.

If 2023 was the tech industry's year of the A.I. chatbot, 2024 is turning out to be the year of A.I. plumbing. From a report: It may not sound as exciting, but tens of billions of dollars are quickly being spent on behind-the-scenes technology for the industry's A.I. boom. Companies from Amazon to Meta are revamping their data centers to support artificial intelligence. They are investing in huge new facilities, while even places like Saudi Arabia are racing to build supercomputers to handle A.I. Nearly everyone with a foot in tech or giant piles of money, it seems, is jumping into a spending frenzy that some believe could last for years.

Microsoft, Meta, and Google's parent company, Alphabet, disclosed this week that they had spent more than $32 billion combined on data centers and other capital expenses in just the first three months of the year. The companies all said in calls with investors that they had no plans to slow down their A.I. spending. In the clearest sign of how A.I. has become a story about building a massive technology infrastructure, Meta said on Wednesday that it needed to spend billions more on the chips and data centers for A.I. than it had previously signaled. "I think it makes sense to go for it, and we're going to," Mark Zuckerberg, Meta's chief executive, said in a call with investors.

The eye-popping spending reflects an old parable in Silicon Valley: The people who made the biggest fortunes in California's gold rush weren't the miners -- they were the people selling the shovels. No doubt Nvidia, whose chip sales have more than tripled over the last year, is the most obvious A.I. winner. The money being thrown at technology to support artificial intelligence is also a reminder of spending patterns of the dot-com boom of the 1990s. For all of the excitement around web browsers and newfangled e-commerce websites, the companies making the real money were software giants like Microsoft and Oracle, the chipmaker Intel, and Cisco Systems, which made the gear that connected those new computer networks together. But cloud computing has added a new wrinkle: Since most start-ups and even big companies from other industries contract with cloud computing providers to host their networks, the tech industry's biggest companies are spending big now in hopes of luring customers.

It's another speech-recognizing, AI-powered handheld device "about half the size of a phone," writes CNET. (Though the $199 device comes with a keyboard and a tiny 2.8-inch screen.) "The Rabbit R1 can identify items in its environment. Point it at a plant, and it can tell you what kind it is. Aim it at your lunch, and it can tell you what's in it.

"it also feels a bit like a novelty so far...." It can call an Uber, order dinner from Doordash, translate conversations, record voice memos, play songs from Spotify and more. Your phone can already do all of those things, but [CEO and founder Jesse] Lyu is promoting the Rabbit R1 as a faster and more natural way to do so... So far, the Rabbit R1 feels fun, fresh and interesting, but also frustrating at times. It intrigues me, but it also hasn't convinced me yet that there's room for another gadget in my life.... Many of the things it can do today feel smartphone-esque, like asking for the weather or playing songs on Spotify...

Visual search is the most interesting feature so far... It's pretty accurate for the most part so far. When I pointed it at my salad during lunch, it was able to tell me most of the ingredients. That's not what I asked. After all, who orders a dish without knowing what's in it? I asked the Rabbit R1 to tell me how many calories were in my lunch. While it couldn't provide the answer I wanted, I was impressed with its response... Overall, Rabbit R1's visual analysis worked pretty well for identifying things like plants and characters from pop culture. When describing my colleague's sneakers, the Rabbit R1 got the brand wrong...

So far, I've used the Rabbit R1 to take voice memos, translate speech from Spanish to English, and answer basic questions about things like weather forecasts. These features work as expected for the most part.
The article points out that Ray-Ban Meta Smart Glasses "also have multimodal AI, meaning the eyewear can 'see' what you see and tell you about it," and "you can already do something like this on your phone through Google's Gemini assistant on Android phones (or the Gemini section of the Google app for the iPhone).

"It's also very reminiscent of Google Lens, which has been around for years..."

What happened after India banned TikTok? The move "mostly drew widespread support" notes the Associated Press, in a country "where protesters had been calling for a boycott of Chinese goods since the deadly confrontation in the remote Karakoram mountain border region." "There was a clamour leading up to this, and the popular narrative was how can we allow Chinese companies to do business in India when we're in the middle of a military standoff," said Nikhil Pahwa, a digital policy expert and founder of tech website MediaNama. Just months before the ban, India had also restricted investment from Chinese companies, Pahwa added. "TikTok wasn't a one-off case. Today, India has banned over 500 Chinese apps to date."

At the time, India had about 200 million TikTok users. And the company also employed thousands of Indians.

TikTok users and content creators, however, needed a place to go — and the ban provided a multi-billion dollar opportunity to snatch up a big market. Within months, Google rolled out YouTube Shorts and Instagram pushed out its Reels feature. Both mimicked the short-form video creation that TikTok had excelled at. "And they ended up capturing most of the market that TikTok had vacated," said Pahwa.
TikTok is also banned in Nepal and Somalia, according to Mashable, and the Associaterd Press adds that it's now also banned in Pakistan, Nepal and Afghanistan "and restricted in many countries in Europe."

Their article concludes that "for the most part, content creators and users in the four years since the ban have moved on to other platforms." They quote one frequent TikTok user as saying they just switched to Instagram after the ban, and "It wasn't really a big deal."

"Intel used to dominate the U.S. chip industry," writes CNBC. But now "it's struggling to stay relevant." Intel's long-awaited turnaround looks farther away than ever after the company reported dismal first-quarter earnings. Investors pushed the shares down 9% on Friday to their lowest level of the year. Although Intel's revenue is no longer shrinking and the company remains the biggest maker of processors that power PCs and laptops, sales in the first quarter trailed estimates. Intel also gave a soft forecast for the second quarter, suggesting weak demand... Intel is the worst-performing tech stock in the S&P 500 this year, down 37%.

Meanwhile, the two best-performing stocks in the index are chipmaker Nvidia and Super Micro Computer, which has been boosted by surging demand for Nvidia-based artificial intelligence servers. Intel, long the most valuable U.S. chipmaker, is now one-sixteenth the size of Nvidia by market cap. It's also smaller than Qualcomm, Broadcom, Texas Instruments, and AMD. For decades, it was the largest semiconductor company in the world by sales, but suffered seven straight quarters of revenue declines recently, and was passed by Nvidia last year.
Intel's problems "are decades in the making," according to CNBC, suggesting that one turning point was Apple's decision not to use Intel's chips in its iPhone. Now nearly every smartphone built uses Arm chips built by Apple and Qualcomm, while Apple's huge orders for TSMC chips "provided the cash to annually upgrade the manufacturing equipment at TSMC, which eventually surpassed Intel." Around 2017, mobile chips from Apple and Qualcomm started adding AI parts to their chips called neural processing units, another advancement over Intel's PC processors. The first Intel-based laptop with an NPU shipped late last year.

Intel has since lost share in its core PC chip business to chips that grew out of the mobile revolution... Apple stopped using Intel in its PCs in 2020. Macs now use Arm-based chips, and some of the first mainstream Windows laptops with Arm-based chips are coming out later this year. Low-cost laptops running Google ChromeOS are increasingly using Arm, too...

AMD made over 20% of server CPUs sold in 2022, and shipments grew 62% that year, according to an estimate from Counterpoint Research last year. AMD surpassed Intel's market cap the same year.

Some Android-powered TVs can expose the contents of users' email inboxes if an attacker has physical access to the TV. Google initially told the office of Senator Ron Wyden that the issue, which is a quirk of how software is installed on these TVs, was expected behavior, but after being contacted by 404 Media, Google now says it is addressing the issue. From the report: The attack is an edge case but one that still highlights how the use of Google accounts, even on products that aren't necessarily designed for browsing user data, can expose information in unusual ways, including TVs in businesses or ones that have been resold or given away.

"My office is mid-way through a review of the privacy practices of streaming TV technology providers. As part of that inquiry, my staff discovered an alarming video in which a YouTuber demonstrated how with 15 minutes of unsupervised access to an Android TV set top box, a criminal could get access to private emails of the Gmail user who set up the TV," Senator Ron Wyden told 404 Media in a statement.

Tutao, known for the encrypted email service Tuta Mail, has filed a Digital Markets Act (DMA) complaint to the EU over an alleged de-ranking in Google Search. From a report: Google Search rankings are all too familiar to search engine optimization (SEO) specialists charged with ensuring web pages rise to the top of search results. In the case of Tutao's products -- Tuta Mail and Tuta Calendar -- all was going well until the beginning of March 2024, when the company claims tuta.com was abruptly de-ranked in Google Search. Rather than being displayed as a search result of thousands of keywords, the count dropped to the hundreds, the developer alleges.

Matthias Pfau, co-founder of Tuta Mail, said: "This reduction in Google Search took us by surprise as we did not change anything on our website during that time. We tried to reach out to Google about this issue, but were met with radio silence." Google denies the claims. It told The Reg: "Search ranking updates absolutely do not aim to preference Google products, or any other particular website. The email provider in question is easily accessible globally on Search. We appreciate the feedback and will look into how we can ensure Search continues to return the most helpful, relevant results."

Tuta Mail's Pfau claims a change in results mean that when a user searches for "encrypted email," Tuta's products no longer show up. However, he went on to allege that if you search for "Tuta" or "Tutanota," the company appears in the results.

Alphabet has reported first quarter results that topped analysts' estimates with soaring profits in its cloud division. It also announced its first-ever dividend. CNBC shares the results: Earnings per share: $1.89 vs. $1.51 per share expected by LSEG
Revenue: $80.54 billion vs. $78.59 billion expected by LSEG

Wall Street is also watching several other numbers in the report:

YouTube advertising revenue: $8.09 billion vs. $7.72 billion expected, according to StreetAccount.
Google Cloud revenue: $9.57 billion vs. $9.35 billion expected, according to StreetAccount.
Traffic acquisition costs (TAC): $12.95 billion $12.74 billion expected, according to StreetAccount.

Alphabet's revenue increased 15% from $69.79 billion a year earlier, the fastest rate of growth since early 2022. Alphabet said its board approved a cash dividend of 20 cents per share to be paid on June 17, to stockholders of record as of June 10. The company said it "intends to pay quarterly cash dividends in the future."