Month: April 2025

The Meta monopoly trial has raised a question that Meta hopes the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) can't effectively answer: How important is it to use social media to connect with friends and family today?

Connecting with friends was, of course, Facebook's primary use case as it became the rare social network to hit 1 billion users—not by being acquired by a Big Tech company but based on the strength of its clean interface and the network effects that kept users locked in simply because all the important people in their life chose to be there.

According to the FTC, Meta took advantage of Facebook's early popularity, and it has since bought out rivals and otherwise cornered the market on personal social networks. Only Snapchat and MeWe (a privacy-focused Facebook alternative) are competitors to Meta platforms, the FTC argues, and social networks like TikTok or YouTube aren't interchangeable, because those aren't destinations focused on connecting friends and family.

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The Banana Pi BPI-CM6 is a computer-on-a-module that’s the same size and shape as a Raspberry Pi CM4 and even uses the same board-to-board connectors. But while Raspberry Pi’s compute module has an ARM-based processor, the BPI-CM6 is powered by a SpacemiT K1 octa-core RISC-V chip. Basically it has the same capabilities as the Banana Pi BPI-F3 […]

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HP Inc. has agreed to pay a $4 million settlement to customers after being accused of “false advertising” of computers and peripherals on its website.

Earlier this month, Judge P. Casey Pitts for the US District Court of the San Jose Division of the Northern District of California granted preliminary approval [PDF] of a settlement agreement regarding a class-action complaint first filed against HP on October 13, 2021. The complaint accused HP's website of showing "misleading" original pricing for various computers, mice, and keyboards that was higher than how the products were recently and typically priced.

Per the settlement agreement [PDF], HP will contribute $4 million to a "non-reversionary common fund, which shall be used to pay the (i) Settlement Class members’ claims; (ii) court-approved Notice and Settlement Administration Costs; (iii) court-approved Settlement Class Representatives’ Service Award; and (iv) court-approved Settlement Class Counsel Attorneys’ Fees and Costs Award. All residual funds will be distributed pro rata to Settlement Class members who submitted valid claims and cashed checks.”

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Federal Communications Commission Chairman Brendan Carr accused Comcast of "news distortion" because its subsidiary NBC isn't parroting the Trump administration narrative on the deportation of Kilmar Abrego Garcia.

"Comcast knows that federal law requires its licensed operations to serve the public interest. News distortion doesn't cut it," Carr wrote in a post on X yesterday.

Carr's use of the phrase "news distortion" is significant because he has been invoking the FCC's rarely enforced news distortion policy to pressure licensed broadcasters that he perceives as being biased against President Trump. For a detailed look at Carr's fight against media, read our feature: "The speech police: Chairman Brendan Carr and the FCC's news distortion policy."

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On Thursday, Norwegian company Equinor announced that it was suspending the construction of a planned 800 MW-capacity offshore wind farm currently being built in the waters off New York. The reason? An order from US Secretary of the Interior Doug Burgum, who alleged that the project was rushed through review.

The move comes as the US's nascent offshore wind industry is facing uncertainty, with all future leases placed on hold by an executive order issued on the day of Trump's inauguration. The hold was ostensibly put in place to allow time to review the permitting process. But Burgum's move comes the same week a report from the Government Accountability Office, done in response to the executive order, found only minor issues with the existing permitting process.

On hold

The Equnior project, termed Empire Wind, is a key part of New York's plans to meet its climate goals. Combined with a second phase that's currently in planning, Empire Wind would have a rated capacity of two gigawatts, or over 20 percent of the state's planned offshore wind capacity. The initial construction, combined with the development of shore facilities, already has an estimated value of $2.5 billion, Equinor estimates, and is currently employing roughly 1,500 people. Construction was expected to be complete in 2027, although energy production from a subset of the 54 planned 15 MW turbines could have begun before then.

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Smartphones with foldable displays have been around for years. A handful of PC makers have also launched laptops. So what’s next? Foldable eReaders, apparently. The MooInk V is an eBook reader with an 8 inch E Ink Gallery color ePaper display that can fold in half like a… well, like a book. Developer by Readmoo […]

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Google's Gemini AI may have had a slow start, but it has been anything but in 2025. Barely a week goes by that another model doesn't arrive in the Gemini app or developer tools like AI Studio, and there's a major release coming to the app today. Google has announced that its faster, more efficient Gemini 2.5 Flash model is rolling out widely in preview. At the same time, developers can begin building with 2.5 Flash using the company's newly announced API pricing, which Google says is much lower than competing products.

A gaggle of Gemini

The model dropdown in the Gemini app is a bit convoluted, particularly as we see products like Veo 2 and Personalization popping up there. Google has been releasing so many preview models and new ways of using Gemini that it can be hard to know which option to choose for a given task. In fairness, Google is far from the only major AI player with this problem.

Tulsee Doshi is Google's director of product management for Gemini, which means she leads the team building these models. We asked Doshi what version of Gemini she finds herself using, and unsurprisingly, she likes the more powerful option. "Typically right now, I have been using 2.5 Pro," says Doshi. "I use Gemini throughout the day for my work in a few key areas, like creating documents or slides. That's either for internal consumption or actually sharing externally, and I've found 2.5 Pro to be really helpful for the creative writing element."

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Synology, maker of network-attached storage (NAS) devices, will seemingly remove advanced features from its Plus devices that are not using hard drives provided by, or certified by, Synology itself, starting with its 2025 lineup.

A report on the German site HardwareLuxx (translated by Google) and a press release on Synology's German-language website appear to confirm Synology's strategy. The company, which sees "significant benefits" to its "proprietary hard drive solution" (also per Google's translation), will be "expanding [its] integrated ecosystem to the Plus series." For those Plus series models released in 2025, only Synology's own hard drives, and third-party drives certified by Synology, will offer "the full range of functions and support." Synology's release states that it can provide the "highest levels of security and performance, while also offering significantly more efficient support."

Ars has contacted Synology's US offices for comment and will update this post with any response.

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On Wednesday, news broke that researchers had found the most compelling evidence yet of a "biosignature"—a chemical present at levels that are only consistent with life—on a distant exoplanet. It didn't take much time for some less-than-reliable news sources to go from there to talk of a planet that "could be 'teeming with life'" and the obvious follow-up, "Scientists reveal what aliens could REALLY look like on exoplanet K2-18b."

Even in the best of circumstances, however, talk of a biosignature is an invitation to scientists to think of alternative chemistries that could explain the chemistry without needing biological activity. And these are not the best of circumstances, as astronomers are pointing to earlier papers that give a range of reasons to be skeptical of the new results; in fact, an astronomer named Chris Glein emailed me to alert me of potential issues the day before the news broke.

To help you understand the controversy, we're going to look at the data that is being presented as evidence of a biosignature and then go through all the reasons that confirming a biosignature is so difficult.

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The AOKZOE A1X is a handheld gaming PC with an 8 inch, 1920 x 1200 pixel, 120 Hz display, a 72.7 Wh battery, supports for up to 64GB of RAM, and a choice of AMD Ryzen 7 8840U Hawk Point or Ryzen AI 9 HX 370 Strix Point processor options. While retail prices are expected […]

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