Industry News

Microsoft has poured over $100 billion into developing its Bing search engine over the past two decades but has little market share to show for it. About nine out of every 10 web searches in the US are made through Google, with Bing splitting the remaining queries with a long list of small competitors.

On Thursday the US government asked a federal judge in Washington, DC, to rule that Google maintains that lead illegally, by unfairly manipulating users to keep Microsoft and other competitors down.

The Biden administration is asking the world’s largest technology companies to publicly commit to tightening the digital security of their software and cloud services. The voluntary pledge, first reported by WIRED, represents the latest effort by the Department of Homeland Security’s Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) to build support for its Secure by Design initiative, which encourages tech vendors to prioritize cybersecurity while developing and configuring their products.

In mid-June 2019, Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates and CEO Satya Nadella received a rude awakening in an email warning that Google had officially gotten too far ahead on AI and that Microsoft may never catch up without investing in OpenAI.

With the subject line "Thoughts on OpenAI," the email came from Microsoft's chief technology officer, Kevin Scott, who is also the company’s executive vice president of AI. In it, Scott said that he was "very, very worried" that he had made "a mistake" by dismissing Google's initial AI efforts as a "game-playing stunt."

On Wednesday, Anthropic announced the launch of an iOS mobile app for its Claude 3 AI language models that are similar to OpenAI's ChatGPT. It also introduced a new subscription tier designed for group collaboration. Before the app launch, Claude was only available through a website, an API, and other apps that integrated Claude through API.

Facing competition from Starlink and other emerging satellite broadband networks, the two companies that own most of the traditional commercial communications spacecraft in geostationary orbit announced plans to join forces Tuesday.

The disruption to GPS services started getting worse on Christmas Day. Planes and ships moving around southern Sweden and Poland lost connectivity as their radio signals were interfered with. Since then, the region around the Baltic Sea—including neighboring Germany, Finland, Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania—has faced persistent attacks against GPS systems.

At a tech forum in Beijing last week, a Chinese company unveiled a “homegrown” brain-computer interface that allowed a monkey to seemingly control a robotic arm just by thinking about it.

In a video shown at the event, a monkey with its hands restrained uses the interface to move a robotic arm and grasp a strawberry. The system, developed by NeuCyber NeuroTech and the Chinese Institute for Brain Research, involves soft electrode filaments implanted in the brain, according to state-run news media outlet Xinhua.

The US Drug Enforcement Administration is preparing to reclassify marijuana to a lower-risk drug category, a major federal policy change that is in line with recommendations from the US health department last year. The upcoming move was first reported by the Associated Press on Tuesday afternoon and has since been confirmed by several other outlets.

Tesla shares jumped in premarket trading in New York after Bloomberg reported that Beijing had given Tesla the 'greenlight' to roll out its driver-assistance system, known as "Full Self-Driving," or FSD, in the world's largest car market.

Sources say Tesla will partner with Chinese tech giant Baidu for mapping and navigation software to support FSD. Tesla also has multiple data security and privacy requirements that satisfy the country's regulators.

Seven years ago, a cyberattack left many of the most popular websites based in the United States inaccessible. For three extended periods on October 21, 2016, internet users were left without their doses of Twitter, CNN and Netflix among other popular sites.