Blue Origin has successfully completed its NS-25 mission, resuming crewed flights for the first time in nearly two years. The mission brought six tourist crew members to the edge of space, including artist and former Air Force Captain Ed Dwight. In 1961, Dwight was selected by President John F. Kennedy to be the country’s first […]

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Microsoft will launch its custom Cobalt 100 chips to customers as a public preview at its Build conference next week, TechCrunch has learned. In an analyst briefing ahead of Build, Scott Guthrie, Microsoft’s executive VP of the Microsoft Cloud and AI group, directly compared Cobalt to AWS’s Graviton chips, which have been available to developers […]

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Ampere and Qualcomm aren’t the most obvious of partners. Both, after all, offer Arm-based chips for running data center servers (though Qualcomm’s largest market remains mobile). But as the two companies announced today, they are now combining forces to offer an AI-focused server that uses Ampere’s CPUs and Qualcomm’s Cloud AI100 Ultra AI inferencing chips […]

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European Union enforcers of the bloc’s online governance regime, the Digital Services Act (DSA), said Thursday they’re closely monitoring disinformation campaigns on the Elon Musk-owned social network X (formerly Twitter) following the Wednesday shooting of Slovakia’s prime minister, Robert Fico. The bloc has been formally investigating X since last December over disinformation in civic discourse and […]

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Facebook and Instagram are under formal investigation in the European Union over child protection concerns, the Commission announced Thursday. The proceedings follow a raft of requests for information to parent entity Meta since the bloc’s online governance regime, the Digital Services Act (DSA), started applying last August. The development could be significant as the formal […]

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Consumer protection groups around the European Union have filed coordinated complaints against Temu, accusing the Chinese-owned ultra low-cost e-commerce platform of a raft of breaches related to the bloc’s Digital Services Act (DSA). Temu only launched in the region about a year ago but recently reported blasting past 75 million monthly users. Penalties for confirmed […]

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A feature Google demoed at its I/O confab yesterday, using its generative AI technology to scan voice calls in real-time for conversational patterns associated with financial scams, has sent a collective shiver down the spines of privacy and security experts who are warning the feature represents the thin end of the wedge. They warn that, […]

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Cargo ships docking at a commercial port incur costs called “disbursements” and “port call expenses.” This might be port dues, towage, and pilotage fees. It’s a complex patchwork and all ports operate their own procedures, much of it on spreadsheets.  The global cost from port calls, for all vessels, is over $220 billion dollars per […]

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Apple released new data about anti-fraud measures related to its operation of the iOS App Store on Tuesday morning, trumpeting a claim that it stopped over $7 billion in “potentially fraudulent transactions” across the four years between 2020 and 2023. More than $1.8 billion of that total was stopped in 2023, per Apple, which is […]

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Booking.com has been designated a gatekeeper under the bloc’s Digital Markets Act (DMA), meaning the online travel agency will face regulation under the bloc’s market fairness and contestability framework — with the risk of major fines (of up to 10% or even 20%) for non-compliance. The travel platform has been given six months to comply […]

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It’s been a busy weekend for union organizing efforts at U.S. Apple stores, with the union at one store voting to authorize a strike, while workers at another store voted against forming a union. Back in 2022, workers the Apple store in Towson, Maryland became organized the first formally recognized union at an Apple retail […]

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Bumble founder and executive chair Whitney Wolfe Herd raised eyebrows this week with her comments about how AI might change the dating experience. During an onstage interview, Bloomberg’s Emily Chang brought up bots posing as real people, or real people falling in love with bots, as examples of how AI might make online dating worse. […]

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