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Apple Sued by App Developer Over its Continuity Camera

Slashdot.org - Wed, 01/28/2026 - 13:01
An anonymous reader shares a report: Apple is being sued by Reincubate, which makes the Camo smartphone webcam app. It has filed a lawsuit against Apple in a U.S. federal court in New Jersey, accusing the company of anticompetitive conduct and patent infringement. The suit alleges that Apple copied Camo's technology, integrated similar features into iOS, and used control over its software ecosystem to disadvantage Reincubate's Camo product. Reincubate's Camo and Camo Studio apps allow iOS or Android phones to function as webcams for Mac and PCs. The company launched Camo in 2020. In 2022, Apple introduced Continuity Camera, a feature that enables iPhones to serve as webcams for Macs but works only within Apple's device ecosystem. According to the lawsuit, Apple copied patented features from Camo and built them into iOS to "redirect user demand to Apple's own platform-tied offering."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

The new era of browsing: Putting Gemini to work in ChromeThe new era of browsing: Putting Gemini to work in ChromeVice President, Chrome

GoogleBlog - Wed, 01/28/2026 - 13:00
Learn more about new agentic capabilities coming to Chrome, powered by Gemini 3.Learn more about new agentic capabilities coming to Chrome, powered by Gemini 3.
Categories: Technology

Tim Berners-Lee Wants Us To Take Back the Internet

Slashdot.org - Wed, 01/28/2026 - 12:22
mspohr shares a report: When Sir Tim Berners-Lee invented the world wide web in 1989, his vision was clear: it would used by everyone, filled with everything and, crucially, it would be free. Today, the British computer scientist's creation is regularly used by 5.5 billion people -- and bears little resemblance to the democratic force for humanity he intended. Since Berners-Lee's disappointment a decade ago, he's thrown everything at a project that completely shifts the way data is held on the web, known as the Solid (social linked data) protocol. It's activism that is rooted in people power -- not unlike the first years of the web. This version of the internet would turbocharge personal sovereignty and give control back to users. Berners-Lee has long seen AI -- which exists only because of the web and its data -- as having the potential to transform society far beyond the boundaries of self-interested companies. But now is the time, he says, to put guardrails in place so that AI remains a force for good -- and he's afraid the chance may pass humankind by. Berners-Lee traces the web's corruption to the commercialization of the domain name system in the 1990s, when the .com space was "pounced on by charlatans." The 2016 US elections, he said, revealed to him just how toxic his creation could become. A corner of the web, he says, has been "optimised for nastiness" -- extractive, surveillance-heavy, and designed to maximize engagement at the cost of user wellbeing. His answer is Solid, a protocol that gives users control through personal data "pods" functioning as secure backpacks of information. The Flanders government in Belgium already uses Solid pods for its citizens. On AI, his optimism remains dim. "The horse is bolting," he says, calling for a "Cern for AI" where scientists could collaboratively develop superintelligence under contained, non-commercial oversight.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

What's the 'Best' Month for New Movies and Music? A Statistical Analysis

Slashdot.org - Wed, 01/28/2026 - 11:45
An analysis of film and music release patterns has found that summer and late fall are the optimal windows for movie premieres, while the music industry has no clear "best" month -- only a worst one, December, which the report's author dubbed "Dump-cember." For films, the calendar splits into distinct strategic zones. Summer months and holidays see elevated box office because audiences have more free time, and studios chase mega-billion-dollar hits during these windows. October and November see a surge of prestige releases as studios cluster their Oscar hopefuls to keep them fresh in voters' minds when awards season begins in January. The Silence of the Lambs, which swept the Academy Awards' Big Four categories in 1992, remains the only Best Picture winner in seven decades to have been released in January -- the industry's infamous "Dump-uary." The music industry operates differently. Most months are interchangeable for album releases, but December is uniquely bad. Artists avoid it because they would compete against Christmas classics from Bing Crosby and Andy Williams, both dead for decades. Albums released in December also receive weaker critical reception as measured by Pitchfork scores, and labels quietly slot their least promising projects into this low-attention window.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

430,000-Year-Old Wooden Tools Are the Oldest Ever Found

Slashdot.org - Wed, 01/28/2026 - 11:15
Early hominins in Europe were creating tools from raw materials hundreds of thousands of years before Homo sapiens arrived there, two new studies indicate, pushing back the established time for such activity. From a report: The evidence includes a 500,000-year-old hammer made of elephant or mammoth bone, excavated in southern England, and 430,000-year-old wooden tools found in southern Greece -- the earliest wooden tools on record. The findings suggest that early humans possessed sophisticated technological skills, the researchers said. Katerina Harvati, a paleoanthropologist at the University of Tubingen in Germany and a lead author of the wooden-tool paper, which was published on Monday in the journal PNAS, said the discoveries provided insight into the prehistoric origins of human intelligence. Silvia Bello, a paleoanthropologist at London's Natural History Museum and an author on the elephant-bone study, which was published last week in Science Advances, concurred. The artifacts in both studies, recovered from coal-mine sites, were probably produced by early Neanderthals or a preceding species, Homo heidelbergensis. Homo sapiens emerged in Africa more than 300,000 years ago, and the oldest evidence of them in Europe is a 210,000-year-old fossil unearthed in Greece. By the time Homo sapiens established themselves in Britain 40,000 years ago, other hominins had already lived there for nearly a million years.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

GPU Robotics Simulators - Trend Hunter

Linux News - Wed, 01/28/2026 - 10:39
GPU Robotics Simulators  Trend Hunter
Categories: Linux

GPU Robotics Simulators - Trend Hunter

Linux News - Wed, 01/28/2026 - 10:39
GPU Robotics Simulators  Trend Hunter
Categories: Linux

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