Amazon has delayed some commitments around new data center leases, Wells Fargo analysts said Monday, the latest sign that economic concerns may be affecting tech companies' spending plans. From a report: A week ago, a Microsoft executive said the software company was slowing down or temporarily holding off on advancing early build-outs. Amazon Web Services and Microsoft are the leading providers of cloud infrastructure, and both have ramped up their capital expenditures in recent quarters to meet the demands of the generative artificial intelligence boom.

"Over the weekend, we heard from several industry sources that AWS has paused a portion of its leasing discussions on the colocation side (particularly international ones)," Wells Fargo analysts wrote in a note. They added that "the positioning is similar to what we've heard recently from MSFT," in that both companies are reeling in some new projects but not canceling signed deals.

Germany will get a new "super-high-tech ministry" responsible for research, technology, and aerospace, according to the coalition agreement published by the incoming government this week. From a report: The announcement is one of several nods to science in the 144-page agreement, unveiled on 9 April following weeks of negotiations between the center-right Christian Democrats (CDU) and its sister party, the Christian Social Union in Bavaria (CSU) -- who together won the most seats in February's federal elections -- and the center-left Social Democrats. The agreement is expected to be formally approved by the three parties by early May, paving the way for CDU leader Friedrich Merz to be elected chancellor.

[...] The new agreement lists a number of scientific priorities for the new government, including support for artificial intelligence, quantum technologies, biotechnology, microchip development and production, and fusion energy. "Our goal is that the world's first fusion reactor should be realized in Germany," the text states. It also mentions personalized medicine, oceans research, and sustainability research as "strategic" areas. But the agreement does not include any budget estimates, and observers caution it is unclear where the money for new programs would come from. The agreement does affirm current commitments to increase the budgets of the country's main research organizations by 3% per year through 2030.

A leaked Apple meeting reveals significant internal struggles with Siri's development, as AI-powered features announced last June have been delayed and may not make it into iOS 19. The Verge reports: Bloomberg (paywalled) has the full scoop on what happened at a Siri team meeting led by senior director Robby Walker, who oversees the division. He called the delay an "ugly" situation and sympathized with employees who might be feeling burned out or frustrated by Apple's decisions and Siri's still-lackluster reputation. He also said it's not a given that the missing Siri features will make it into iOS 19 this year; that's the company's current target, but "doesn't mean that we're shipping then," he told employees. "We have other commitments across Apple to other projects," Walker said, according to Bloomberg's report. "We want to keep our commitments to those, and we understand those are now potentially more timeline-urgent than the features that have been deferred."

The meeting also hinted at tension between Apple's Siri unit and the marketing division. Walker said the communications team wanted to highlight features like Siri understanding personal context and being able to take action based on what's currently on a user's screen -- even though they were nowhere near ready. Those WWDC teases and the resulting customer expectations only made matters worse, Walker acknowledged. Apple has since pulled an iPhone 16 ad that showcased the features and has added disclaimers to several areas of its website noting they've all been punted to a TBD date. They were held back in part due to quality issues "that resulted in them not working properly up to a third of the time," according to Mark Gurman.

[...] Walker told his staff that senior executives like software chief Craig Federighi and AI boss John Giannandrea are taking "intense personal accountability" for a predicament that's drawing fierce criticism as the months pass by with little to show for it beyond a prettier Siri animation. "Customers are not expecting only these new features but they also want a more fully rounded-out Siri," Walker said. "We're going to ship these features and more as soon as they are ready." He praised the team for its "incredibly impressive" work so far. "These are not quite ready to go to the general public, even though our competitors might have launched them in this state or worse," he said of the delayed features.

Intel has appointed Lip-Bu Tan as its new CEO in an effort to turn around the struggling chipmaker, following the resignation of Pat Gelsinger. CNBC reports: Tan was previously CEO of Cadence Design Systems, which makes software used by all the major chip designers, including Intel. He was an Intel board member but departed last year, citing other commitments. Tan replaces interim co-CEOs David Zinsner and MJ Holthaus, who took over in December when former Intel CEO Patrick Gelsinger was ousted. Tan is also rejoining Intel's board. [...] Intel shares rose over 12% in extended trading on Wednesday.

Thursday the White House "moved to halt a $5 billion initiative to build electric vehicle charging stations," reports Politico, "by instructing states not to spend federal funds previously allocated to them..." NPR described the move as "putting in limbo billions of dollars allocated to states with current and future projects..."

Politico notes the move "appears to upend years of precedent in which federal promises of funds for highway projects had given states an all-but-guaranteed assurance that they were free to spend them. It also raises legal questions... Funding experts had told POLITICO last year that decades of legal precedent would largely insulate the charging money... Andrew Rogers [deputy administrator of the Federal Highway Administration, or FHWA, in the Biden administration] said in a text message that the new letter "appears to ignore both the law and multiple restraining orders that have been issued by federal courts." Rogers, who is now a senior vice president at Boundary Stone Partners, said the move appears to be "in direct violation" of the Impoundment Control Act of 1974, a Watergate-era law that prohibits presidents from unilaterally canceling congressionally approved spending. Trump has contended that the law is unconstitutional.
Politico also got a quote from the chief analyst at analytics firm Paren, who predicts lawsuits from affected states and that the final impact of the move will be "just causing havoc and slowing things down for awhile." [A letter to state transportation directors from the Federal Highway Administration] clarifies that states will be able to receive reimbursements for "existing obligations" to design and build stations "in order to not disrupt current financial commitments." According to the letter, FHWA plans to publish new draft guidance on the NEVI program in the spring, followed by a comment period, before issuing new final guidance. Only then will states be able to resubmit their annual implementation plans for all fiscal years of the program.
"But that doesn't mean that the program is going to be sunset or the funds are not going to be made available again to the states," Nick Nigro, the founder of Atlas Public Policy consultancy told NPR: Several experts tell NPR that as a result of its overwhelming bipartisan support at the time, attempts to overturn it within the executive branch are likely to be challenged in court. Nigro believes the funding will resume eventually...

So far, 56 stations [with multiple chargers] are up and running as a result of the program, while more than 900 sites in total have been "awarded" to date, according to Loren McDonald, chief analyst at Paren, another research analytics firm. McDonald said several hundred of the awarded sites are currently under construction and expected to open this year. He does not believe the FHWA has the authority to pause or rescind any aspect of the NEVI program... "I assume lawsuits from states will start soon, and this will go to court and Congress," McDonald said in a statement.
The move has "confounded states, which had been allocated billions of dollars by Congress for the program," the New York Times reported Friday. "[S]ome state officials said that as a result of the memo from the Trump administration, they had stopped work on the charging stations. Others said they intended to keep going."

The Washington Post reports that a Texas Department of Transportation official "said it would continue to deploy federal funds for EV chargers until it receives further guidance," and that Ryan Gallentine, managing director at the national business association Advanced Energy United, said that states "are under no obligation to stop these projects based solely on this announcement." Politico adds: Also on Thursday, FHWA took down several internet pages providing information on NEVI and its sister program, the $2.5 billion Charging and Fueling Infrastructure grant program... Amid the confusion, at least six states — Alabama, Oklahoma, Missouri, Rhode Island, Ohio and Nebraska — have put their NEVI programs on hold, according to McDonald. Rhode Island and Ohio had been considered leading states in implementing the program.

Chinese AI startup DeepSeek is challenging U.S. tech giants with claims it can deliver performance comparable to leading AI models at a fraction of the cost, sparking debate among Wall Street analysts about the industry's massive spending plans. While Jefferies warns that DeepSeek's efficient approach "punctures some of the capex euphoria" following Meta and Microsoft's $60 billion commitments this year, Citi questions whether such results were achieved without advanced GPUs.

Goldman Sachs suggests the development could reshape competition by lowering barriers to entry for startups. Founded in 2023 by former hedge fund executive Liang Wenfeng, DeepSeek's open-source models have gained traction with its mobile app topping charts across major markets. DeepSeek's latest AI model had sparked over $1 trillion rout in US and European technology stocks Monday, before even the U.S. market opened.

Many of the world's largest tech companies, including Meta, Google, TikTok, and X, have pledged to European lawmakers that they will do more to prevent and remove illegal hate speech on their platforms. The revised set of voluntary commitments unveiled on Monday aim to help platforms "demonstrate their compliance" with the Digital Services Act (DSA) obligations regarding illegal content moderation. The Verge reports: Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, Twitch, X, YouTube, Snapchat, LinkedIn, Dailymotion, Jeuxvideo.com, Rakuten Viber, and Microsoft-hosted consumer services have all signed the "Code of Conduct on Countering Illegal Hate Speech Online Plus" -- which is not a terribly named streaming service but an update to a 2016 Code. The revised code commits signatories to transparency around hate speech detection and reduction, to allowing third-party monitors to assess how hate speech notices are reviewed by the platforms, and to review "at least two-thirds of hate speech notices" within 24 hours. These EU Codes of Conduct are voluntary commitments and companies face no penalties if they decide to back out of the agreement [...].

According to Axios, Google has told the EU it will not add fact checks to search results and YouTube videos or use them in ranking or removing content, despite the requirements of a new EU law. From the report: In a letter written to Renate Nikolay, the deputy director general under the content and technology arm at the European Commission, Google's global affairs president Kent Walker said the fact-checking integration required by the Commission's new Disinformation Code of Practice "simply isn't appropriate or effective for our services" and said Google won't commit to it. The code would require Google to incorporate fact-check results alongside Google's search results and YouTube videos. It would also force Google to build fact-checking into its ranking systems and algorithms.

Walker said Google's current approach to content moderation works and pointed to successful content moderation during last year's "unprecedented cycle of global elections" as proof. He said a new feature added to YouTube last year that enables some users to add contextual notes to videos "has significant potential." (That program is similar to X's Community Notes feature, as well as new program announced by Meta last week.)

The EU's Code of Practice on Disinformation, introduced in 2022, includes several voluntary commitments that tech firms and private companies, including fact-checking organizations, are expected to deliver on. The Code, originally created in 2018, predates the EU's new content moderation law, the Digital Services Act (DSA), which went into effect in 2022.

The Commission has held private discussions over the past year with tech companies, urging them to convert the voluntary measures into an official code of conduct under the DSA. Walker said in his letter Thursday that Google had already told the Commission that it didn't plan to comply. Google will "pull out of all fact-checking commitments in the Code before it becomes a DSA Code of Conduct," he wrote. He said Google will continue to invest in improvements to its current content moderation practices, which focus on providing people with more information about their search results through features like Synth ID watermarking and AI disclosures on YouTube.

The Register's Jude Karabus reports: IBM and semiconductor maker GlobalFoundries have settled all of their litigation against each other, including breach of contract, patent, and trade secret suits, the pair say. The details of the settlement are confidential. All that both companies were prepared to say in yesterday's statements was that the deal they'd agreed would resolve "all litigation matters, inclusive of breach of contract, trade secrets, and intellectual property claims between the two companies." They added that the settlement would allow the companies to "explore new opportunities for collaboration in areas of mutual interest." In 2021, IBM sued GlobalFoundries for $2.5 billion, accusing it of failing to deliver on 10nm and 7nm chip production commitments, which disrupted IBM's hardware roadmap. GlobalFoundries poaching engineers countersued in 2023, alleging IBM misused trade secrets and poached engineers to support partnerships with Intel and Rapidus, potentially compromising proprietary technologies.

NetEase has reversed 100-year bans imposed on "Marvel Rivals" players using Linux and Mac compatibility tools in December 2024, following intervention from CodeWeavers' CEO and player complaints.

The game's anti-cheat system had banned players until 2124 for using Proton and CrossOver software on Steam Deck and Apple devices. The company stated on Discord it "will not ban players who are playing fairly and without cheating" but has made no broader commitments regarding compatibility tools.

Apple has no plans to develop its own search engine despite potential restrictions on its lucrative revenue-sharing deal with Google, citing billions in required investment and rapidly evolving AI technology as key deterrents, according to a court filing [PDF].

In a declaration filed with the U.S. District Court in Washington, Apple Senior Vice President Eddy Cue said creating a search engine would require diverting significant capital and employees, while recent AI developments make such an investment "economically risky."

Apple received approximately $20 billion from Google in 2022 under a deal that makes Google the default search engine on Safari browsers. This arrangement is now under scrutiny in the U.S. government's antitrust case against Google.

Cue said Apple lacks the specialized professionals and infrastructure needed for search advertising, which would be essential for a viable search engine. While Apple operates niche advertising like the App Store, search advertising is "outside of Apple's core expertise," he said. Building a search advertising business would also need to be balanced against Apple's privacy commitments, according to his declaration.

The European Commission has launched formal proceedings against TikTok over concerns about its failure to limit election interference, particularly in last month's Romanian presidential vote. Reuters reports: The Commission said it will request information and look into TikTok's policy on political advertisements and paid-for political content as well as TikTok's systems to generate recommendations and the risks of them being manipulated. The opening of formal proceedings empowers the Commission to take further enforcement steps and to accept commitments made by TikTok. There is no specific deadline to complete proceedings.

Datacenter operators are increasingly turning to small modular reactors (SMRs) like those developed by Oklo to meet growing energy demands. According to The Register, Oklo has secured commitments from two major datacenter providers for 750 MW of power, pending regulatory approvals. It brings the firm's planned nuclear build-out to 2.1 gigawatts. From the report: Oklo's designs are, from what we understand, inspired by the Experimental Breeder Reactor II (EBR-II) and utilize liquid-metal cooling. They are capable of producing between 15MW and 50MW of power, depending on the configuration. That means Oklo's datacenter customers plan to deploy somewhere between 15 and 50 of the reactors to satisfy their thirst for electricity. However, they may be waiting a while.

According to Oklo's website, the nuclear startup hopes to bring its first plant online before the end of the decade. Before that can happen, though, Oklo will need to obtain approval from the Nuclear Regulatory Commission -- something for which it says it's already submitted applications. In 2022, the watchdog rejected an Oklo plan to build a small atomic reactor in Idaho, citing "significant information gaps" on safety-related measures.

That said, Oklo has lately received support from US government agencies including the Department of Energy (DoE), which has awarded a site use permit, while Idaho National Laboratory -- home of EBR-II -- has provided fuel material to support the efforts. Speaking of fuel, Oklo's designs may not suffer from the challenges other SMR startups, like Terrapower, have encountered. Oklo's designs are intended to run on recycled nuclear waste products from traditional reactors. In fact, the startup is currently working with DoE national labs to develop new fuel recycling technologies. Oklo hopes to bring a commercial-scale recycling plan online by the early 2030s.

"The foundation behind the Gnome desktop environment is having to go through some serious belt-tightening..." writes Linux Magazine.

From an October 7th announcement by The Gnome Foundation: Our plan for the previous financial year was to operate a break-even budget. We raised less than expected last year, due to a very challenging fundraising environment for nonprofits, on top of internal changes such as the departure of our previous Executive Director, Holly Million. The Foundation has a reserves policy which requires us to keep a certain amount of money in the bank account, to preserve core operations in the event of interruptions to our income. In order to meet our reserves policy, this year's budget had to reduce our expenditure to below expected income, and generate a small surplus to reinstate the Foundation's financial reserves to the necessary level...

We're asking for your support in several ways:

- Look out for opportunities to volunteer your time and skills in areas where we've had to reduce staff involvement.

- Share ideas on how to organize and improve our activities in this new context.

- Consider making donations to support the GNOME Foundation's core priorities, if you're able...

Through these difficult decisions, the GNOME Foundation is able to meet its reserves policy, ensuring sufficient funds for the coming year. Our budget for the new financial year is realistic and supports four full time staff, who are able to support key operations like finance, infrastructure and events. We are additionally contracting a number of other individuals on a short term or part time basis, to help with fund raising, websites and delivering on our project commitments.

We are going to be looking to the GNOME community to help with the areas that are most affected by our reduced staffing. If you would like to help GNOME with its events, marketing, or fundraising, we would love to hear from you.
In their new budget, "expenses have been greatly reduced," according to an October 10 update: We are also very relieved to be able to provide a surplus budget for the first time in many years, and doing so while still being able to support the community: events, infrastructure, internships, travel funding, and meeting our commitment to donors for work done in some parts of the stack, e.g.: Flathub, parental controls and GNOME Software.

"Biden forgives more student loans," read Thursday's headline at CNBC.

While this time it was $4.5 billion in student debt for over 60,000 public service workers, "The Biden-Harris Administration has approved $175 billion in student debt relief for nearly 5 million borrowers through various actions," according to an announcement from the White House on Thursday. (So the average amount received by each of the 5 million students is $35,000.) CNN calculates this eliminates roughly 11% of all outstanding U.S. federal student loan debt.

This latest round of forgiveness fixed a loophole in a bipartisan program (passed during the Bush administration in 2007) called Public Service Loan Forgiveness: "For too long, the government failed to live up to its commitments, and only 7,000 people had ever received forgiveness under Public Service Loan Forgiveness before Vice President (Kamala) Harris and I took office," Biden said in a statement. "We vowed to fix that," he added... Thursday's announcement impacts about 60,000 borrowers who are now approved for approximately $4.5 billion in student debt relief under PSLF.
CNN points out the total $175 billion in forgiven student debt is more than under any other president — though it's still "less than half of the $430 billion that would've been canceled under the president's one-time forgiveness plan, which was struck down by the Supreme Court last year." The Biden administration has made it easier for about 572,000 permanently disabled borrowers to receive the debt relief to which they are entitled. It also has granted student loan forgiveness to more than 1.6 million borrowers who were defrauded by their college... The Biden administration is conducting a one-time recount of borrowers' past payments and making adjustments if they had been counted incorrectly, bringing many people closer to debt relief.

In a statement today, the White House said it has received commitments from several AI companies to curb the creation and distribution of deepfake porn, also known as image-based sexual abuse material. Engadget reports: The participating businesses have laid out the steps they are taking to prevent their platforms from being used to generate non-consensual intimate images (NCII) of adults and child sexual abuse material (CSAM). Specifically, Adobe, Anthropic, Cohere, Common Crawl, Microsoft and OpenAI said they'll be: "responsibly sourcing their datasets and safeguarding them from image-based sexual abuse."

All of the aforementioned except Common Crawl also agreed they'd be: "incorporating feedback loops and iterative stress-testing strategies in their development processes, to guard against AI models outputting image-based sexual abuse" and "removing nude images from AI training datasets" when appropriate. [...] The notable absences from today's White House release are Apple, Amazon, Google and Meta.

Wired interviews America's foreign policy chief, Secretary of State Antony Blinken, about U.S. digital polices, starting with a new "cybersecurity bureau" created in 2022 (which Wired previously reported includes "a crash course in cybersecurity, telecommunications, privacy, surveillance, and other digital issues.") Look, what I've seen since coming back to the State Department three and a half years ago is that everything happening in the technological world and in cyberspace is increasingly central to our foreign policy. There's almost a perfect storm that's come together over the last few years, several major developments that have really brought this to the forefront of what we're doing and what we need to do. First, we have a new generation of foundational technologies that are literally changing the world all at the same time — whether it's AI, quantum, microelectronics, biotech, telecommunications. They're having a profound impact, and increasingly they're converging and feeding off of each other.

Second, we're seeing that the line between the digital and physical worlds is evaporating, erasing. We have cars, ports, hospitals that are, in effect, huge data centers. They're big vulnerabilities. At the same time, we have increasingly rare materials that are critical to technology and fragile supply chains. In each of these areas, the State Department is taking action. We have to look at everything in terms of "stacks" — the hardware, the software, the talent, and the norms, the rules, the standards by which this technology is used.

Besides setting up an entire new Bureau of Cyberspace and Digital Policy — and the bureaus are really the building blocks in our department — we've now trained more than 200 cybersecurity and digital officers, people who are genuinely expert. Every one of our embassies around the world will have at least one person who is truly fluent in tech and digital policy. My goal is to make sure that across the entire department we have basic literacy — ideally fluency — and even, eventually, mastery. All of this to make sure that, as I said, this department is fit for purpose across the entire information and digital space.
Wired notes it was Blinken's Department that discovered China's 2023 breach of Microsoft systems. And on the emerging issue of AI, Blinken cites "incredible work done by the White House to develop basic principles with the foundational companies." The voluntary commitments that they made, the State Department has worked to internationalize those commitments. We have a G7 code of conduct — the leading democratic economies in the world — all agreeing to basic principles with a focus on safety. We managed to get the very first resolution ever on artificial intelligence through the United Nations General Assembly — 192 countries also signing up to basic principles on safety and a focus on using AI to advance sustainable development goals on things like health, education, climate. We also have more than 50 countries that have signed on to basic principles on the responsible military use of AI. The goal here is not to have a world that is bifurcated in any way. It's to try to bring everyone together.

An anonymous reader shares a report: The sudden resignation of a high-profile Intel board member came after differences with CEO Pat Gelsinger and other directors over what the director considered the U.S. company's bloated workforce, risk-averse culture and lagging artificial intelligence strategy, according to three sources familiar with the matter. Lip-Bu Tan, a semiconductor industry veteran, had said he was leaving the board because of a personal decision to "reprioritize various commitments" and that he remained "supportive of the company and its important work," in a regulatory filing on Thursday.

The former CEO of chip-software company Cadence Design joined Intel's board two years ago as part of a plan to restore Intel's place as the leading global chipmaker. The board expanded Tan's responsibilities in October 2023, authorizing him to oversee manufacturing operations. Over time, Tan grew frustrated by the company's large workforce, its approach to contract manufacturing and Intel's risk-averse and bureaucratic culture, according to the sources, who were not authorized to speak publicly. The circumstances around Tan's exit have not previously been reported. The departure of the industry veteran, who is well-regarded by investors, over Intel's strategy illustrates the uncertainty of its turnaround efforts. Tan leaves as the company endures one of the bleakest periods in its five-decade history that has left it vulnerable to a potential activist shareholder attack, former executives said. Intel has hired investment bank Morgan Stanley to prepare a defense, according to sources familiar with the matter, confirming an earlier report.

Italy's telecoms regulator AGCOM has summoned Google and Cloudflare to a September meeting to discuss strategies for combating online piracy, six months after launching its Piracy Shield blocking system. The move comes as IPTV piracy remains resilient despite new anti-piracy legislation passed in the country last year. The law introduced harsher penalties for providers and consumers of pirated content, including fines for watching pirate streams. It also granted more aggressive site-blocking powers.

Major stream suppliers appear minimally affected by overseas laws. however. AGCOM chief Massimiliano Capitanio seeks commitments from Google to limit pirate services in search results, according to TorrentFreak. The regulator also wants Cloudflare to address IPTV providers using its services to evade blocking.

Mozilla is following in Google Chrome's footsteps in officially distrusting Entrust as a root certificate authority (CA) following what it says was a protracted period of compliance failures. From a report: A little over a month ago, Google was the first to make the bold step of dropping Entrust as a CA, saying it noted a "pattern of concerning behaviors" from the company. Entrust has apologized to Google, Mozilla, and the wider web community, outlining its plans to regain the trust of browsers, but these appear to be unsatisfactory to both Google and Mozilla.

In an email shared by Mozilla's Ben Wilson on Wednesday, the root store manager said the decision wasn't taken lightly, but equally Entrust's response to Mozilla's concerns didn't inspire confidence that the situation would materially change for the better. "Mozilla previously requested that Entrust provide a detailed report on these recent incidents and their root causes, an evaluation of Entrust's recent actions in light of their previous commitments given in the aftermath of similarly serious incidents in 2020, and a proposal for how Entrust will re-establish Mozilla's and the community's trust," said Wilson.