Alphabet-owned Wing "is expanding its drone delivery service to an additional 150 Walmart stores across the U.S.," reports Axios: [T]he future is already here if you live in Dallas — where some Walmart customers order delivery by Wing three times a week. By the end of 2026, some 40 million Americans, or about 12 percent of the U.S. population, will be able to take advantage of the convenience, the companies claim... Once the items are picked and packed in a small cardboard basket, they are loaded onto a drone inside a fenced area in the Walmart parking lot. Drones fly autonomously to the designated address, with human pilots monitoring each flight from a central operations hub....

For now, Wing deliveries are free. "The goal is to expose folks to the wonders of drone delivery," explains Wing's chief business officer, Heather Rivera... Over time, she said Wing expects delivery fees to be comparable to other delivery options, but faster and more convenient. Service began recently in Atlanta and Charlotte, and it's coming soon to Los Angeles, Houston, Cincinnati, St. Louis, Miami and other major U.S. cities to be announced later, according to the article. "By 2027, Walmart and Wing say they'll have a network of more than 270 drone delivery locations nationwide."

Walmart also announced a new deal today with Google's Gemini, allowing customers to purchase Walmart products from within Gemini. (Walmart announced a similar deal for ChatGPT in October.)

Slashdot reader BrianFagioli calls this "a defensive angle that Walmart does not quite say out loud." As AI models answer more questions directly, retailers risk losing customers before they ever hit a website. If Gemini recommends a product from someone else first, Walmart loses the sale before it starts. By planting itself inside the AI, Walmart keeps a seat at the table while the internet shifts under everyone's feet.

Google clearly benefits too. Gemini gets a more functional purpose than just telling you how to boil pasta or summarize recipes. Now it can carry someone from the moment they wonder what they need to the moment the order is placed. That makes the assistant stickier and a bit more practical than generic chat. Walmart's incoming CEO John Furner says the company wants to shape this new pattern instead of being dragged into it later. Sundar Pichai calls Walmart an early partner in what he sees as a broader wave of agent style commerce, where AI starts doing the errands people used to handle themselves.
The article concludes "This partnership serves as a snapshot of where retail seems to be heading..."

An anonymous reader shared this report from Engadget: If you received a bunch of password reset requests from Instagram recently, you're not alone. As reported by Malwarebytes, an antivirus software company, there was a data breach revealing the "sensitive information" of 17.5 million Instagram users. Malwarebytes added that the leak included Instagram usernames, physical addresses, phone numbers, email addresses and more.

The company added that the "data is available for sale on the dark web and can be abused by cybercriminals." Malwarebytes noted in an email to its customers that it discovered the breach during its routine dark web scan and that it's tied to a potential incident related to an Instagram API exposure from 2024.

Remember that re-discovered computer tape with one of the earliest versions of Unix from the early 1970s? This week several local news outlets in Utah reported on the find, with KSL creating a video report with shots of the tape arriving at Silicon Valley's Computer History Museum, the closet where it was found, and even its handwritten label.

The Salt Lake Tribune reports that the closet where it was found also contained "old cords from unknown sources and mountains of papers that had been dumped from a former professor's file cabinet, including old drawings from his kids and saved plane ticket stubs." (Their report also includes a photo of the University of Utah team that found the tape — the University's Flux Research Group).

Professor Robert Ricci believes only 20 copies were ever produced of the version of Unix on that tape: At the time, in the 1970s, Ricci estimates there would have been maybe two or three of those computers — called a PDP-11, or programmed data processor — in Utah that could have run UNIX V4, including the one at the U. Having that technology is part of why he believes the U. got a copy of the rare software. The other part was the distinguished computing faculty at the school.

The new UNIX operating system would've been announced at conferences in the early 1970s, and a U. professor at the time named Martin Newell frequently attended those because of his own recognized work in the field, Ricci said. In another box, stuffed in under manila envelopes, [researcher Aleks] Maricq found a 1974 letter written to Newell from Ken Thompson at Bell Labs that said as soon as "a new batch comes from the printers, I will send you the system." Ricci and Maricq are unsure if the software was ever used. They reached out to Newell, who is now 72 and retired, as well as some of his former students. None of them recalled actually running it through the PDP-11...

The late Jay Lepreau also worked at the U.'s computing department and created the Flux Research Group that Ricci, Maricq and [engineering research associate Jon] Duerig are now part of. Lepreau overlapped just barely with Newell's tenure. In 1978, Lepreau and a team at the U. worked with a group at the University of California, Berkeley. Together, they built their own clone of the UNIX operating system. They called it BSD, or Berkeley Standard Distribution. Steve Jobs, the former CEO of Apple, worked with BSD, too, and it influenced his work.

Ultimately, it was Lepreau who saved the 9-track tape with the UNIX system on it in his U. office. And he's why the university still has it today. "He seems to have found it and decided it was worth keeping," Ricci said...

The U. will also get the tape back from the museum. Maricq said it will likely be displayed in the university's new engineering building that's set to open in January 2027. That's why, the research associate said, he was cleaning out the storage room to begin with — to try to prepare for the move. He was mostly just excited to see the floor again. "I thought we'd find some old stuff, but I didn't think it'd be anything like this," he said. And Maricq still has boxes to go through, including more believed to be from Lepreau's office.
Local news station KMYU captured the thoughts of some of the University researchers who found the tape: "When you see the very first beginnings of something, and you go from seed to sapling, that's what we saw here," [engineering research associate Jon] Duerig said. "We see this thing in the moment of flux. We see the signs of all the things changing — of all the things developing that we now see today."
Duerig also gave this comment to local news station KSL. "The coolest thing is that anybody, anywhere in the world can now access this, right? People can go on the internet archive and download the raw tape file and simulate running it," Duerig said. "People have posted browsable directory trees of the whole thing." One of the museum's directors said the tape's recovery marked a big day for the museum "One of the things that was pretty exciting to us is that just that there is this huge community of people around the world who were excited to jump on the opportunity to look at this piece of history," Ricci said. "And it was really cool that we were able to share that."

Duerig said while there weren't many comments or footnotes from the programmers of that time, they did discovery more unexpected content having to do with Bell Labs on the tape. "There were survey results of them actually asking survey questions of their employees at these operator centers," he said.
Thanks to long-time Slashdot reader walterbyrd for sharing the news.

"We will make the new ð algorithm...open source in 7 days," Elon Musk posted Saturday on X.com. Musk says this is "including all code used to determine what organic and advertising posts are recommended to users," and "This will be repeated every 4 weeks, with comprehensive developer notes, to help you understand what changed."

Some context from Engadget: Musk has been making promises of open-sourcing the algorithm since his takeover of Twitter, and in 2023 published the code for the site's "For You" feed on GitHub. But the code wasn't all that revealing, leaving out key details, according to analyses at the time. And it hasn't been kept up to date.
Bloomberg also reported on Saturday's announcement: The billionaire didn't say why X was making its algorithm open source. He and the company have clashed several times with regulators over content being shown to users.

Some X users had previously complained that they were receiving fewer posts on the social media platform from people they follow. In October, Musk confirmed in a post on X that the company had found a "significant bug" in the platform's "For You" algorithm and pledged a fix. The company has also been working to incorporate more artificial intelligence into its recommendation algorithm for X, using Grok, Musk's artificial intelligence chatbot...

In September, Musk wrote that the goal was for X's recommendation engine to "be purely AI" and that the company would share its open source algorithm about every two weeks. "To the degree that people are seeing improvements in their feed, it is not due to the actions of specific individuals changing heuristics, but rather increasing use of Grok and other AI tools," Musk wrote in October. The company was working to have all of the more than 100 million daily posts published to X evaluated by Grok, which would then offer individual users the posts most likely to interest them, Musk wrote. "This will profoundly improve the quality of your feed." He added that the company was planning to roll out the new features by November.

A founder of Twitter and a founder of Pinterest are now working on "social media for people who hate social media," writes a Washington Post columnist.

"When I heard that this platform would harness AI to help us live more meaningful lives, I wanted to know more..." Their bid for redemption is West Co. — the Workshop for Emotional and Spiritual Technology Corporation — and the platform they're testing is called Tangle, a "purpose discovery tool" that uses AI to help users define their life purposes, then encourages them to set intentions toward achieving those purposes, reminds them periodically and builds a community of supporters to encourage steps toward meeting those intentions. "A lot of people, myself included, have been on autopilot," Stone said. "If all goes well, we'll introduce a lot of people to the concept of turning off autopilot."

But will all go well? The entrepreneurs have been at it for two years, and they've scrapped three iterations before even testing them. They still don't have a revenue model. "This is a really hard thing to do," Stone admitted. "If we were a traditional start-up, we would have probably been folded by now." But the two men, with a combined net worth of at least hundreds of millions, and possibly billions, had the luxury of self-funding for a year, and now they have $29 million in seed funding led by Spark Capital...

[T]he project revolves around training existing AI models in "what good intentions and helpful purposes look like," explained Long Cheng, the founding designer. When you join Tangle, which is invitation-only until this spring at the earliest, the AI peruses your calendar, examines your photos, asks you questions and then produces "threads," or categories that define your life purpose. You're free to accept, reject or change the suggestions. It then encourages you to make "intentions" toward achieving your threads, and to add "reflections" when you experience something meaningful in your life. Users then receive encouragement from friends, or "supporters." A few of the "threads" on Tangle are about personal satisfaction (traveler, connoisseur), but the vast majority involve causes greater than self: family (partner, parent, sibling), community (caregiver, connector, guardian), service (volunteer, advocate, healer) and spirituality (seeker, believer). Even the work-related threads (mentor, leader) suggest a higher purpose.
The column includes this caveat. "I have no idea whether they will succeed. But as a columnist writing about how to keep our humanity in the 21st century, I believe it's important to focus on people who are at least trying..."

"Quite possibly, West Co. and the various other enterprises trying to nudge technology in a more humane direction will find that it doesn't work socially or economically — they don't yet have a viable product, after all — but it would be a noble failure."

This week Meta announced several new features for "Meta Ray-Ban Display" smartglasses:

- A new teleprompter feature for the smart glasses (arriving in a phased rollout)

- The ability to send messages on WhatsApp and Messenger by writing with your finger on any surface. (Available for those who sign up for an "early access" program).

- "Pedestrian navigation" for 32 cities. ("The 28 cities we launched Meta Ray-Ban Display with, plus Denver, Las Vegas, Portland, and Salt Lake City," and with more cities coming soon.)


But they also warned Meta Ray-Ban Display "is a first-of-its-kind product with extremely limited inventory," saying they're delaying international expansion of sales due to inventory constraints — and also due to "unprecedented" demand in the U.S. CNBC reports: "Since launching last fall, we've seen an overwhelming amount of interest, and as a result, product waitlists now extend well into 2026," Meta wrote in a blog post. Due to "limited" inventory, the company said it will pause plans to launch in the U.K., France, Italy and Canada early this year and concentrate on U.S. orders as it reassesses international availability...

Meta is one of several technology companies moving into the smart glasses market. Alphabet announced a $150 million partnership with Warby Parker in May and ChatGPT maker OpenAI is reportedly working on AI glasses with Apple.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from CBC.ca: A company largely owned by the French and U.K. governments is pitching Canada on a roughly $250-million plan to provide the military with secure satellite broadband coverage in the Arctic, CBC News has learned. Eutelsat, a rival to tech billionaire Elon Musk's Starlink, already provides some services to the Canadian military, but wants to deepen the partnership as Canada looks to diversify defence contracts away from suppliers in the United States.

A proposal for Canada's Department of National Defence to join a French Ministry of Defence initiative involving Eutelsat was apparently raised by French President Emmanuel Macron with Prime Minister Mark Carney on the sidelines of last year's G7 summit in Alberta. The prime minister's first question, according to Eutelsat and French defence officials, was how the proposal would affect the Telesat Corporation, a former Canadian Crown corporation that was privatized in the 1990s.

Telesat is in the process of developing its Lightspeed system, a Low Earth Orbit (LEO) constellation of satellites for high-speed broadband. And in mid-December, the Liberal government announced it had established a strategic partnership with Telesat and MDA Space to develop the Canadian Armed Forces' military satellite communications (MILSATCOM) capabilities. A Eutelsat official said the company already has its own satellite network in place and running, along with Canadian partners, and has been providing support to the Canadian military deployed in Latvia. "What we can provide for Canada is what we call a sovereign capacity capability where Canada would actually own all of our capacity in the Far North or wherever they require it," said David van Dyke, the general manager for Canada at Eutelsat.

"We also give them the ability to not be under the control of a singular individual who could decide to disconnect the service for political or other reasons."

Experts interviewed by NBC News warn that the rapid spread of AI-generated images and videos is accelerating an online trust breakdown, especially during fast-moving news events where context is scarce. From the report: President Donald Trump's Venezuela operation almost immediately spurred the spread of AI-generated images, old videos and altered photos across social media. On Wednesday, after an Immigration and Customs Enforcement officer fatally shot a woman in her car, many online circulated a fake, most likely AI-edited image of the scene that appears to be based on real video. Others used AI in attempts to digitally remove the mask of the ICE officer who shot her.

The confusion around AI content comes as many social media platforms, which pay creators for engagement, have given users incentives to recycle old photos and videos to ramp up emotion around viral news moments. The amalgam of misinformation, experts say, is creating a heightened erosion of trust online -- especially when it mixes with authentic evidence. "As we start to worry about AI, it will likely, at least in the short term, undermine our trust default -- that is, that we believe communication until we have some reason to disbelieve," said Jeff Hancock, founding director of the Stanford Social Media Lab. "That's going to be the big challenge, is that for a while people are really going to not trust things they see in digital spaces."

Though AI is the latest technology to spark concern about surging misinformation, similar trust breakdowns have cycled through history, from election misinformation in 2016 to the mass production of propaganda after the printing press was invented in the 1400s. Before AI, there was Photoshop, and before Photoshop, there were analog image manipulation techniques. Fast-moving news events are where manipulated media have the biggest effect, because they fill in for the broad lack of information, Hancock said. "In terms of just looking at an image or a video, it will essentially become impossible to detect if it's fake. I think that we're getting close to that point, if we're not already there," said Hancock. "The old sort of AI literacy ideas of 'let's just look at the number of fingers' and things like that are likely to go away."

Renee Hobbs, a professor of communication studies at the University of Rhode Island, added: "If constant doubt and anxiety about what to trust is the norm, then actually, disengagement is a logical response. It's a coping mechanism. And then when people stop caring about whether something's true or not, then the danger is not just deception, but actually it's worse than that. It's the whole collapse of even being motivated to seek truth."

Intel CEO Lip-Bu Tan says the company is "going big time" into its 14A (1.4nm-class) process, signaling confidence in yields and hinting at at least one external foundry customer. Tom's Hardware reports: Intel's 14A is expected to be production-ready in 2027, with early versions of process design kit (PDK) coming to external customers early this year. To that end, it is good to hear Intel's upbeat comments about 14A. Also, Tan's phrasing 'the customer' could indicate that Intel has at least one external client for 14A, implying that Intel Foundry will produce 14A chips for Intel Products and at least one more buyer.

The 14A production node will introduce Intel's 2nd Generation RibbonFET GAA transistors; 2nd Gen BSPDN called PowerDirect that will connect power directly to source and drain of transistors, enabling better power delivery (e.g., reducing transient voltage droop or clock stretching) and refined power controls; and Turbo Cells that optimize critical timing paths using high-drive, double-height cells within dense standard cell libraries, which boost speed without major area or power compromises.

Yet, there is another aspect of Intel's 14A manufacturing process that is particularly important for the chipmaker: its usage by external customers. With 18A, the company has not managed to land a single major external client that demands decent volumes. While 18A will be used by Intel itself as well as by Microsoft and the U.S. Department of Defense, only Intel will consume significant volumes. For 14A, Intel hopes to land at least one more external customer with substantial volume requirements, as this will ensure that Intel will recoup its investments in the development of such an advanced node.

Microsoft is testing a new Windows policy that lets IT administrators uninstall Microsoft Copilot from managed devices. The change rolls out via Windows Insider builds and works through standard management tools like Intune and SCCM. BleepingComputer reports: The new policy will apply to devices where the Microsoft 365 Copilot and Microsoft Copilot are both installed, the Microsoft Copilot app was not installed by the user, and the Microsoft Copilot app was not launched in the last 28 days. "Admins can now uninstall Microsoft Copilot for a user in a targeted way by enabling a new policy titled RemoveMicrosoftCopilotApp," the Windows Insider team said.

"If this policy is enabled, the Microsoft Copilot app will be uninstalled, once. Users can still re-install if they choose to. This policy is available on Enterprise, Pro, and EDU SKUs. To enable this policy, open the Group policy editor and go to: User Configuration -> Administrative Templates -> Windows AI -> Remove Microsoft Copilot App."

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: Search engine optimization, or SEO, is a big business. While some SEO practices are useful, much of the day-to-day SEO wisdom you see online amounts to superstition. An increasingly popular approach geared toward LLMs called "content chunking" may fall into that category. In the latest installment of Google's Search Off the Record podcast, John Mueller and Danny Sullivan say that breaking content down into bite-sized chunks for LLMs like Gemini is a bad idea.

You've probably seen websites engaging in content chunking and scratched your head, and for good reason -- this content isn't made for you. The idea is that if you split information into smaller paragraphs and sections, it is more likely to be ingested and cited by gen AI bots like Gemini. So you end up with short paragraphs, sometimes with just one or two sentences, and lots of subheads formatted like questions one might ask a chatbot.

According to Google's Danny Sullivan, this is a misconception, and Google doesn't use such signals to improve ranking. "One of the things I keep seeing over and over in some of the advice and guidance and people are trying to figure out what do we do with the LLMs or whatever, is that turn your content into bite-sized chunks, because LLMs like things that are really bite size, right?" said Sullivan. "So... we don't want you to do that."

The conversation, which begins around the podcast's 18-minute mark, goes on to illustrate the folly of jumping on the latest SEO trend. Sullivan notes that he has consulted engineers at Google before making this proclamation. Apparently, the best way to rank on Google continues to be creating content for humans rather than machines. That ensures long-term search exposure, because the behavior of human beings -- what they choose to click on -- is an important signal for Google.

Longtime Slashdot reader chicksdaddy writes: CES, the Consumer Electronics Show, isn't just about shiny new gadgets. As AP reports, this year brought back the fifth annual Worst in Show anti-awards, calling out the most harmful, wasteful, invasive, and unfixable tech at the Las Vegas show. The coalition behind the awards -- including Repair.org, iFixit, EFF, PIRG, Secure Repairs, and others -- put the spotlight on products that miss the point of innovation and make life worse for users.

2026 Worst in Show winners include:

Overall (and Repairability): Samsung's AI-packed Family Hub Fridge -- over-engineered, hard to fix, and trying to do everything but keep food cold.
Privacy: Amazon Ring AI -- expanding surveillance with features like facial recognition and mobile towers.
Security: Merach UltraTread treadmill -- an AI fitness coach that also hoovers up sensitive data with weak security guarantees, including a privacy policy that declares the company "cannot guarantee the security of your personal information" (!!).
Environmental Impact: Lollipop Star -- a single-use, music-playing electronic lollipop that epitomizes needless e-waste.
Enshittification: Bosch eBike Flow App -- pushing lock-in and digital restrictions that make gear worse over time.
"Who Asked For This?": Bosch Personal AI Barista -- a voice-assistant coffee maker that nobody really wanted.
People's Choice: Lepro Ami AI Companion -- an overhyped "soulmate" cam that creeps more than it comforts.

The message? Not all tech is progress. Some products add needless complexity, threaten privacy, or throw sustainability out the window -- and the industry's watchdogs are calling them out.

Valve has added the NTSYNC kernel driver to the SteamOS 3.7.20 beta, laying the groundwork for improved Windows game synchronization performance via Wine and Proton. Phoronix reports: For gearing up for that future Proton NTSYNC support, SteamOS 3.7.20 enables the NTSYNC kernel driver and loads the module by default. Most Linux distributions are at least already building the NTSYNC kernel module though there's been different efforts on how to handle ensuring it's loaded when needed. The presence of the NTSYC kernel driver is the main highlight of the SteamOS 3.7.20 beta now available for testing.

Craigslist, the 30-year-old classifieds site that looks virtually unchanged since the dial-up era, continues to draw more than 105 million monthly users and remains enormously profitable despite never spending a cent on advertising or marketing. The site ranks as the 40th most popular website in the United States, according to Internet data company Similarweb.

University of Pennsylvania associate professor Jessa Lingel called it the "ungentrified" Internet. Unlike Facebook Marketplace, Etsy, or DePop, Craigslist doesn't use algorithms to track users or predict what they want to see. There are no public profiles, no rating systems, no likes or shares. The site effectively disincentivizes the clout-chasing and virality-seeking that dominates platforms like TikTok and Instagram.

Craigslist began in 1995 as an email list for a few hundred San Francisco Bay Area locals sharing events and job openings. Engineer Craig Newmark even recruited CEO Jim Buckmaster through a site ad. The two spent roughly a decade battling eBay in court after the tech giant purchased a minority stake in 2004, ultimately buying back shares and regaining full control in 2015.

Apple's iOS 26 appears to be witnessing the slowest adoption rate in recent memory, with third-party analytics from StatCounter indicating that only 15 to 16% of active iPhones worldwide are running the operating system nearly four months after its September release. The figures stand in stark contrast to iOS 18, which had reached approximately 63% adoption by January 2025, and iOS 17, which hit 54% by January 2024. iOS 16 had surpassed 60% by January 2023.

StatCounter's breakdown for January 2026 shows iOS 26.1 accounting for roughly 10.6% of devices, iOS 26.2 at about 4.6%, and the original iOS 26.0 at 1.1%. More than 60% of iPhones tracked by the analytics firm remain on iOS 18.

MacRumors' own visitor data tells a similar story: 89.3% of the site's readers were on iOS 18 during the first week of January 2025, but only 25.7% are running iOS 26 during the same period this year. iOS 26 introduced Liquid Glass, a sweeping visual redesign that replaces much of the traditional opaque interface with translucent layers, blurred backgrounds, and dynamic depth effects.

Researchers at Stanford University have created a programmable synthetic "skin" that can independently change color and texture, "a feat previously only available within the animal kingdom," reports the Register. From the report: The technique employs electron beams to write patterns and add optical layers that create color effects. When exposed to water, the film swells to reveal texture and colors independently, depending on which side of the material is exposed, according to a paper published in the scientific journal Nature this week. In an accompanying article, University of Stuttgart's Benjamin Renz and Na Liu said the researchers' "most striking achievement was a photonic skin in which color and texture could be independently controlled, mirroring the separate regulation... in octopuses."

The research team used the polymer PEDOT:PSS, which can swell in water, as the basis for their material. Its reaction to water can be controlled by irradiating it with electrons, creating textures and patterns in the film. By adding thin layers of gold, the researchers turned surface texture into tunable optical effects. A single layer could be used to scatter light, giving the shiny metal a matte, textured appearance. To control color, a polymer film was sandwiched between two layers of gold, forming an optical cavity, which selectively reflects light.

YouTube is updating search filters so users can explicitly choose between Shorts and long-form videos. The change also replaces view-count sorting with a new "Popularity" filter and removes underperforming options like "Sort by Rating." The Verge reports: Right now, a filter-less search shows a mix of longform and short form videos, which can be annoying if you just want to see videos in one format or the other. But in the new search filters, among other options, you can pick to see "Videos," which in my testing has only showed a list of longform videos, or "Shorts," which just shows Shorts.

YouTube is also removing the "Upload Date - Last Hour" and "Sort by Rating" filters because they "were not working as expected and had contributed to user complaints." The company will still offer other "Upload Date" filters, like "Today," "This week," "This Month," and "This Year," and you can also find popular videos with the new "Popularity" filter, which is replacing the "View count" sort option. (With the new "Popularity" filter, YouTube says that "our systems assess a video's view count and other relevance signals, such as watch time, to determine its popularity for that specific query.")

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Wired: Google is putting even more generative AI tools into Gmail as part of its goal to further personalize user inboxes and streamline searches. On Thursday, the company announced a new "AI Inbox" tab, currently in a beta testing phase, that reads every message in a user's Gmail and suggests a list of to-dos and key topics, based on what it summarizes. In Google's example of what this AI Inbox could look like in Gmail, the new tab takes context from a user's messages and suggests they reschedule their dentist appointment, reply to a request from their child's sports coach, and pay an upcoming fee before the deadline. Also under the AI Inbox tab is a list of important topics worth browsing, nestled beneath the action items at the top. Each suggested to-do and topic links back to the original email for more context and for verification.

[...] For users who are concerned about their privacy, the information Google gleans by skimming through inboxes will not be used to improve the company's foundational AI models. "We didn't just bolt AI onto Gmail," says Blake Barnes, who leads the project for Google. "We built a secure privacy architecture, specifically for this moment." He emphasizes that users can turn off Gmail's new AI tools if they don't want them. At the same time Google announced its AI Inbox, the company made free for all Gmail users multiple Gemini features that were previously available only to paying subscribers. This includes the Help Me Write tool, which generates emails from a user prompt, as well as AI Overviews for email threads, which essentially posts a TL;DR summary at the top of long message threads. Subscribers to Google's Ultra and Pro plans, which start at $20 a month, get two additional new features in their Gmail inbox. First, an AI proofreading tool that suggests more polished grammar and sentence structures. And second, an AI Overviews tool that can search your whole inbox and create relevant summaries on a topic, rather than just summarizing a single email thread.

Paris Judicial Court ordered Google to block additional pirate sports-streaming domains at the DNS level, rejecting Google's argument that enforcement should target upstream providers like Cloudflare first. "The blockade was requested by Canal+ and aims to stop pirate streams of Champions League games," notes TorrentFreak. From the report: Most recently, Google was compelled to take action following a complaint from French broadcaster Canal+ and its subsidiaries regarding Champions League piracy.. Like previous blocking cases, the request is grounded in Article L. 333-10 of the French Sports Code, which enables rightsholders to seek court orders against any entity that can help to stop 'serious and repeated' sports piracy. After reviewing the evidence and hearing arguments from both sides, the Paris Court granted the blocking request, ordering Google to block nineteen domain names, including antenashop.site, daddylive3.com, livetv860.me, streamysport.org and vavoo.to.

The latest blocking order covers the entire 2025/2026 Champions League series, which ends on May 30, 2026. It's a dynamic order too, which means that if these sites switch to new domains, as verified by ARCOM, these have to be blocked as well. Google objected to the blocking request. Among other things, it argued that several domains were linked to Cloudflare's CDN. Therefore, suspending the sites on the CDN level would be more effective, as that would render them inaccessible. Based on the subsidiarity principle, Google argued that blocking measures should only be ordered if attempts to block the pirate sites through more direct means have failed.

The court dismissed these arguments, noting that intermediaries cannot dictate the enforcement strategy or blocking order. Intermediaries cannot require "prior steps" against other technical intermediaries, especially given the "irremediable" character of live sports piracy. The judge found the block proportional because Google remains free to choose the technical method, even if the result is mandated. Internet providers, search engines, CDNs, and DNS resolvers can all be required to block, irrespective of what other measures were taken previously. Google further argued that the blocking measures were disproportionate because they were complex, costly, easily bypassed, and had effects beyond the borders of France.

The Paris court rejected these claims. It argued that Google failed to demonstrate that implementing these blocking measures would result in "important costs" or technical impossibilities. Additionally, the court recognized that there would still be options for people to bypass these blocking measures. However, the blocks are a necessary step to "completely cease" the infringing activities.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: The Federal Communications Commission plans to authorize a new category of wireless devices in the 6 GHz Wi-Fi band that will be permitted to operate at higher power levels than currently allowed. The FCC will also consider authorizing higher power levels for certain wireless devices that are only allowed to operate indoors. The FCC said it scheduled a vote for its January 29 meeting on an order "to create a new category of unlicensed devices... that can operate outdoors and at higher power than previously authorized devices." These so-called Geofenced variable power (GVP) devices operating on the 6 GHz band will "support high data rates suitable for AR/VR, short-range hotspots, automation, and indoor navigation," and "overcome limitations of previous device classes by allowing higher power and outdoor mobility," the FCC said. They will be required to work with geofencing systems to avoid interference with fixed microwave links and radio astronomy observatories.

FCC Chairman Brendan Carr attributed the FCC's planned action to President Trump in a press release titled, "President Trump Unleashes American Innovation With 6 GHz Win." That's consistent with Carr's relatively new stance that the FCC takes orders from the president, despite his insisting during the Biden era that the FCC must operate independently from the White House. While many of Carr's regulatory decisions have been criticized by consumer advocates, the 6 GHz action is an exception. Michael Calabrese, of New America's Open Technology Institute, told Ars that "increasing the power levels for Wi-Fi connections to peripheral devices such as AR/VR is a big win for consumers" and a change that has been "long advocated by the Wi-Fi community."

Carr said that the FCC "will vote on an order that expands unlicensed operations in the 6 GHz band so that consumers can benefit from better, faster Wi-Fi and an entirely new generation of wireless devices -- from AR/VR and IoT to a range of innovative smart devices. [It] will do so through a set of forward-looking regulations that allow devices to operate at higher power while protecting incumbent users, including through geofencing systems." [...] A draft of the order said the planned "additional power will enable composite standard-power/LPI access points to increase indoor coverage and provide more versatility to American consumers." The FCC will also seek comment on a proposal to authorize LPI access points on cruise ships.