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Google has lost its court battle with the U.S. Department of Justice,
who initially sued the tech giant for violating antitrust laws back in 2020.
Because Google is used for more than 90% of search queries in the U.S.,
D.C. district judge, Amit Mehta, wrote in his final ruling that Google is a monopolist.
Get them a monocle, and it abuses that position by paying companies like Apple
as much as $20 billion a year to be the default search engine on their devices.
As pointed out by The Verge, Mehta's ruling summarized some spicy moments
from the trial, like Apple exec Eddie Q, saying during testimony that I don't believe
there's a price in the world that Microsoft could offer us
to replace Google with Bing. This is more about Bing, honestly.
He continued, they offered to give us Bing for free. They could give us the whole company.
Google's superiority as a product isn't really in question here,
but Mehta points out that Google felt so secure
in their position, they made controversial product changes
without concern that its users might go elsewhere,
which brings a distinct stench,
more than a whiff of monopoly to the nostrils. So what happens now?
Does Google get broken up into separate companies, each of which go to jail?
Well, if this plays out like Microsoft's antitrust conviction back in 1999,
the year of the best movies ever, Google may end up reaching a settlement
that forces them to even the playing field. Unfortunately, that might not be enough
to save Mozilla of Firefox fame, which brought in $593 million of revenue in 2022,
510 of which came from Google's search payments.
Suddenly Bing ain't looking so bad, baby.
I add these voices to myself. Reviews are out for AMD's Ryzen 5, 9600X,
and Ryzen 7, 9700X CPUs, and the results look pretty good.
The new Zen 5 chips show a clear performance improvement over their previous gen counterparts and run cooler.
That's thanks in part to AMD's claimed 15% improvement in thermal resistance,
a claim that almost sounds like it means something until you read it a second time.
Thermal resistance is a measurable property. Did it increase or decrease?
That's like me saying, I improved the meters on my weekly run.
Anyway, the 9600X and 9700X not only outperformed
the 7700X and 7600X, but do so while consuming 40% less power,
at least for the most part. Tech PowerUp found that on average during gaming,
the 9600X and 9700X consume about the same amount of juice
as the 7600X and 7700X respectively.
In terms of pricing, it's also a bit of a good news, bad news situation.
AMD's announced prices for the entire Ryzen 9000 series
are cheaper than the launch price of the Ryzen 7000 chips.
Sure, but the situation completely flips when you look at Ryzen 7000's current prices.
For instance, the 9700X costs $69 more than the 7700X.
Ironically, that's not the very nice. NVIDIA has been scraping 80 years worth of videos daily
to train their AI without permission, according to leaked documents and Slack messages.
An internal chart shows the company compiled 38.5 million video URLs for download,
all with the blessing of CEO, Jensen Huang,
and his leather jacket, who really calls the shots. Huang's just a puppet.
They won't let me stop. This is despite the fact that those videos came
from platforms like Netflix and YouTube. And this isn't like that earlier
NVIDIA AI scraping controversy where they used a third party dataset
that contained unauthorized YouTube data from channels like MKBHD.
Messages show that NVIDIA employees were encouraged to suggest specific YouTube channels
whose videos should be downloaded and used for training. One of those channels was, you guessed it, MKBHD.
But it was only because his videos are super high quality.
And it's a compliment. Dang it.
Upon hearing the news, Marquez tweeted the word, cool, six times in a row.
Cool, cool, cool, cool, cool. Yet for some reason I suspect
that he thinks it's actually not cool. I know it sounds weird, but I'm just getting the vibe.
NVIDIA has given a response that was definitely proofread
saying they respect the rights all of content creators,
but they are complying with the letter and spurt of copyright law,
because they're just learning information from different sources to make their own expressions.
You know, I tried that excuse for plagiarism once, but my university didn't like it very much.
Quick bits have been a part of important historical events. For example, during the American Revolution,
Paul Revere famously told the Patriots that the quick bit ish were coming.
X has filed a federal lawsuit against the Global Alliance for Responsible Media,
accusing the coalition of colluding to create an ad boycott
on the Elon Musk on platform. The lawsuit was accompanied by an amazing video
from ex CEO Linda Hacharino,
who communicated her thoughts both in English and American stern mom sign language.
The suit is a bit surprising since Musk famously told advertisers to go fuck themselves.
Is he upset they listened? Someone took my advice, you're not supposed to do that.
You fuck myself. Google has announced they are killing the Chromecast
for Google TV devices in a blog post discussing memorable moments in Chromecast history,
because there's nothing more Google than saying, remember this cool stuff we did?
Anyway, it's dead now. The company is launching a new product
called the Google TV Streamer, a premium priced, of course, HDMI set top box
that doubles as a smart home hub. It costs twice as much
as the now discontinued 4K Chromecast for Google TV dongle,
but it does not include an HDMI cable in the box.
Nothing says premium, quite like supplying your own fucking cables.
Dell is allegedly laying off more workers.
It's all part of a reorganization effort that is also meant to create a new group
within its sales team focusing on artificial intelligence products and services,
making this possibly the most roundabout way that jobs have been lost due to AI.
Several sources claim 12,500 jobs are being cut,
bringing the total number of Dell layoffs over the past 50 months to 24,500.
After Intel announced they were laying off 15,000 people last week,
we hear a tech link specifically requested that everyone stop competing for the biggest status number.
We even said please. Reddit CEO and arch enemy of Reddit users,
Steve Huffman has suggested paywalling subreddits
as a potential source of income for the site, paywalling certain subreddits.
During an earnings call, Huffman suggested that the current free version of Reddit
would continue to exist. They just create cool new subreddits
with exclusive content in private areas. Huffman also announced the site
would be testing AI powered search results pages to summarize and recommend content.
Something he believes will increase ad revenue. Ooh, AI and ads?
Say less, Steve. Seriously, please stop talking. And Logitech is now backpedaling after their CEO
claimed the company wanted to release a subscription based forever mouse
in an interview with the Verge. This is the second statement the company
has had to walk back from, from that interview. As Logitech also had to assure customers
it wasn't discontinuing its smart home cameras. Logitech now says they have no plans
to release a subscription based mouse and called the idea provocative internal thinking,
which is also how my problematic uncle defends his past comments.
Here's a provocative comment. You should come back on Friday for more tech news.
What, what did you think I was gonna say? It's not provocative actually, it's normalize it.