Condé Nast, the media giant that owns The New Yorker, Vogue and Wired, has sent a cease-and-desist letter to AI-powered search startup Perplexity, according to The Information. The letter, sent on Monday, demanded Perplexity stop using content from Condé Nast publications in its AI-generated responses and accused the startup of plagiarism. It comes a month after Forbes took similar action.
A faulty update from cybersecurity provider CrowdStrike caused a global outage last Friday, apparently affecting some 8.5 million Windows devices, according to Microsoft itself. The update triggered a blue screen of death (BSOD), knocking offline systems used by hospitals, airlines, and banks.
The mining of technology nostalgia is unrelenting. Earlier this week, we had an unofficial return of the iPod, not to mention Tamagotchis and now Discman. Well, not an actual Discman, which is a Sony brand, but the portable CD player is back.
iOS 18 has landed in public beta and Apple is offering up more control, yet again, of the layout of your iPhone. However, Apple Intelligence, the most exciting upgrade, is conspicuously (but unsurprisingly) absent.
Meta has reportedly decided not to offer its upcoming multimodal AI model and future versions to customers in the European Union, citing a lack of clarity on the European regulators’ data protection rules. These newer AI models process not only text but also images and audio, and power AI capabilities across Meta’s platforms.
Some of the world’s largest tech companies trained their AI models on datasets that included transcripts of more than 173,000 YouTube videos without permission. That’s according to an investigation from Proof News, which laid out how Apple, NVIDIA and Anthropic, among other companies, used transcripts of YouTube videos from more than 48,000 channels. This goes against YouTube’s own platform rules, which Google execs have repeatedly mentioned.
Amazon’s retail phenomenon is back and everywhere. Prime Day is here to offer deals on stuff you might want (and even more deals on stuff you don’t), and so far this year, discounts are pretty substantial on big-ticket items.
A new space suit designed by scientists at Weill Cornell Medicine and Cornell University, inspired by Frank Herbert’s Dune, could make spacewalks longer and less disgusting by recycling expelled urine in a special filtration backpack.
Joby Aviation says its electric vertical takeoff and landing (eVTOL) aircraft successfully completed a 523-mile test flight, powered by hydrogen.
There weren’t too many surprises (thanks, leaks!) at Samsung’s Unpacked event, held live in Paris with satellite events in New York, London and elsewhere. The big announcement was Samsung’s foray into a new kind of wearable, the smart ring.