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Grab some popcorn for the Xi vs Zuck bout, which may not be the biggest fight on the card

Chinese authorities have signalled they’ll likely probe Meta’s planned acquisition of made-in-China AI platform Manus.…

An anonymous reader quotes a report from NPR: [I]t turns out that some genius dogs can learn a brand new word, like the name of an unfamiliar toy, by just overhearing brief interactions between two people. What's more, these "gifted" dogs can learn the name of a new toy even if they first hear this word when the toy is out of sight -- as long as their favorite human is looking at the spot where the toy is hidden. That's according to a new study in the journal Science. "What we found in this study is that the dogs are using social communication. They're using these social cues to understand what the owners are talking about," says cognitive scientist Shany Dror of Eotvos Lorand University and the University of Veterinary Medicine, Vienna. "This tells us that the ability to use social information is actually something that humans probably had before they had language," she says, "and language was kind of hitchhiking on these social abilities." [...] "There's only a very small group of dogs that are able to learn this differentiation and then can learn that certain labels refer to specific objects," she says. "It's quite hard to train this and some dogs seem to just be able to do it." [...] To explore the various ways that these dogs are capable of learning new words, Dror and some colleagues conducted a study that involved two people interacting while their dog sat nearby and watched. One person would show the other a brand new toy and talk about it, with the toy's name embedded into sentences, such as "This is your armadillo. It has armadillo ears, little armadillo feet. It has a tail, like an armadillo tail." Even though none of this language was directed at the dogs, it turns out the super-learners registered the new toy's name and were later able to pick it out of a pile, at the owner's request. To do this, the dogs had to go into a separate room where the pile was located, so the humans couldn't give them any hints. Dror says that as she watched the dogs on camera from the other room, she was "honestly surprised" because they seemed to have so much confidence. "Sometimes they just immediately went to the new toy, knowing what they're supposed to do," she says. "Their performance was really, really high." She and her colleagues wondered if what mattered was the dog being able to see the toy while its name was said aloud, even if the words weren't explicitly directed at the dog. So they did another experiment that created a delay between the dog seeing a new toy and hearing its name. The dogs got to see the unfamiliar toy and then the owner dropped the toy in a bucket, so it was out of sight. Then the owner would talk to the dog, and mention the toy's name, while glancing down at the bucket. While this was more difficult for dogs, overall they still could use this information to learn the name of the toy and later retrieve it when asked. "This shows us how flexible they are able to learn," says Dror. "They can use different mechanisms and learn under different conditions."

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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.")

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Longtime Slashdot reader schwit1 shares a report from Reuters: Billionaire entrepreneur Elon Musk persuaded a judge on Wednesday to allow a jury trial on his allegations that ChatGPT maker OpenAI violated its founding mission in its high-profile restructuring to a for-profit entity. Musk was a cofounder of OpenAI in 2015 but left in 2018 and now runs an AI company that competes with it. U.S. District Judge Yvonne Gonzalez Rogers in Oakland, California, said at a hearing that there was "plenty of evidence" suggesting OpenAI's leaders made assurances that its original nonprofit structure was going to be maintained. The judge said there were enough disputed facts to let a jury consider the claims at a trial scheduled for March, rather than decide the issues herself. She said she would issue a written order after the hearing that addresses OpenAI's bid to throw out the case. [...] Musk contends he contributed about $38 million, roughly 60% of OpenAI's early funding, along with strategic guidance and credibility, based on assurances that the organization would remain a nonprofit dedicated to the public benefit. The lawsuit accuses OpenAI co-founders Sam Altman and Greg Brockman of plotting a for-profit switch to enrich themselves, culminating in multibillion-dollar deals with Microsoft and a recent restructuring. OpenAI, Altman and Brockman have denied the claims, and they called Musk "a frustrated commercial competitor seeking to slow down a mission-driven market leader." Microsoft is also a defendant and has urged the judge to toss Musk's lawsuit. A lawyer for Microsoft said there was no evidence that the company "aided and abetted" OpenAI. OpenAI in a statement after the hearing said: "Mr Musk's lawsuit continues to be baseless and a part of his ongoing pattern of harassment, and we look forward to demonstrating this at trial."

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Dark copyright evasion magic makes light work of developers' guardrails

Machine learning models, particularly commercial ones, generally do not list the data developers used to train them. Yet what models contain and whether that material can be elicited with a particular prompt remain matters of financial and legal consequence, not to mention ethics and privacy.…

Resets 'Days Since Last Outage' counter to zero, aspires to do the same for everyone, forever

Analytics outfit Snowflake is buying telemetry data platform Observe to help its customers discover and mitigate IT issues before they cause downtime. It announced the deal on the same day its own services experienced a “major outage.”…

Illinois Department of Human Services disclosed that a misconfigured internal mapping website exposed sensitive personal data for more than 700,000 Illinois residents for over four years, from April 2021 to September 2025. Officials say they can't confirm whether the publicly accessible data was ever viewed. TechCrunch reports: Officials said the exposed data included personal information on 672,616 individuals who are Medicaid and Medicare Savings Program recipients. The data included their addresses, case numbers, and demographic data -- but not individuals' names. The exposed data also included names, addresses, case statuses, and other information relating to 32,401 individuals in receipt of services from the department's Division of Rehabilitation Services.

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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.

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Memory pricing expected to surge another 60% in Q1 with relief years away

While end customers grapple with crushing memory prices, we imagine Samsung execs are breaking out the Champagne. This week the memory titan forecast fourth-quarter operating profit would roughly triple as the South Korean electronics cabal rides the AI wave into the New Year.…

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.

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Microsoft is embedding full e-commerce checkout directly into Copilot chats, letting users buy products without ever visiting a retailer's website. "If checkout happens inside AI conversations, retailers risk losing direct customer relationships -- while platforms like Microsoft gain leverage," reports Axios. From the report: Microsoft unveiled new agentic AI tools for retailers at the NRF 2026 retail conference, including Copilot Checkout, which lets shoppers complete purchases inside Copilot without being redirected to a retailer's website. The checkout feature is live in the U.S. with Shopify, PayPal, Stripe and Etsy integrations. Copilot apps have more than 100 million monthly active users, spanning consumer and commercial audiences, according to the company. More than 800 million monthly active users interact with AI features across Microsoft products more broadly. Shopping journeys involving Copilot are 33% shorter than traditional search paths and see a 53% increase in purchases within 30 minutes of interaction, Microsoft says. When shopping intent is present, journeys involving Copilot are 194% more likely to result in a purchase than those without it.

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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.

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Authentication is basically solved. Authorization is another thing entirely...

CrowdStrike has signed a $740 million deal to buy identity security startup SGNL. The move underscores the growing threat of identity-based attacks as companies struggle to secure skyrocketing numbers of non-human identities, including AI agents.…

The long-standing hierarchy in the TV market -- Sony, Samsung and LG at the top, TCL and Hisense fighting it out in the midrange -- is eroding as the budget brands close the performance gap and increasingly lead on technology innovation, The Verge writes. Hisense debuted the first RGB LED TV last year, and TCL's X11L announced at CES 2026 is the first TV to use reformulated quantum dots and a new color filter. TCL's QM9K release last year was "a pretty clear statement that they're ready to fight with the big boys." The premium brands retain certain advantages: Sony's processing remains unmatched and LG's OLEDs deliver contrast that mini LED cannot match. "Even as the gap in performance across technologies continues to shrink, and TVs from all the manufacturers get closer to parity, the challenge for TCL and Hisense shifts from creating incredible, competitive products to altering perception," The Verge notes. Samsung once owned the art TV segment entirely; CES 2026 saw announcements from Amazon's Ember Artline and LG's Gallery TV, all using similar edge-lit technology and magnetic frames. The experience across brands is "remarkably similar." If the pricing gap persists and performance remains comparable, "the big three will have to respond by bringing their pricing down or risk losing sales," the publication concluded.

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It's for less consequential health-related matters, where being wrong won't kill customers

Could a bot take the place of your doctor? According to OpenAI, which launched ChatGPT Health this week, an LLM should be available to answer your questions and even examine your health records. But it should stop short of diagnosis or treatment.…

An anonymous reader shares a report: Internet access available through mobile devices in Iran appears to be limited, according to several social media accounts that routinely track such developments. Cloudflare Radar, which monitors internet traffic on behalf of the internet infrastructure firm Cloudflare, said on Thursday that IPv6 (Internet Protocol version 6), a standard widely used for mobile infrastructure, was affected. "IPv6 address space in Iran dropped by 98.5 per cent, concurrent with IPv6 traffic share dropping from 12 per cent to 1.8 per cent, as the government selectively blocks internet access amid protests," read Cloudflare Radar's social post. NetBlocks, which tracks internet access and digital rights around the world, also confirmed it was seeing problems with connectivity through various internet providers in Iran. "Live network data show Tehran and other parts of Iran are now entering a digital blackout," NetBlocks posted on X.

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Beijing could green-light sales to select customers as soon as this quarter

Nvidia's H200 GPUs could begin trickling into China as soon as this quarter, but there's a catch. Due to all the geopolitical turmoil that's ravaged US-China trade relations over the past year, buyers may need to pay up front for the coveted AI accelerators. And they won't get a refund if China decides to block the imports!…

The promise of AI-powered workplace tools that sort emails, take meeting notes, and file expense reports is finally delivering meaningful productivity gains -- one software startup reported a 20% boost around mid-2025 -- but companies are discovering an unexpected tradeoff: employees are burning out from the relentless pace of high-level cognitive work. Roger Kirkness, CEO of 14-person software startup Convictional, noticed that after AI took the scut work off his team's plates, their days became consumed by intensive thinking, and they were mentally exhausted and unproductive by Friday. The company transitioned to a four-day workweek; the same amount of work gets done, Kirkness says. The underlying problem, according to Boston College economist and sociologist Juliet Schor, is that businesses tend to simply reallocate the time AI saves. Workers who once mentally downshifted for tasks like data entry are now expected to maintain intense focus through longer stretches of data analysis. "If you just make people work at a high-intensity pace with no breaks, you risk crowding out creativity," Schor says.

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TV manufacturers at CES 2026 in Las Vegas this week unveiled a wave of AI features that frequently consume significant screen space and take considerable time to deliver results -- all while global TV shipments declined 0.6% year over year in Q3, according to Omdia. Google demonstrated Veo generating video from a photo on a television, a process that took about two minutes to produce eight seconds of footage, The Verge writes in a column. Samsung presented a future where viewers ask their sets for sports predictions and recipes to share with kitchen displays. Hisense showed an AI agent that displays real-time stats for every soccer player on screen, a feature requiring so much space the company built a prototype 21:9 aspect ratio display to accommodate it. Demos repeatedly showed video shrinking to make room for sports scores and information when viewers asked questions -- noticeable on 70-inch displays and likely worse on anything 50 inches or smaller. Amazon's Alexa Plus can jump to Prime Video scenes based on verbal descriptions. LG's sets switch homescreen recommendations based on voice recognition of individual family members.

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Love Google AI Overviews? Now they're in your inbox

We hope you like more AI in your Gmail inbox, because Google is "bringing Gmail into the Gemini era." It'll be on by default, but the good news is that you can disable it. …