Month: June 2025

Now that Meta has largely beaten an AI training copyright lawsuit raised by 13 book authors—including comedian Sarah Silverman and Pulitzer Prize-winning author Junot Diaz—the only matter left to settle in that case is whether Meta violated copyright laws by torrenting books used to train Llama models.

In an order that partly grants Meta's motion for summary judgment, judge Vince Chhabria confirmed that Meta and the authors would meet on July 11 to "discuss how to proceed on the plaintiffs’ separate claim that Meta unlawfully distributed their protected works during the torrenting process."

Chhabria's order suggested that authors may struggle to win this part of the fight, too, due to a lack of evidence, as there has not yet been much discovery on this issue that was raised so late in the case. But he also warned that Meta was wrong to argue its torrenting was completely "irrelevant" to whether its copying of books was fair use.

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On Wednesday, Anthropic announced a new feature that expands its Artifacts document management system into the basis of a personal AI app gallery resembling something from the Flash game era of the early 2000s—though these apps run on modern web code rather than Adobe's defunct plugin.

Using plain English dialogue, users can build and share interactive applications directly within Claude's chatbot interface using a new API capability that lets artifacts interact with Claude itself. Claude is an AI assistant similar to ChatGPT.

Claude has been capable of building web apps for some time, but Anthropic has put renewed focus on the feature that many have overlooked. "I'm amused that Anthropic turned 'we added a window.claude.complete() function to Artifacts' into what looks like a major new product launch," wrote independent AI researcher Simon Willison in a blog post, "but I can't say it's bad marketing for them to do that!"

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After sending cease-and-desist letters to VMware users whose support contracts had expired and who subsequently declined to subscribe to one of Broadcom’s VMware bundles, Broadcom has started the process of conducting audits on former VMware customers.

Broadcom stopped selling VMware perpetual licenses in November 2023 in favor of pushing a small number of VMware SKUs that feature multiple VMware offerings. Since Broadcom is forcefully bundling VMware products, the costs associated with running VMware have skyrocketed, with customers frequently citing 300 percent price hikes and some firms claiming even larger increases. As a result, some VMware users have opted to keep using VMware perpetual licenses, even though Broadcom refuses to renew most of those clients’ support services.

This year, Broadcom started sending such VMware users cease-and-desist letters [PDF], telling organizations to stop using any maintenance releases/updates, minor releases, major releases/upgrades extensions, enhancements, patches, bug fixes, or security patches (except for zero-day security patches) that VMware issued since the user’s support contract ended.

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Mit der Mehrheit von CDU und SPD ist die bundesweit strengste gesetzliche Regelung zum Umgang mit mobilen digitalen Endgeräten an Schulen eingeführt worden. Grüne und FDP waren dagegen. (Schulen, Smartphone)

Soon after a landmark ruling deemed that when Anthropic copied books to train artificial intelligence models, it was a "transformative" fair use, another judge has arrived at the same conclusion in a case pitting book authors against Meta.

But that doesn't necessarily mean the judges are completely in agreement, and that could soon become a problem for not just Meta, but other big AI companies celebrating the pair of wins this week.

On Wednesday, Judge Vince Chhabria explained that he sided with Meta, despite his better judgment, mainly because the authors made all the wrong arguments in their case against Meta.

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Microsoft's new 13-inch Surface Laptop is an odd one. It's inarguably a step down in every respect from last year's 13.8-inch Surface Laptop. But it's also too good (and too expensive) to be considered a replacement for the Surface Laptop Go, the company's perennially overpriced and underspecced entry-level laptop. It's cheaper than last year's Surfaces, but mostly because Microsoft gave those devices a de facto price hike by killing the entry-level configurations of those PCs.

We're left with a laptop that's perfectly fine or even great, depending on what you want. It's relatively affordable for what is, a sort of MacBook Air-ish, just-the-basics portable computer. But it's such a step down from the $999 laptop Microsoft released just last year that it's hard not to see the entire laptop as one big series of compromises.

Where does the 13-inch Surface Laptop belong?

Despite just calling it the "Surface Laptop, 13-inch," Microsoft clearly considers this to be an entirely different sub-class of laptop rather than a continuation of the flagship Surface Laptop or the lower-end Surface Go. The system identifies itself to Windows as "Surface Laptop 13in 1st Ed with Snapdragon," where the 13.8- and 15-inch Surface Laptops are both labeled as 7th edition devices.

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Bereits seit einem Jahr hätten Hersteller das Recht auf Reparatur für Elektronik umsetzen können. Nun bemerkt man, dass Fachkräfte fehlen - und der Staat soll zahlen. (Recycling & Reparatur, GreenIT)

Earlier this week, we reported on a Swedish archaeologist who spent the last three years sailing the fjords in a replica boat similar to those the Vikings may have used. Not to be outdone, Japanese researchers have followed suit, building their own seaworthy dugout canoe with Paleolithic-era tools to cross between Taiwan and Yonaguni Island, where one of the world’s strongest ocean currents, the Kuroshio, remains active.

They presented their findings in two new papers published in the journal Science Advances. One describes the experimental trial, and the other involves numerical simulations to investigate the general conditions needed for the crossing. The successfully re-enacted voyage suggests that early modern humans likely had a high level of strategic seafaring knowledge. (You can watch a 90-minute documentary about the voyage here.) This would explain the presence of archaeological evidence that Paleolithic people made the crossing some 30,000 years ago without the aid of maps, metal tools, or modern boats.

“We initiated this project with simple questions: ‘How did Paleolithic people arrive at such remote islands as Okinawa? How difficult was their journey? And what tools and strategies did they use?’” said co-author Yousuke Kaifu of the University of Tokyo. “Archaeological evidence such as remains and artifacts can’t paint a full picture as the nature of the sea is that it washes such things away. So we turned to the idea of experimental archaeology, in a similar vein to the Kon-Tiki expedition of 1947 by Norwegian explorer Thor Heyerdahl.”

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Over the past year, Google has transformed its web search experience with AI, driving toward a zero-click experience. Now, the same AI focus is coming to YouTube, and Premium subscribers can get a preview of the new search regime. Select searches on the video platform will now produce an AI-generated results carousel with a collection of relevant videos. Even if you don't pay for YouTube, AI is still coming for you with an expansion of Google's video chatbot.

Google says the new AI search feature, which appears at the top of the results page, will include multiple videos, along with an AI summary of each. You can tap the video thumbnails to begin playing them right from the carousel. The summary is intended to extract the information most relevant to your search query, so you may not even have to watch the videos.

The AI results carousel is only a test right now, and it's limited to YouTube Premium subscribers. If you're paying for Premium, you can enable the feature on YouTube's experimental page. While the feature is entirely opt-in right now, that probably won't last long. Like AI Overviews in search, this feature will take precedence over organic search results and get people interacting with Google's AI, and that's the driving force behind most of the company's decisions lately.

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The new Acer Chromebook Plus 514 (CB514-6H/6HT) is ChromeOS laptop with an Intel Core 3 N355 octa-core processor based on Intel’s Twin Lake architecture, and a 14 inch, 1920 x 1200 pixel display with optional touchscreen support. It’s a relatively modest update over last year’s model, but the new version brings a slightly faster processor, a […]

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