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Today — 9 January 2025Tech News

Best of CES 2025: All of the wildest and most intriguing gear, new releases, and hands-on features [Updated]

By: 9to5Toys
9 January 2025 at 10:06

All of the best and most interesting to new gear from CES 2025 is being collected for you right here. The latest in smart home advancements and display tech to the suite of AI features seemingly getting injected into just about all of it, and everything in between, we will be rounding up the most intriguing new reveals and prototypes as well as products you’ll actually be able to get your hands-on this year down below.

more…

Best of CES 2025: All of the wildest and most intriguing gear, new releases, and hands-on features [Updated]

By: 9to5Toys
9 January 2025 at 10:06

All of the best and most interesting to new gear from CES 2025 is being collected for you right here. The latest in smart home advancements and display tech to the suite of AI features seemingly getting injected into just about all of it, and everything in between, we will be rounding up the most intriguing new reveals and prototypes as well as products you’ll actually be able to get your hands-on this year down below.

more…

This Tim Cook habit can almost fix Vision Pro’s biggest problem

9 January 2025 at 09:54

Tim Cook says that he uses his Vision Pro every day. And in multiple interviews this past year, he’s mentioned a specific habit with the product that’s a big part of his use: lying down. After following his lead, I can now report that this method can (almost) fix the Vision Pro’s biggest problem.

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Mark Zuckerberg gave Meta’s Llama team the OK to train on copyrighted works, filing claims

9 January 2025 at 10:10

Counsel for plaintiffs in a copyright lawsuit filed against Meta allege that Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg gave the green light to the team behind the company’s Llama AI models to use a data set of pirated ebooks and articles for training. The case, Kadrey v. Meta, is one of many against tech giants developing AI […]

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The Switch 2 leaks keep coming

9 January 2025 at 09:59
A render of what’s apparently the Nintendo Switch 2.
Image: OnLeaks on X

New day, new Nintendo Switch 2 leaks. Nintendo is getting ever-closer to its April 2025 deadline to reveal its Switch successor, but thanks new renders from OnLeaks and 91Mobiles, we may now have an even better idea of what the new console might look like.

If you’ve been following our coverage of other Switch 2 leaks, these renders shouldn’t look too surprising. According to the new renders, the console will resemble the original Switch, but it will be bigger, with an 8.4-inch screen. Interestingly, OnLeaks and 91Mobiles report that the screen will “most likely” be an “OLED panel” — previous reports have said the console would have an LCD screen.

The renders show that the top of the Switch 2 will feature a power button, a volume rocker, a 3.5mm headphone jack, a game card slot, and, new for the Switch 2, a USB-C port. OnLeaks and 91Mobiles also say that “there also seems to be a sensor of sorts” and they speculate that “this might be an ambient light sensor or something else.” These renders also have a U-shaped kickstand that has appeared in other leaks.

As for the Joy-Cons, OnLeaks and 91Mobiles’ renders show the mysterious second new button on the right Joy-Con. However, they say the new button is above the Home button; other leaks have included the new button below it. The Joy-Cons in the renders have the large buttons in the back that are apparently used to detach the controllers from the console, which are apparently attached magnetically.

The renders also show an interesting color scheme for the Joy-Cons: they are mostly black but have color accents — light blue on the left one and orange on the right — under the joystick pads and on the bumped-out part of the controllers with the SL and SR buttons. A similar design popped up earlier this month for an alleged Switch 2 left Joy-Con with light blue accents. I love it, personally.

Hopefully, given the tidal wave of recent leaks, we don’t have to wait too much longer for Nintendo to officially announce the new console. But whenever the console actually launches, it’s going to have some stiff competition.

New $120 16GB Raspberry Pi 5 is for the people who use it like an everyday PC

The Raspberry Pi foundation has spent the last year filling out the Pi 5 lineup—in August, we got a cheaper $50 version with 2GB of RAM, and in December, we got the Pi 500, a Pi-inside-a-keyboard intended specifically for general-purpose desktop use. Today, the Pi 5 board achieves what may be its final form: a version with 16GB of RAM, available for $120.

The 16GB version of the Pi 5 includes the revised "d0" stepping of the Pi 5's BCM2712 processor. For the Pi's purposes, this chip is functionally identical to the original version but uses slightly less power and runs slightly cooler because it cuts out silicon used for features that the Pi 5 didn't take advantage of.

Raspberry Pi CEO Eben Upton writes that the 16GB version of the Pi 5 is possible because of other tweaks made to the d0 stepping of the Pi 5's processor, plus an updated LPDDR4X chip from Micron that could fit eight 16 Gbit RAM dies inside a single package that could fit on the Pi 5's board.

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© Raspberry Pi Foundation

Linux Foundation bands together Chromium browser makers in a “neutral space”

Supporters of Chromium-Based Browsers sounds like a very niche local meetup, one with hats and T-shirts that barely fit the name. But it's really a "neutral space" for funding and support, corralling together some big names with a stake in the future of Chrome's open source roots, Chromium.

The Linux Foundation, a nonprofit started in 2000 that has grown to support a broader range of open source projects, spurred the initiative. In a press release, the Foundation states that the project will allow "industry leaders, academia, developers, and the broader open source community" to work on Chromium, with "much-needed funding and development support for open development of projects."

A few names you don't often see together are already on board: Google, Meta, Microsoft, and Opera. Krystian Kolondra, executive vice president of browsers at Opera, stated in a release that "as one of the major browsers contributing to the Chromium project," Opera would "look forward to collaborating with members of the project to foster this growth and keep building innovative and compelling products for all users."

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© Chromium

How the UK was connected to the Internet for the first time

The Internet has become the most prevalent communications technology the world has ever seen. Though there are more fixed and mobile telephone connections, even they use Internet technology in their core. For all the many uses the Internet allows for today, its origins lie in the cold war and the need for a defence communications network that could survive a nuclear strike. But that defence communications network quickly became used for general communications and within only a few years of the first transmission, traffic on the predecessor to today’s Internet was already 75% email.

In the beginning

Arpanet was the vital precursor of today’s Internet, commissioned by the US Defence Advanced Research Projects Agency (Darpa) in 1969. In his interesting account of why Arpanet came about, Stephen Lukasic, Director of Darpa from 1970-75, wrote that if its true nature and impact had been realised it would never have been permitted under the US government structure of the time. The concept for a decentralised communications technology that would survive a nuclear attack would have placed it outside Darpa’s remit (as defence communications specifically were assigned to a different agency), so the focus changed to how to connect computers together so that major applications could be run on the most appropriate system available.

This was in the era of time-sharing computers. Today’s familiar world of the ubiquitous “personal computer” on each desk was decades away. Computers of this time were generally very large, filling entire rooms, and comparatively rare. Users working at connected terminals would submit jobs to the computer which would allocate processing time for the job when available. The idea went that if these computers were networked together, an available remote computer could process a job even when the computers closer to the users were full. The resulting network was called Arpanet and the first packets of data traversed the network in September 1969.

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© Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory

Scout Motors CEO Scott Keogh says modern cars have become ‘dystopian’ and ‘disconnected’

9 January 2025 at 09:37

Volkswagen-backed startup Scout Motors broke cover just a few months ago, and at this week’s CES 2025 in Las Vegas, Nevada, they hold the honor of being one of the only American automakers with a presence at the show.  That’s not the only thing that stands out about Scout being here, though. In a sea […]

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The US Government Has Banned Information Platforms Long Before TikTok. It Didn’t Go Well.

9 January 2025 at 09:34
The Justice Department's effort to bar Americans from access to TikTok--a matter to be argued before the Supreme Court tomorrow--is possibly the most contentious first-amendment case of the social media age. But it's not a new one. The United States has enacted widespread bans on publications and information sources in the past, for reasons similar...

Disney Unveils 3 Ways It’s Using AI to Evolve Its Advertising

9 January 2025 at 09:28
Disney has a history of investing in machine learning and AI audience segmentation, and during its fifth-annual Global Tech & Data Showcase at CES on Wednesday, the company revealed the latest ways AI is enhancing its advertising capabilities. Ahead of the presentation, Disney revealed several ad updates, including a new biddable offering for live sports...

Amazon is selling the tech behind its $50 billion ad business to other retailers

By: Emma Roth
9 January 2025 at 09:33
Illustration of Amazon’s wordmark on an orange, black, and tan background made up of overlapping lines.
Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge

Amazon’s massive advertising business, which is only surpassed in the US by Google and Meta, is about to get bigger. In addition to selling ads on its sprawling marketplace, it will now let other retailers use the technology powering its $50 billion business on their own websites, as reported earlier by Adweek.

The company’s new Retail Ad Service beta will let other online stores “Deliver contextually relevant ads by leveraging Amazon’s two decades of ad tech expertise, driven by machine learning models trained on trillions of shopping signals” across their product, search, and browsing pages.

It also plugs the retailers into Amazon’s existing advertising customers, as brands already using Amazon’s ad system can choose to place their ads on third-party sites. The setup also allows Amazon to pull more profit from “retail media” (ads you see in stores or while shopping online) even when the shopping isn’t happening on its site, and could give it access to more data — which is something the FTC may have questions about.

The path of this business is similar to the launch of Amazon Web Services, which the company built to keep its online marketplace running and loading quickly 24/7 before selling access to the servers as a backbone for other companies’ operations, as noted by CNBC.

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