Technology News

One of the fastest monopoly trials on record wound down Monday, as US District Court Judge Leonie Brinkema heard closing arguments on Google's alleged monopoly in a case over the company's ad tech.

Department of Justice lawyer Aaron Teitelbaum kicked things off by telling Brinkema that Google "rigged" ad auctions, allegedly controlling "multiple parts" of services used to place ads all over the Internet, unfairly advantaging itself in three markets, The New York Times reported.

"Google is once, twice, three times a monopolist," Teitelbaum said, while reinforcing that "these are the markets that make the free and open Internet possible."

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PlayStation's handheld will finally support dedicated game streaming—and with another portable playing device supposedly inbound, can Sony make cloud gaming take off? If it can't, who else can?

OpenAI keeps deleting data that could allegedly prove the AI company violated copyright laws by training ChatGPT on authors' works. Apparently largely unintentional, the sloppy practice is seemingly dragging out early court battles that could determine whether AI training is fair use.

Most recently, The New York Times accused OpenAI of unintentionally erasing programs and search results that the newspaper believed could be used as evidence of copyright abuse.

The NYT apparently spent more than 150 hours extracting training data, while following a model inspection protocol that OpenAI set up precisely to avoid conducting potentially damning searches of its own database. This process began in October, but by mid-November, the NYT discovered that some of the data gathered had been erased due to what OpenAI called a "glitch."

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Bird flu virus has been found in a batch of raw—unpasteurized—milk sold in California, prompting a recall issued at the state's request, health officials announced over the weekend.

No illnesses have yet been linked to the contaminated milk, made by Raw Farm, LLC of Fresno County. The contamination was found in testing by health officials in nearby Santa Clara County, who detected the virus in milk from a retail store. The state laboratory has confirmed the finding.

In a YouTube message from Raw Farm, a company representative called the contamination "not a big deal" and emphasized that the recall is only being done out of an abundance of caution.

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The US Supreme Court will hear appeals of a 5th Circuit ruling that called Universal Service fees on phone bills an illegal tax.

The US Court of Appeals for the 5th Circuit ruled in July that the Federal Communications Commission's Universal Service Fund is unconstitutional and that the fees on phone bills are a "misbegotten tax." The FCC and several non-government groups challenged the ruling, and the Supreme Court agreed to take up the case on Friday.

The Universal Service Fund is an $8 billion-a-year system that subsidizes the expansion of telecom networks with grants to Internet service providers and makes access more affordable through programs such as Lifeline discounts. The FCC program has faced several court challenges filed by Consumers' Research, a nonprofit that fights "woke corporations," and a mobile virtual network operator called Cause Based Commerce.

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Ben Schwartz voices the titular character in Sonic the Hedgehog 3.

Some lucky folks got a heads-up last week that a trailer for Sonic the Hedgehog 3 was about to drop when Paramount Pictures released a playable Sega Genesis gaming cartridge to select individuals. Hidden among a mini-game and character posters and accessible by entering a cheat code was the trailer release date. True to its word, Paramount just dropped the final trailer for the third film in the successful franchise. All our favorite characters are back, as well as a couple of new ones, most notably a new villain familiar to fans of the games: Shadow, voiced by Keanu Reeves.

(Spoilers for the first two films below.)

As previously reported, in the first film, Sonic (Ben Schwartz) teamed up with local town sheriff Tom Wachowski (James Marsden) to stop the sinister mad scientist Dr. Robotnik (Jim Carrey). Robotnik wanted to catch and experiment on the hedgehog, and if he could also frame Tom as a domestic terrorist, even better.

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Bloomberg reports that Sony is "in the early stages" of work on a fully portable console that can play PlayStation 5 software. The device is still "likely years away from launch," according to "people familiar with its development" that spoke to Bloomberg anonymously.

The report comes less than a year after the launch of the PlayStation Portal, a Sony portable device designed to stream PS5 games running on a console on the same local network. Recently, Sony updated the Portal firmware to let PlayStation Plus subscribers also stream PS5 games from Sony's centralized servers at up to 1080p and 60 fps.

Sony's reported PS5 portable plans also come after months of rumors that Microsoft has also been working on a new Xbox console with a portable form factor. In June, Microsoft Gaming CEO Phil Spencer added fuel to those rumors by directly saying, "I think we should have a handheld, too... I like my ROG Ally, my Lenovo Legion Go, my Steam Deck... I think being able to play games locally is really important."

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Make your favorite golfer’s day with the best gifts to enhance every part of their game.

This affordable audio controller is great, especially if you use Ableton.

Google Shopping has some helpful tips to share to help you maximize savings and minimize stress while shopping both in store and online this Cyber Five weekend.Google Shopping has some helpful tips to share to help you maximize savings and minimize stress while shopping both in store and online this Cyber Five weekend.

The world’s most important climate talks were pulled back from the brink of collapse after poorer countries reluctantly accepted a finance package of “at least” $300 billion a year from wealthy nations after bitter negotiations.

Fears about stretched budgets around the world and the election of Donald Trump as US president, who has described climate change as a “hoax,” drove the developing countries into acceptance of the slightly improved package after Sunday 2:30 am local time in Baku.

The UN COP29 climate summit almost collapsed twice throughout Saturday evening and into the early hours of Sunday morning, as vulnerable nations walked out of negotiations and India objected stridently.

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WIRED has tested the best ski gloves and mittens for every style and budget.

Whether you’re up against pet hair or you want to splurge on a high-end laser-guided robot vacuum, we have the perfect pick for you.

Make some noise for safety with our favorite alarms, from keychain sirens to wearable bracelets.

Neutrinos are some of nature’s most elusive particles. One hundred trillion fly through your body every second, but each one has only a tiny chance of jostling one of your atoms, a consequence of the incredible weakness of the weak nuclear force that governs neutrino interactions. That tiny chance means that reliably detecting neutrinos takes many more atoms than are in your body. To spot neutrinos colliding with atoms in the atmosphere, experiments have buried 1,000 tons of heavy water, woven cameras through a cubic kilometer of Antarctic ice, and planned to deploy 200,000 antennas.

In a field full of ambitious plans, a recent proposal by Steven Prohira, an assistant professor at the University of Kansas, is especially strange. Prohira suggests that instead of using antennas, we could detect the tell-tale signs of atmospheric neutrinos by wiring up a forest of trees. His suggestion may turn out to be impossible, but it could also be an important breakthrough. To find out which it is, he'll need to walk a long path, refining prototypes and demonstrating his idea’s merits.

Prohira’s goal is to detect so-called ultra-high-energy neutrinos. Each one of these tiny particles carries more than fifty million times the energy released by uranium during nuclear fission. Their origins are not fully understood, but they are expected to be produced by some of the most powerful events in the Universe, from collapsing stars and pulsars to the volatile environments around the massive black holes at the centers of galaxies. If we could detect these particles more reliably, we could learn more about these extreme astronomical events.

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Since launch, Tesla’s polarizing electric pickup has been beset by quality issues, and is now heading to be one of the most unreliable EVs made yet. Strangely, Cybertruck owners may not care one bit.

Since launch, Tesla’s polarizing electric pickup has been beset by quality issues, and is now heading to be one of the most unreliable EVs made yet. Strangely, Cybertruck owners may not care one bit.

In the Western world, some automated driving features seem to have fallen out of favor. Not true in China—and the reasons why offer a preview of auto industry changes to come.

Removing your phone number and address from the internet can be exceedingly difficult. A multibillion-dollar lawsuit led by an unlikely privacy crusader could soon catalyze change for everyone.

Removing your phone number and address from the internet can be exceedingly difficult. A multibillion-dollar lawsuit led by an unlikely privacy crusader could soon catalyze change for everyone.