Month: May 2025

Virtuelle Welten zu erleben und sich darin zu bewegen, setzt sich trotz großer Investitionen von Meta oder Apple kaum durch. Es gibt Gründe dafür. (VR, Simulationsspiel)

Schnelle und unkomplizierte Datenanalysen: Die besten Methoden für SQL-Abfragen in der Open-Source-Bibliothek Polars. Eine Anleitung von Antony Ghiroz (Python Polars Guide, Python)

Science-Fiction ist meist eine ernste Angelegenheit. Im Lauf der Jahrzehnte gab es aber auch einige Sci-Fi-Komödien - eine ist sogar recht prophetisch. Von Peter Osteried (Science-Fiction, Disney)

Dieses E-Learning-Paket mit rund 33 Stunden Videomaterial und mehr als 340 Lektionen vermittelt praxisnahes Know-how zu Penetration Testing, Schwachstellenanalysen und Schutzmechanismen in Linux und Microsoft 365. (Golem Karrierewelt, Microsoft)

From its humble beginnings in the late 20th century, Google has come to dominate online searches, putting it squarely in the US government's antitrust crosshairs. The ongoing search antitrust case threatens to upend Google's dominance, giving smaller players a chance to thrive and possibly wiping others out. After wrapping up testimony in the case earlier this month, lawyers for Google and the Department of Justice have now made their closing arguments.

The DOJ won the initial trial, securing a ruling that Google used anticompetitive practices to maintain its monopoly in general search. During the time this case has taken to meander its way through the legal system, the online landscape has been radically altered, making it harder than ever to envision a post-Google Internet.

To address Google's monopoly, the DOJ is asking United States District Judge Amit Mehta to impose limits on Google's business dealings and order a divestment of the Chrome browser. Forcing the sale of Chrome would be a major penalty and a coup for the DOJ lawyers, but this issue has been overshadowed somewhat as the case drags on. During closing arguments, the two sides dueled over how Google's search deals and the rise of AI could change the Internet as we know it.

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Amazon Fire Sticks are enabling “billions of dollars” worth of streaming piracy, according to a report today from Enders Analysis, a media, entertainment, and telecommunications research firm. Technologies from other media conglomerates, Microsoft, Google, and Facebook, are also enabling what the report’s authors deem an “industrial scale of theft."

The report, "Video piracy: Big tech is clearly unwilling to address the problem," focuses on the European market but highlights the global growth of piracy of streaming services as they increasingly acquire rights to live programs, like sporting events.

Per the BBC, the report points to the availability of multiple, simultaneous illegal streams for big events that draw tens of thousands of pirate viewers.

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The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention on Thursday updated its immunization schedules for children and adults to partially reflect the abrupt changes announced by health secretary and anti-vaccine advocate Robert F. Kennedy Jr. earlier this week.

In a 58-second video posted on social media on Tuesday, May 27, Kennedy said he was unilaterally revoking the CDC's recommendations that healthy children and pregnant people get COVID-19 vaccines.

"I couldn’t be more pleased to announce that, as of today, the COVID vaccine for healthy children and healthy pregnant women has been removed from the CDC recommended immunization schedule," Kennedy said in the video.

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Twenty-eight-year-old Nathan Laatsch was, until yesterday, a cybersecurity employee at the Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA). He had a Top Secret clearance and worked in the Insider Threat Division. Laatsch spent his days—you'll understand the past tense in a moment—"enabling user monitoring on individuals with access to DIA systems," including employees under surreptitious internal investigation.

Given that Laatsch was one of those who "watched the watchers," he appears to have had supreme confidence in his own ability to avoid detection should he decide to go rogue. "Stupid mistakes" made by other idiots would "not be difficult for me to avoid," he once wrote. DIA couldn't even launch an investigation of Laatsch without him knowing that something was up.

The Greeks had a word for this: hubris.

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Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton has failed to reverse a preliminary injunction currently blocking him from probing Media Matters for America (MMFA) in defense of Elon Musk's social media platform X.

On Friday, a US appeals court upheld the injunction. In his opinion, senior Circuit Judge Harry T. Edwards wrote that there was "ample" evidence that Paxton "pursued a retaliatory campaign" against MMFA "because they published an unfavorable article about X.com." And MMFA has standing to raise a First Amendment defense, because "the First Amendment generally 'prohibits government officials from subjecting individuals to retaliatory actions after the fact for having engaged in protected speech," Edwards wrote.

Edwards noted that the day after X sued MMFA over reporting on antisemitic posts appearing next to big brands' ads on X—alleging the report fraudulently spawned an ad boycott—Paxton announced a broad probe into MMFA that, he confirmed in a press release, was directly due to X's lawsuit.

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Hugging Face is best known as a platform for machine learning and AI development, but it has also been dabbling in the world of robotics. This week, the company revealed two new robots it plans to bring to market—including a humanoid one that it would sell for around $3,000, far less than many of the other options that have been floated, like Unitree's $16,000 G1.

Dubbed the HopeJR, Hugging Face's robot has up to 66 actuated degrees of freedom. According to Hugging Face Principal Research Scientist Remi Cadene, it can walk and manipulate objects. As shown in a short X video, it has an accessible look that reminds us a bit of Bender from Futurama. (It's the eyes.)

Co-designed with French robotics company The Robot Studio, HopeJR will be open source. "The important aspect is that these robots are open source, so anyone can assemble, rebuild, [and] understand how they work, and [they’re] affordable, so that robotics doesn’t get dominated by just a few big players with dangerous black-box systems," Hugging Face CEO Clem Delangue told TechCrunch.

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