Wednesday 8th May 2024

Apple May 2024 iPad Event: iPad Pro, iPad Air, M4, Apple Pencil, Magic Keyboard

Apple's iPads have been on the back burner since 2022—there have been plenty of iPhones and Macs since, even a mixed-reality headset, but it's been two years since we've seen a new tablet. Now the wait is finally over. During its virtual event today, Apple announced the next-generation iPad Pro and iPad Air, an all-new M4 chip, as well as updated accessories.

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Google Pixel 8A: News, Specs, Features, Price, Release Date

Google’s Pixel A-series Android smartphones have long proven that there's no need to spend anywhere close to $1,000 for a great, feature-packed smartphone. While the price of these handsets has slightly increased since the first Pixel 3A in 2019, the new Google Pixel 8A seems to have everything you'd want in a smartphone at a palatable price of $499.

The company announced its latest Pixel phone virtually—one week before its Google I/O developer conference, where expectations are high for the latest Android and artificial intelligence improvements, and potential updates on the mixed-reality headset it's developing in partnership with Qualcomm and Samsung. Google says it's giving its new handset “time to shine” ahead of the event. The Pixel 8A is available for preorder today and goes on sale May 14.


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TikTok Sues the US Government to Stop a Potential Ban

TikTok sued the US federal government on Tuesday, arguing that the possible app ban violates the First Amendment.

Last month, President Biden signed a bill that forces TikTok and its Chinese owner, ByteDance, to divest its ownership of the app or face a nationwide ban. At the time, TikTok said that it planned to sue, calling the law unconstitutional.


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Met Gala Deepfakes Are Flooding Social Media

The Met Gala is undoubtedly one of the most anticipated events of the year, but this time the music and entertainment celebrities who graced its red carpet had some competition for the public's attention: generative AI deepfakes.

In a post published on X this morning—and now counting nearly 15 million views—Katy Perry is pictured wearing a stunning dress decorated with three-dimensional floral appliqués, which descends to the ground, transforming into incredibly realistic-looking moss. But the image is far from real, as a Community Note attached to the post makes clear.


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OpenAI’s New Tool Will Give Artists Control Over Their Data—but It’s Unclear How

OpenAI is fighting lawsuits from artists, writers, and publishers who allege it inappropriately used their work to train the algorithms behind ChatGPT and other AI systems. On Tuesday the company announced a tool apparently designed to appease creatives and rights holders by granting them some control over how OpenAI uses their work.

The company says it will launch a tool in 2025 called Media Manager that allows content creators to opt out their work from the company’s AI development. In a blog post, OpenAI described the tool as a way to allow “creators and content owners to tell us what they own” and specify “how they want their works to be included or excluded from machine learning research and training.”


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The 50 Best Shows on Disney+ Right Now

Star Wars: Tales of the Empire, X-Men '97, and a new season of Doctor Who are just a few of the shows you should be watching on Disney+ this month.


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FCC Closes ‘Fast Lane’ Loophole in Final Net Neutrality Order

The Federal Communications Commission released its final net neutrality order on Tuesday, and it includes a few edits to the draft version ensuring that internet service providers can’t sneakily violate fast-lane bans.

Speaking to WIRED on Tuesday, a senior FCC official said that the final net neutrality order has been updated to ensure that paid fast lanes in consumer-facing products violate the agency’s rules. The official also said that providers couldn’t mask consumer products as enterprise ones to skirt the rules.


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Inside the Climate Protests Hell-Bent on Stopping Tesla

Mara is sick. The 24-year-old has been living in a mosquito-infested forest near Tesla’s German gigafactory since March, and despite the 78 degrees Fahrenheit heat, a cold is spreading through the camp. Sitting on a makeshift bench, she tells me how she left Berlin to live among the pine trees, roughly an hour’s drive outside the city, in an attempt to stop the company from expanding.

This week, she will be joined by the notorious German climate group Here And No Further (Ende Gelände), known for its theatrical, often law-breaking blockades, for a five-day-long protest. Anticipating the arrival of hundreds of demonstrators, Tesla said it would shut the factory for four days, telling its employees to work from home, according to an internal email obtained by the German newspaper Handelsblatt.


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The Affordable Connectivity Program Has a Lifeline in the Senate

There’s a new plan to revive the Affordable Connectivity Program, a pandemic-era initiative that provides low-income households in the US with discounts on high-speed internet access.

At the end of April, funding for the program was set to run out, affecting millions. But a bipartisan group of senators, led by Ben Ray Luján of New Mexico, have proposed using a Federal Aviation Administration reauthorization measure as a vehicle for funding the ACP and other telecom programs for a combined $6 billion. Luján’s coalition includes senators J.D. Vance, Peter Welch, Jacky Rosen, Steve Daines, and Roger Wicker.


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C’mon, Why Isn’t the New Apple Pencil Pro Backward Compatible?

Apple announced four new iPad models today, and alongside these tablets is a new stylus: the $129 Apple Pencil Pro. It’s the first major overhaul of the iPad accessory to introduce new features since the company launched the second-generation Apple Pencil in 2018.

The new stylus is very similar to its predecessor, except there's a new Squeeze function that lets you squeeze near the tip of the stylus to bring up a new tool palette on the screen. (The double-tap function is still present, allowing you to tap twice at the tip to switch back to the last-used tool in your drawing app.)


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