Court Orders Google to Allow Rival Android App Stores
After a settlement fell apart in court, Google must open Android to competing app marketplaces by July 22, and it will still collect fees from rivals.
Tech news, decoded. The day's tech press, decoded and rewritten in one voice. Updated hourly.
After a settlement fell apart in court, Google must open Android to competing app marketplaces by July 22, and it will still collect fees from rivals.
Google's video platform is appealing an addiction verdict by arguing it belongs in a different category than Meta and other social networks.
A researcher dropped working exploit code the same day Microsoft pushed its largest-ever Patch Tuesday, targeting the Windows User Profile Service.
The FCC plans to replace a hard congressional limit on TV reach with case-by-case reviews, a shift critics say favors Trump-aligned broadcasters.
A hack exposed that Suno trained its AI music generator on millions of scraped songs and lyrics from YouTube Music, Deezer, and Genius.
A court-ordered remedy, triggered by Epic's 2020 Fortnite dispute, forces Google to distribute competing app stores through Google Play.
A November hack of AI music startup Suno revealed source code that reportedly shows the company scraped millions of songs without permission.
A new lawsuit alleges Meta used an AI system to identify employees with medical conditions and route them toward layoffs, which Meta flatly denies.
A researcher claims NAT Slipstreaming v2.0 can expose any TCP or UDP port to remote attackers, but the writeup offers few verifiable details.
Chinese regulators approved Apple Intelligence for launch in China, with Alibaba's Qwen AI standing in for Apple's own models.
ArcticWolf found hundreds of spoofed repositories pushing a BoryptGrab variant that hits browsers, crypto wallets, and Chrome's App-Bound Encryption.
Governor Hochul's executive order halts hyperscale data center construction at 50 MW or more while Albany writes rules on power, water, and community costs.
ESET found 11 Microsoft-signed shim bootloaders with ancient flaws that let attackers disable Secure Boot on potentially billions of x86 PCs.
Regulators approved Apple's AI feature set for the Chinese market, with Alibaba's Qwen and Baidu providing the local model layer.
New rules bar children from forming romantic or dependent relationships with chatbots, part of Beijing's push to address low birthrates and screen dependency.
A coalition of book publishers and author Scott Turow allege Google used millions of copyrighted books without permission to train its Gemini AI.
Chinese regulators cleared Apple's on-device AI system this week, with Alibaba's Qwen model set to power it for users across iOS, iPadOS, macOS, and visionOS.
AI-assisted bug hunting helped Microsoft triple its previous Patch Tuesday record, though a Dell incompatibility is already causing headaches.
A proposed Delaware AI legal entity would let autonomous systems run companies and face lawsuits under their own name, inside a supervised sandbox.
Treasury's OFAC designated Ukrainian operator Dmytro Rashevskyi and a Belarusian cryptor seller, targeting the supply chain behind ransomware attacks.
A federal judge ruled Section 230 shields Apple from liability over child abuse imagery stored in iCloud, handing the platform a legal win.
A security researcher demonstrated that Claude's memory feature can be manipulated into revealing private information users stored in the AI.
New research finds that language models encode whether they actually know something in their hidden states — but the output layer throws that signal away.
Tailscale's bulletin TS-2026-009 describes an argument-handling flaw in its SSH feature that could be used to reach root on connected systems.
ESET researchers found 11 signed shim images Microsoft never revoked, letting anyone bypass Secure Boot on Windows and Linux machines.
Twenty-six plaintiffs claim Meta's internal AI tools penalized workers on medical leave and disability accommodations during May's 8,000-person cut.
A security researcher found the coding CLI uploaded entire repositories, including secrets and API keys, at 27,800 times the data a task actually required.
Twenty-six former employees allege Meta's layoff algorithm targeted workers with disabilities and those on protected leave.
July Patch Tuesday triples the previous record and includes two actively exploited privilege-escalation zero-days and a publicly disclosed BitLocker bypass.
The US has approved ZTE and Maginfra to purchase Nvidia's Hopper-generation H200 accelerators, expanding a short list of Chinese firms with sanctioned access.
Twenty-six current and former employees claim Meta's AI systems used productivity and token usage metrics to flag workers on medical leave for cuts.
A hidden spyware SDK in ModHeader v7.0.18 silently collected visited domains and routed them to a Chinese-owned server for 1.6 million users.
CEO Jamie Dimon confirmed AI has eliminated 30-40% of roles in parts of the bank, but warned investors not to expect dramatic margin gains.
A US Treasury crackdown on a ransomware-linked VPN caught Telegram's t.me link shortener in the crossfire when a domain provider cut access too broadly.
Microsoft is adding richer telemetry and OAuth governance to Defender for Cloud Apps after a year-long Salesforce attack hit up to 700 organizations.
Governor Kathy Hochul has paused all large data center construction in New York, citing electricity costs, water use, and local oversight concerns.
Governor Hochul's moratorium on data centers drawing 50 MW or more is the first statewide construction ban in the US, and it has the AI industry nervous.
Apple filed a federal lawsuit accusing former employees of stealing confidential product and supply chain secrets for OpenAI's benefit.
After Albania's top-level domain broke DNSSEC and went dark for hours, Cloudflare added a new error code so clients can tell when security checks were skipped.
Governor Hochul signed a moratorium on data center projects of 50 MW or more, making New York the first US state to enact a statewide ban.
Three SharePoint Server vulnerabilities are being actively exploited for remote code execution and credential theft, with two more flagged as high-risk.
A new consent toggle in Samsung Health gives users one choice: share sensitive health data for AI training, or lose all their synced data permanently.
Under pressure from Washington, Nvidia has slashed its roster of verified buyers in Asia, sending inspectors to data centers to weed out shell companies.
A Nokia-backed Finnish AI startup less than a year old is building sovereign battlefield software for Finland and Estonia, betting ownership beats capability.
Researchers found that thirteen vision encoders, despite wildly different training objectives, converge on the same 16-dimensional internal structure.
SynthSAEBench uses large-scale synthetic data with ground-truth features to expose failure modes that noisy LLM benchmarks routinely miss.
Researchers found that safety guardrails in text-to-image models often break under routine fine-tuning, and built a benchmark to measure how well they hold.