This Week In Techdirt History: March 23rd – 29th
Five Years Ago This week in 2020, the pandemic news continued. Some people were attempting to leverage it to call for longer patent terms, while we were calling for loosening…
Ex-FCC chairs from both parties say CBS news distortion investigation is bogus
The Federal Communications Commission’s news distortion investigation into CBS drew a public rebuke from a bipartisan group of five former FCC commissioners, including two former chairmen. The group criticizing current…
Google discontinues Nest Protect smoke alarm and Nest x Yale lock
Google acquired Nest in 2014 for a whopping $3.4 billion but seems increasingly uninterested in making smart home hardware. The company has just announced two of its home gadgets will…
Oracle has reportedly suffered 2 separate breaches exposing thousands of customers‘ PII
Oracle isn’t commenting on recent reports that it has experienced two separate data breaches that have exposed sensitive personal information belonging to thousands of its customers. The most recent data…
Report: US scientists lost $3 billion in NIH grants since Trump took office
Since Trump took office on January 20, research funding from the National Institutes of Health has plummeted by more than $3 billion compared with the pace of funding in 2024,…
Beyond RGB: A new image file format efficiently stores invisible light data
Imagine working with special cameras that capture light your eyes can’t even see—ultraviolet rays that cause sunburn or infrared heat signatures that reveal hidden writing. Or perhaps using specialized cameras…
Why do LLMs make stuff up? New research peers under the hood.
One of the most frustrating things about using a large language model is dealing with its tendency to confabulate information, hallucinating answers that are not supported by its training data.…
New Windows 11 build makes mandatory Microsoft Account sign-in even more mandatory
Microsoft released a new Windows Insider build of Windows 11 to its experimental Dev Channel today, with a fairly extensive batch of new features and tweaks. But the most important…
Elon Musk’s X has a new owner—Elon Musk’s xAI
Elon Musk today said he has merged X and xAI in a deal that values the social network formerly known as Twitter at $33 billion. Musk purchased Twitter for $44…
The CDC buried a measles forecast that stressed the need for vaccinations
ProPublica is a Pulitzer Prize-winning investigative newsroom. Sign up for The Big Story newsletter to receive stories like this one in your inbox. Leaders at the Centers for Disease Control…