Month: May 2025

MOUNTAIN VIEW, Calif.—Google rolled out early versions of Gemini 2.5 earlier this year. Marking a significant improvement over the 2.0 branch. For the first time, Google's chatbot felt competitive with the likes of ChatGPT, but it's been "experimental" and later "preview" since then. At I/O 2025, Google announced general availability for Gemini 2.5, and these models will soon be integrated with Chrome. There's also a fancy new subscription plan to get the most from Google's AI. You probably won't like the pricing, though.

Gemini 2.5 goes gold

Even though Gemini 2.5 was revealed a few months ago, the older 2.0 Flash has been the default model all this time. Now that 2.5 is finally ready, the 2.5 Flash model will be swapped in as the new default. This model has built-in simulated reasoning, so its outputs are much more reliable than 2.0 Flash.

Google says the release version of 2.5 Flash is better at reasoning, coding, and multimodality, but it uses 20–30 percent fewer tokens than the preview version. This edition is now live in Vertex AI, AI Studio, and the Gemini app. It will be made the default model in early June.

Read full article

Comments

In sparking his global trade war, Donald Trump seems to have maintained a glaring blind spot when it comes to protecting one of America's greatest trade advantages: the export of digital services.

Experts have warned that the consequences for Silicon Valley could be far-reaching.

In a report released Tuesday, an intelligence firm that tracks global trade risks, Allianz Trade, shared results of a survey of 4,500 firms worldwide, designed "to capture the impact of the escalation of trade tensions." Amid other key findings, the group warned that the US's fixation on the country's trillion-dollar goods deficit risks rocking "the fastest-growing segment of global trade," America's "invisible exports" of financial and digital services.

Read full article

Comments

Federal Communications Commission Chairman Brendan Carr celebrated an FCC court loss yesterday after a ruling that struck down Biden-era diversity reporting requirements that Carr voted against while Democrats were in charge.

"An appellate court just struck down the Biden FCC's 2024 decision to force broadcasters to post race and gender scorecards," Carr wrote. "As I said in my dissent back then, the FCC's 2024 decision was an unlawful effort to pressure businesses into discriminating based on race & gender."

The FCC mandate was challenged in court by National Religious Broadcasters, a group for Christian TV and radio broadcasters and the American Family Association. They sued in the conservative-leaning US Court of Appeals for the 5th Circuit, where a three-judge panel yesterday ruled unanimously against the FCC.

Read full article

Comments

Under the control of anti-vaccine advocate Robert F. Kennedy Jr., the Food and Drug Administration is unilaterally terminating universal access to seasonal COVID-19 vaccines; instead, only people who are age 65 years and older and people with underlying conditions that put them at risk of severe COVID-19 will have access to seasonal boosters moving forward.

The move was laid out in a commentary article published today in the New England Journal of Medicine, written by Trump administration FDA Commissioner Martin Makary and the agency's new top vaccine regulator, Vinay Prasad.

The article lays out a new framework for approving seasonal COVID-19 vaccines, as well as a rationale for the change—which was made without input from independent advisory committees for the Food and Drug Administration and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

Read full article

Comments

Torrent site uploaders come in various shapes and sizes. Only a few become so popular that their ‘brand’ is widely recognized by online pirates.

COLLECTiVE falls into the latter category. The uploader operating under this tag, Will1869, shared many high-profile titles, mostly films. He purportedly operated as a one-man team.

These releases appeared on major torrent sites including 1337x and the recently defunct TorrentGalaxy. COLLECTiVE reportedly ran a small torrent portal, Laidbackmanor, where these releases often appeared first.

Unlike regular release groups, which are often the origin of leaks, Will1869 (as COLLECTiVE) typically sourced his releases from elsewhere. This included cams with embedded ads that were carefully stripped before they were shared further.

UK Police Arrest Will1869, Shut Down Laidbackmanor

For a long time, COLLECTiVE uploads appeared at a steady pace, but that changed at the end of last month, when they suddenly stopped. At the same time, the Laidbackmanor site was taken offline and redirected to a GoDaddy landing page.

In the immediate wake of these events, rumors started to spread that Will1869, a.k.a. COLLECTiVE, had been arrested. This was reported by several unconfirmed sources and corroborated by a message sent through his website hours before it disappeared.

PM sent to Laidbackmanor users

After reaching out to a trusted source, who asked to remain anonymous, we can now report that UK police arrested Will1869 at the end of April. He has since been released on bail but remains under investigation.

At this point, no further information on the case is available, but we are informed that additional details are expected to be released in due course. What is clear, however, is that the arrest effectively means the end for COLLECTiVE and the associated website.

Prominent Releases

It’s unknown how the authorities eventually pinpointed Will1869, but his operation under the COLLECTiVE tag has been a high-profile target for a while, as its releases have been downloaded through pirate sites many millions of times.

In January, COLLECTiVE made headlines when two Oscar-nominated screeners started to leak across various torrent sites. The most popular releases were tagged by COLLECTiVE but Will1869 wasn’t the original source. Instead, the leaks were obtained elsewhere on the open web.

COLLECTiVE’s Nickel Boys release

These pass-through releases were typical of how COLLECTiVE operated. Instead of ripping content directly, Will1869 picked up other releases which, after some ‘improvements’, were uploaded to the public.

The arrest of Will1869 by UK police effectively puts an end to this stream of uploads.

From: TF, for the latest news on copyright battles, piracy and more.

Microsoft is updating Windows 11 with a set of new encryption algorithms that can withstand future attacks from quantum computers in an attempt to jump-start what’s likely to be the most formidable and important technology transition in modern history.

Computers that are based on the physics of quantum mechanics don’t yet exist outside of sophisticated labs, but it’s well-established science that they eventually will. Instead of processing data in the binary state of zeros and ones, quantum computers run on qubits, which encompass myriad states all at once. This new capability promises to bring about new discoveries of unprecedented scale in a host of fields, including metallurgy, chemistry, drug discovery, and financial modeling.

Averting the cryptopocalypse

One of the most disruptive changes quantum computing will bring is the breaking of some of the most common forms of encryption, specifically, the RSA cryptosystem and those based on elliptic curves. These systems are the workhorses that banks, governments, and online services around the world have relied on for more than four decades to keep their most sensitive data confidential. RSA and elliptic curve encryption keys securing web connections would require millions of years to be cracked using today’s computers. A quantum computer could crack the same keys in a matter of hours or minutes.

Read full article

Comments

Außerdem erhalten Filmemacher Google Flow ein KI-Tool auf Veo-Basis, mit dem sich besonders realistische und physikalisch korrekte Clips erzeugen lassen. (Google I/O 2025, Google)

Die KI Jules entwickelt Code und erklärt Vorschläge. Nutzer geben dem Programmieragenten Aufgaben, der arbeitet mit Repositories von Github. (Softwareentwicklung, Google)

Googles leistungsfähigstes KI-Modell Gemini 2.5 Pro soll künftig noch intensiver nachdenken. Außerdem wird es ein neues Abo geben - für 250 US-Dollar im Monat. (Google I/O 2025, Google)

The GMKtec EVO-X1 is a mini PC that combines a versatile set of ports with a powerful 12-core, 24-thread AMD Ryzen AI 9 HX 370 Strix Point processor with 16-core RDNA 3.5 integrated graphics and an NPU that delivers up to 50 TOPS of AI performance. And all of that fits inside a compact body that’s […]

The post GMKtec EVO-X1 Review: Mini PC shows big performance can come from small packages appeared first on Liliputing.