Are Book Publishers Warming Up to the AI Industry?
There’s at least 15 author-driven lawsuits underway against AI companies, while publishers have filed roughly 10 more coordinated suits of their own, notes Publisher’s Weekly.

Yet “While the lawsuits play out, some publishers are building bridges.”

Google recently announced a partnership with Bloomsbury, De Gruyter Brill, Johns Hopkins University Press, Macmillan, O’Reilly … ⌘ Read more

Orphaned VMs: Running VMs Uninterrupted While Host Kernel Is Offline For Reboots/Updates
Here’s some very intriguing work taking place by a Google engineer… With the hyperscalers and other cloud providers pushing for zero-downtime, a set of experimental patches for “Orphaned VMs” allow for the virtual machines to continue to run while the host kernel is offline for security updates or rebooting with the Live Update Orchestrator. The experimental patches and request for feedback from other Linux kernel stakeho … ⌘ Read more

Lawsuit Says Anthropic, OpenAI, SpaceXAI And Google Made Illegal Agreement On AI Slowdown
Tom’s Hardware reports:

Four plaintiffs subscribed to ChatGPT, Claude, Grok, or Gemini filed a proposed class-action lawsuit alleging that the developers of these AI models violated antitrust laws when they agreed to slow AI development. According to the Associated Press, the lawsuit argues that thi … ⌘ Read more

Google’s “Painful To Maintain” Binder C Linux Driver Being Removed In Favor Of Rust
Google’s Binder driver written in the C programming language has long been part of the mainline kernel as the inter-process communication (IPC) mechanism used on Android. The past few years the Binder driver was rewritten in Rust as one of the first “real” drivers in the Rust programming language. The Rust Binder driver was upstreamed in Linux 6.18 and now for the upcoming Linux 7.4 kernel cycle, the old Binder C-based driver is se … ⌘ Read more

Ex-Google DeepMind Researcher Also Warns AI Could ‘Kill All Humans’. But Meta’s Zuckerberg Believes Safety is Up to Each AI Company
Reuters reports that a former Google DeepMind employee “became the latest AI researcher to warn that the technology could ‘kill all humans’, saying time could be running out to avoid the outcome:

Public alarm about the po … ⌘ Read more

Male Fruit Fly Brain Trained to Play Doom
Last week, Google announced that it managed to produce a detailed 3D reconstruction of an adult male fruit fly’s brain and central nervous system. A few days later a software engineer at Coinbase said the fly brain was being trained to play the original Doom. “Each Doom frame stimulates sensory neurons,” says Alex Wormuth. “Neural activity is mapped to game controls. Damage triggers a stimu … ⌘ Read more

Android Rolling Out Passkey Transfers Between Password Managers
Android is rolling out a system-level way to securely transfer passwords and passkeys between credential managers, eliminating the need to export passwords as unencrypted text files or manually recreate passkeys. The feature initially supports Google Password Manager, 1Password, Bitwarden, and Dashlane, with other providers able to integrate through … ⌘ Read more

Google to Invest Record $15 Billion In AI Infrastructure In Finland
Google plans to invest at least $15 billion in AI infrastructure in Finland through 2028, its largest single investment in Europe. The company also signed a 22-year power agreement with Finnish utility Fortum and said it will explore business models that could support new nuclear reactors at Fortum’s Loviisa site.

Finland has emerged as … ⌘ Read more

Google’s Revived Nuclear Power Plant Gets $1.9 Billion Loan From US Government
The U.S. Department of Energy has approved a $1.9 billion loan to NextEra Energy to restart Iowa’s shuttered Duane Arnold nuclear plant, which Google has backed as a power source for its growing AI infrastructure. “The sizable loan is the second of its kind, suggesting that the Trump administration views revived nucle … ⌘ Read more

Google Will ‘Degrade’ Search In Europe to Avoid EU Fines
Google says it will overhaul Search in Europe to comply with the EU’s Digital Markets Act, giving more prominence to comparison services like Expedia and Hotels.com while stripping some real-time features from hotel, airline, and restaurant results. “These changes degrade the user experience for Europeans – boosting online intermediaries at the expense of local … ⌘ Read more

Google DeepMind Publishes AI-Powered Predictions For Effect of All 9 Billion Mutations to Human DNA
Google DeepMind has released AlphaGenome Atlas, a free research database containing AI-generated predictions for the effects of all 9 billion possible single-letter mutations in the human genome. Built from its AlphaGenome model, the atlas is designed to help scientists interpr … ⌘ Read more

Why Google Told Drivers to Drive a Longer Way On Purpose
“A team at Google’s research arm used Google Maps to reroute a small portion of drivers in 10 U.S. cities,” reports SFGate — including San Francisco and Los Angeles.

“Through their experiment, which was published in the journal Nature Cities in June, the researchers sought to evenly spread traffic down more corridors as the drivers head to similar destinations, … ⌘ Read more

Instead of Fighting AI, Some Teachers Work It Into Their Lessons
Last year the writing program at the University of Baltimore used an app that tracks students while they’re writing in Google Docs, offering teachers a video playing back revisions “with a scoreboard of all the edits, pastes and minutes spent on it,” writes the Washington Post. “Is it surveillance? Yes, I think obviously,” says the program’s direc … ⌘ Read more

Four Major AI Models Suffer Rare Overlapping Downtime
ChatGPT, Claude, Grok, and Gemini all suffered significant service disruptions within roughly the same few-hour window Thursday morning. OpenAI and Anthropic reported elevated errors and later restored service, while Grok remained impaired and third-party monitoring indicated a likely Gemini outage despite no public acknowledgment from Google. Ars Technica reports: Ot … ⌘ Read more

Google Releases Gemini 3.8 Flash, Its Third Flash Model In Six Weeks
Google released Gemini 3.8 Flash, its third Flash model in six weeks, claiming it’s their best reasoning and coding model yet (topping the DeepSWE leaderboard). Ars Technica reports: Gemini 3.8 Flash comes in two variations. There’s the standard Flash, which Google describes as a “workhorse” model that’s good for anything from agentic tasks … ⌘ Read more

Google Engineer Accused of Polymarket Insider Trading Says He Was Just Gambling
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Wired: Michele Spagnuolo, the Google engineer arrested in May by U.S. authorities for alleged insider trading on Polymarket, is making a new bold bet. On Wednesday, his legal team filed a motion to dismiss the charges against him. Spagnuolo isn’t outright denying that he made mo … ⌘ Read more

Google Escapes Ad Tech Breakup In Third Big Tech Antitrust Loss For US
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Reuters: Alphabet’s Google escaped a breakup of its advertising technology business on Wednesday, when a judge in Virginia rejected U.S. antitrust enforcers’ bid to force a sale of Google’s online advertising exchange. While the ad exchange is a small part of Google’s business, the ruling is the … ⌘ Read more

MapQuest’s App Surges to No. 1 In Navigation After Refusing to Rename Lake Ontario
MapQuest’s refusal to rename Lake Ontario as “Lake America” has sent its app surging up the charts, making it the No. 1 navigation app in the U.S. and driving “hundreds of thousands” of new downloads. In contrast, Google Maps announced on Saturday that it was complying with the Trump administration’s name change. … ⌘ Read more

Google Maps Renamed Lake Ontario to ‘Lake America’ - But Only for U.S. Users
It’s already happened — at least on Google Maps.

Google’s online maps reflect name changes in official government sources, Google posted Saturday. So when the U.S. Geographic Names Information System formally changed the name for “Lake Ontario” to “Lake America,” Google also renamed it “Lake America” — for visitors from the U … ⌘ Read more

Google’s AI-Powered Lifestyle App ‘Dreambeans’ Now Free in the US
Google’s AI assistant Gemini crawls your Google apps for “more personalized suggestions,” in a feature they call Personal Intelligence. Now when given permission, an Android/iOS app called Dreambeans “uses Personal Intelligence to connect information from Google apps like Gmail, Calendar, Photos, YouTube and Search History, to curate a finite coll … ⌘ Read more

OpenAI, Anthropic, Google, and 100 Other Companies Call For Action To Defend Against Rogue AI
An anonymous reader quotes a report from TechCrunch: Over a hundred tech companies – including OpenAI, Anthropic, Google, and Microsoft – have signed an open letter urging both the private and public sectors to work together to defend themselves from AI-related cyber threats. The letter – w … ⌘ Read more

GPU Reset Recovery Merge Request For GNOME Mutter Submitted
Google Summer of Code 2026 featured a project working on GPU reset recovery for GNOME’s Mutter compositor. GSoC has now wrapped up and the project overall was largely successful although some outstanding work remains. In this last week the merge request has been opened to conduct code review on this GPU reset recovery implementation for GNOME… ⌘ Read more

Gemini Notebook Now Lets You Reference Books, Turn Them Into Different Formats
Google is adding an “Expert Intelligence” feature to Gemini Notebook (formerly known as NotebookLM) that lets users cite and work directly from more than 100,000 books they own through Google Play Books. Those books can be used as sources for things like quizzes, infographics, and Audio Overviews. Digital Trends reports … ⌘ Read more

Old IBM Driver Joins Insecure SGI Drivers In Being Removed For Linux 7.3
The char/misc changes were merged this week for the Linux 7.3 cycle. While there is a lot of IIO driver churn as usual and updates to the likes of the Google Binder drivers, there continues to be the 2026 trend of removing old hardware drivers that are rarely updated these days and likely have no active users left on the mainline Linux kernel. This trend is further pushed along by the surplus of AI/LLM-generated bug reports and patches … ⌘ Read more

AI’s Memory Crunch Is Coming For Android Apps
Google is imposing new memory-use limits on Android apps as the AI data center boom contributes to a broader memory chip shortage that could leave lower-cost phones with less RAM. Developers will have until February 2027 to meet new thresholds for memory and bitmap usage. To aid developers, Google is adding tools to flag apps that exceed the limits and help prevent slowdowns and … ⌘ Read more

China’s Moonshot In Talks With Microsoft, Amazon, Google Over K3 Revenue Sharing
Longtime Slashdot reader schwit1 shares a report from Reuters: China’s Moonshot AI is negotiating revenue-sharing agreements with Microsoft, Amazon, and Alphabet’s Google, that would allow the U.S. cloud giants to host its blockbuster Kimi K3 model, three people familiar with the talks said. Any deal could mark the fi … ⌘ Read more

Chrome/Chromium Experimenting With Flatpak Packaging
Google engineers responsible for the Chrome/Chromium web browser are experimenting with Flatpak packaging on Linux. They aren’t yet committed to officially supporting Flatpak packages but for now are at least exploring the option… ⌘ Read more

Waymo Is Expanding to Germany
Waymo plans to launch its robotaxi service in Munich by the end of 2027, marking the Google-owned company’s first expansion into the European Union. “It already operates in 11 cities in the United States and has applied for a license in the United Kingdom to launch its robotaxis in London this year,” notes Reuters. From the report: The Google subsidiary will start rolling out vehicles in the German city this year, w … ⌘ Read more

Linux 7.3 Introduces New AES Encryption APIs - Will Open Up More Performance
Eric Biggers of Google continues carrying out great work on the Linux kernel crypto code. For Linux 7.3 he’s landed work on new library APIs for most of the AES encryption modes used within the kernel. Moving forward this will open the door to more performance optimizations, reducing code duplication, and other enhancements… ⌘ Read more

Walmart To Finally Start Accepting Apple Pay and Google Pay
After years of refusing to adopt tap-to-pay technology in its stores, retail giant Walmart announced today that it is finally accepting payments via both Apple Pay and Google Pay. The rollout begins August 24 at select Walmart and Sam’s Club locations and is expected to reach all stores by year-end. It will then expand to fuel stations by mid-2027. TechCru … ⌘ Read more

Google Gives Publishers a ‘Preferred Sources’ Button to Fight AI-Driven Traffic Losses
Google is giving publishers a new way to fight declining referral traffic from AI-powered search by letting them embed a “Preferred Sources” button that readers can use to favor their sites across Search, Discover, and Google News. “The idea is to make it easier for readers to find links from the sites th … ⌘ Read more

Real tired of doing these, but here’s another Android developers vs Google update, this time there’s both good and bad news.

The good:
-Users will be able to enable “sideloading” for all current and future devices, attached to their Google account, rather than having to undergo the tedious 24 hour wait including process, on each device.

-Rather than these changes to “sideloading” and “advanced workflows” being implemented at random different dates, in different countries, we’ll all get them come 2027.

The bad:
As GrapheneOS developers recently mentioned “Google replaced pushing Git tags for certain source code with obtaining source code via Google Drive after making a request through Google Forms. It’s completely ridiculous and they’ve gradually become very slow at handling requests. They’re in clear violation of the GPLv2 now.”

whole thread: https://grapheneos.social/@GrapheneOS/117057099753905023

Two Very Exciting Memory Management Optimizations Going Into Linux 7.3
Andrew Morton on Tuesday sent out all of the memory management “MM” updates for the Linux 7.3 merge window. The MM pull was particularly heavy as he noted 1,250 “added-to-MM” emails were sent out this cycle compared to 920 the prior cycle. With a lot of patch churn, he also turned to Google’s Gemini AI for writing his patch summaries. In going through the very verbose AI-generated summary, there are two patch series that get me excited on the performance … ⌘ Read more

Go Language 1.27 Adds Generic Methods, Struct Improvement & More SIMD
Go 1.27 was released today as the newest version of this programming language from Google’s Go team… ⌘ Read more

Google Buys All of Spirit Airlines’ Data to Feed Its AI Models
Google has agreed to pay $10 million for a massive trove of anonymized Spirit Airlines data following the carrier’s shutdown, including internal communications, spreadsheets, booking and frequent-flyer records, transactions, and employee information. CNN reports: Did you ever fly on Spirit Airlines? Or work there? Or send an email to someone who worke … ⌘ Read more

AVX-512 xor_gen Continues To Look Exciting For Helping Linux RAID With Modern CPUs
Google engineer Eric Biggers back in June posted an AVX-512 optimization for Linux RAID yielding up to a 41% improvement on a modern AMD Ryzen 9 9950X (Zen 5) processor. A revised patch then put it as much as a 43% improvement for this AVX-512 optimized xor_gen() function. The code hasn’t yet been merged to mainline but an updated version of it is now available… ⌘ Read more

AI Fails to Deliver a 4-Day Work Week - Especially at AI Companies
“An engineering director at Google said four years ago that AI would deliver a four-day work week by 2025,” remembers the BBC. And earlier this year OpenAI “formally urged companies to start testing out a four-day work week (with no change in pay), claiming that AI will soon be able to speed up so much human labour that the corporate world shoul … ⌘ Read more

Judge Orders Google To Make Rival App Store Installs Easier
A federal judge has ordered Google to remove what he called “anticompetitive friction” that makes rival Android app stores harder to find and install. The order is part of the remedies stemming from Epic’s antitrust victory, which already requires Google to carry competing app stores inside Google Play and give them access to its app catalog. The Verge rep … ⌘ Read more

Google’s Gemini 3.7 Flash Targets Coding and Agents With a 50% Price Cut
Google has released Gemini 3.7 Flash just three weeks after 3.6 Flash, focusing on better coding, agentic workflows, and enterprise automation while temporarily cutting API prices in half through the end of 2026. VentureBeat reports: For enterprise developers, the more consequential story may be the combination of those intellig … ⌘ Read more

Apple Turns to Publishers For Help With Siri AI
Apple is reportedly negotiating multi-year deals with news publishers to give its redesigned Siri access to current news and other information, with payments potentially tied to how often publishers’ content is used. The talks come as Apple prepares to launch its long-delayed Siri AI later this year, after partnering with Google to use distilled Gemini models. Engadget reports: … ⌘ Read more

The Pixel Tag Is Google’s Answer To the AirTag
Google has unveiled the $29 Pixel Tag, its long-awaited AirTag rival that combines UWB with Bluetooth 6.0 Channel Sounding for two forms of precision tracking. It launches November 11. The Verge reports: The Pixel Tag is a slim oblong device available in one grayish color – Fog – that weighs about 12g, or 0.4oz. Like the AirTag, it has no built-in hooks or clips for attaching to o … ⌘ Read more

Google Unveils Pixel 11 Lineup
At its Made by Google 2026 event today, Google unveiled a slew of new devices, headlined by the Pixel 11, Pixel 11 Pro, and Pixel 11 Pro Fold. Here’s a breakdown of the company’s latest smartphones, provided by TechCrunch: Pixel 11: The standard Pixel 11 gets a redesigned camera bar that is thinner than the one on the previous generation. Google says the new camera bar is more than 40% thinner and now uses an … ⌘ Read more

Google Gemini Hits 1 Billion Users In Record Time
Gemini has become Google’s fastest-growing product ever, reaching 1 billion monthly active users faster than any of the company’s 13 other billion-user services. Ars Technica reports: Gemini has wormed its way into virtually every Google product and service, powering email organization in Gmail, document summary in Drive, and much more. Gemini is also core to Google’s flagshi … ⌘ Read more

Raspberry Pi AXI PMU Driver Under Review For The Mainline Linux Kernel
One of the Raspberry Pi device drivers that has remained elusive from the mainline Linux kernel has been for the performance monitoring unit (PMU) for the Broadcom AXI on all Raspberry Pi 1 through Raspberry Pi 5 models. Thanks to the work of a Google engineer, there is a new effort working to get a mainline Linux driver for the Raspberry Pi AXI PMU… ⌘ Read more

First Rival Android App Store Arrives In the US Play Store
Aptoide has become the first third-party Android app store available directly through Google Play in the U.S. “The change is a direct result of Google’s litigation with Epic, which saw a judge rule in 2024 that the Play Store would have to open up to third-party stores,” notes The Verge. The change makes rival storefronts far easier to discover and install, potent … ⌘ Read more

AI-Powered Browser Just Generates Every Website From Scratch
XDA Developers reports:

On July 22, a Google DeepMind engineer, Vidy Thatte, shared a snippet of a browser he built that “treats every URL as a prompt and generates a site from scratch” on his X account. Just a few days later, he shared a TestFlight link to let iPhone users try it for themselves. The browser he launched is called Gem, and it’s a browser … ⌘ Read more

Google Should Still Be Forced To Shed Chrome, Advocacy Group Argues
“Google should be required to divest the Chrome browser, and prohibited from paying Apple to distribute Google’s search engine, the nonprofit advocacy group Public Knowledge argues in a new court filing,” MediaPost reports, citing a friend-of-the-court brief filed Tuesday in the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals:

The group adds that “independen … ⌘ Read more

Microsoft, Google, Amazon, Meta and Oracle: Expect a Negative Cash Flow of $125 Billion Next Year
The Washington Post shared surprising news this week about five top AI companies.

Microsoft, Google, Amazon, Meta and Oracle “are spending so much on developing AI and delivering it to customers that they’re expected to bleed cash in the coming year, according to a Washington Pos … ⌘ Read more

Google’s $15 Billion India Data Center Project Battles Water, Wildlife Concerns
Google’s $15 billion data-center project in Visakhapatnam is facing protests and legal challenges over fears that it will worsen local water shortages and disturb wildlife near the Kambalakonda sanctuary. Google says the campus will use advanced air cooling and comply with Indian law, while state officials deny that resi … ⌘ Read more

Times Magazine Now Serves Ads That Only AI Chatbots Can See
Longtime Slashdot reader mccalli writes: Times Magazine has started serving adverts with “brand messages” to AI crawlers, which are not part of its main page. The aim seems to be to influence chatbots to talk about the brand offerings in a positive light that can’t be traced back to the actual page. Notably, they’ve excluded Google chatbots from this, likely be … ⌘ Read more