A federal judge ruled today that Google is a monopolist in some parts of the online advertising market, marking the second case in a year where the company was found to have violated US antitrust law. Last August, a federal judge ruled that Google was maintaining an illegal monopoly in search. Judge Leonie Brinkema of…
It’s been a week since President Donald Trump imposed massive tariffs on Chinese imports to the United States, but the policies haven’t forced Amazon shoppers in the US to dig deeper into their wallets just yet. Recent data from price tracking websites reviewed by WIRED show little in the way of dramatic price hikes across…
On June 5, a Pinal County Board of Supervisors meeting was asked to approve a $500,000 contract between the county and Massive Blue in order to license Overwatch. “I was looking at the website for Massive Blue, and it’s a one-pager with no additional information and no links,” Kevin Cavanaugh, the then-supervisor for District 1,…
A New Mexico man is facing federal charges for two separate incidents of alleged arson—one at an Albuquerque Tesla showroom and one at the New Mexico Republican Party’s office—according to a Monday press release from the Department of Justice. Jamison Wagner, 40, was charged with allegedly setting fire to a building or vehicle used in…
The wife of data privacy professor Xiaofeng Wang, who was fired from his tenured job at Indiana University, Bloomington (IU) the same day the couple’s houses were searched by the Federal Bureau of Investigation last month, said on Monday that she believes her family has been unfairly targeted by the US government and is the…
Note that while Generative Erase and Remove Background can be used for free, Image Creator uses up AI credits associated with your Microsoft account. You can’t buy these separately, they come as part of a subscription to Microsoft 365 or Copilot Pro subscriptions, so use them wisely. You can read more about AI credits and…
When one factory in one of these towns designs a new product, others nearby can quickly copy it or produce their own, slightly different version. There’s even a Chinese word for these kinds of dupes: shanzhai. Creating such a densely concentrated and rapidly iterative ecosystem like this took years of concentrated effort. “It all requires…
The original version of this story appeared in Quanta Magazine. Large language models work well because they’re so large. The latest models from OpenAI, Meta, and DeepSeek use hundreds of billions of “parameters”—the adjustable knobs that determine connections among data and get tweaked during the training process. With more parameters, the models are better able…
Meanwhile, the Trump family’s crypto empire continues to expand. In late March, Eric Trump and Donald Trump Jr., the president’s sons, announced a new bitcoin mining venture. Shortly before that, the parent company of Truth Social, Trump’s social media platform, entered an agreement to launch a series of crypto-exchange-traded funds. President Trump himself has previously…
Palantir, the software company cofounded by Peter Thiel, is part of an effort by Elon Musk’s so-called Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) to build a new “mega API” for accessing Internal Revenue Service records, IRS sources tell WIRED. For the past three days, DOGE and a handful of Palantir representatives, along with dozens of career…