The government should be scrutinizing Metaâs power. Unfortunately, its legal attack isn’t cutting to the heart of what keeps Meta big.
This week, I spent three days in a Washington, DC courtroom watching Mark Zuckerberg testify. He was there defending his company from being broken up by the Federal Trade Commission, which is seeking to unwind his acquisitions of Instagram and WhatsApp on the grounds that they were anticompetitive. At times, he was made uncomfortable and challenged with evidence that he wanted to âneutralizeâ rivals. Primarily, what I observed was the FTC’s misunderstanding of how social media works.
To establish the market it argues Meta has a monopoly in, the FTC has defined a subset of social media that it calls âpersonal social networking services.â This category includes apps that primarily facilitate sharing between friends and family, but for some reason, doesnât include private messaging apps. The government argues that Metaâs only competitors in this market are Snapchat and MeWe, an obscure, blockchain-based social network that claims to have 20 million users. Conveniently for the FTC, including only these two companies gives Meta a de fac …
Prototyping is an important stage in the development of a new app. And to make life even easier for developers, prototyping platform Play recently introduced Play to Xcode, which essentially turns mockups into real app projects.
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Tesla has plenty of Cybertrucks listed on its website, and they’ve got some hefty discounts, including many for about $10,000 off, Electrek reports. Many are from the 2024 model year and include limited “Foundation Series” Cybertrucks that ended production in October, plus some lightly used “demo” ones we saw that have racked up around 300 miles on the odometer.
Some Cybertruck models in stock won’t be eligible for the $7,500 federal tax credit either due to their age or because the sticker price is too high. But as of this writing, interested buyers could get more than that with the available discounts, including as much as a $11,990 cut off a top Cyberbeast model that usually sells for $119,990. In January, the company offered up to $2,600 off inventory Cybertrucks.
Used Cybertruck prices are also taking a hit. CarGurus currently shows the average used Cybertruck selling for about $85,000, a steep drop from $104,300 on December 30th and $107,800 from November.
Business Insider reports Tesla is also slowing down Cybertruck manufacturing at its Texas factory and shrinking its production teams. Some line workers are being moved over to build better-selling Model Y vehicles, but it, too, has seen a year-over-year decline in sales as reported by the company earlier this month.
Risk-isolated lending protocol Silo has launched V2 of its protocol on Sonic, the high-speed Layer 1 that was once known as Fantom. Risk-isolation has always been synonymous with Silo, whose lending and borrowing protocol has hundreds of millions of dollars […]
The post Silo V2 Lending Reduces Risk and Ramps Up Rewards on Sonic first appeared on Tech Startups.
NBA fans are still recovering from the shocking trade of star Luka Doncic from the Mavericks to the LA Lakers. And in a new interview with Doncic, he reveals that his iPhone might still be recovering a little too.
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Google's history with music services is almost as convoluted and frustrating as its history with messaging. However, things have gotten calmer (and slower) ever since Google ceded music to the YouTube division. The YouTube Music app has its share of annoyances, to be sure, but it's getting a long-overdue feature that users have been requesting for ages: consistent volume.
Listening to a single album from beginning to end is increasingly unusual in this age of unlimited access to music. As your playlist wheels from one genre or era to the next, the inevitable vibe shifts can be grating. Different tracks can have wildly different volumes, which can be shocking and potentially damaging to your ears if you've got your volume up for a ballad only to be hit with a heavy guitar riff after the break.
The gist of consistent volume simple—it normalizes volume across tracks, making the volume roughly the same. Consistent volume builds on a feature from the YouTube app called "stable volume." When Google released stable volume for YouTube, it noted that the feature would continuously adjust volume throughout the video. Because of that, it was disabled for music content on the platform.
Welcome to episode 50 of Pixelated, a podcast by 9to5Google. This week, we talk about the lack of One UI 7 and Gemini Live’s Astra camera/screen sharing already going free.
The Instagram app has its own built-in camera, so users can take photos and videos for Stories without needing another app. While users can save this content to their photo library, some people have noticed that the Save button on the Instagram camera has now disappeared – but luckily there’s already a fix available.
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This fall Apple will launch four new iPhones, including the ultra-thin iPhone 17 Air. But with the iPhone 17 Pro Max, the company is leaning hard in the opposite direction, and thus fulfilling the wish of many users over the years for the most battery life possible.
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