LinkedIn is testing support for short-form videos to help it compete with TikTok, YouTube Shorts, Instagram Reels, and other social media platforms. "[W]e are testing new ways to help members more easily discover timely, relevant videos to watch on LinkedIn," Suzi Owens, a company spokesperson, tells Axios in an email. From the report: A new "Video" option will appear next to the "Home" button at the bottom of the app's navigation bar, per a demo of the feature shared online by Austin Null, strategy director at creative agency McKinney. After tapping it, viewers are led to a feed of short-form videos similar to Instagram Reels and TikTok.

"If you've ever jokingly wondered if your search or viewing history is going to 'put you on some kind of list,' your concern may be more than warranted," writes Mashable : In now unsealed court documents reviewed by Forbes, Google was ordered to hand over the names, addresses, telephone numbers, and user activity of Youtube accounts and IP addresses that watched select YouTube videos, part of a larger criminal investigation by federal investigators.

The videos were sent by undercover police to a suspected cryptocurrency launderer... In conversations with the bitcoin trader, investigators sent links to public YouTube tutorials on mapping via drones and augmented reality software, Forbes details. The videos were watched more than 30,000 times, presumably by thousands of users unrelated to the case. YouTube's parent company Google was ordered by federal investigators to quietly hand over all such viewer data for the period of Jan. 1 to Jan. 8, 2023...
"According to documents viewed by Forbes, a court granted the government's request for the information," writes PC Magazine, adding that Google was asked "to not publicize the request." The requests are raising alarms for privacy experts who say the requests are unconstitutional and are "transforming search warrants into digital dragnets" by potentially targeting individuals who are not associated with a crime based simply on what they may have watched online.
That quote came from Albert Fox-Cahn, executive director at the Surveillance Technology Oversight Project, who elaborates in Forbes' article. "No one should fear a knock at the door from police simply because of what the YouTube algorithm serves up. I'm horrified that the courts are allowing this."

Thanks to long-time Slashdot reader schwit1 for sharing the article.

Indian Express calls it "the ultimate smartphone killer". (Coming soon, its laser-on-your-palm feature will display stock prices, sports scores, and flight statuses.)

Humane's Ai Pin can even translate what you say, repeating it out loud in another language (with 50 different languages supported). And it can read you summaries of what's on your favorite web sites, so "You can just surf the web with your voice," according to a new video released this week.

The video also shows it answering specific questions like "What's that song by 21 Savage with the violin intro?" (And later, while the song is playing, answering more questions like "This was sampled from another song. What song was that?") But then co-founder Imran Chaudhri — an iPhone designer and one of several former Apple employees at Humane — demonstrated a "Vision" feature that's coming soon. Holding a Sony Walkman he asks the Pin to "Look at this and tell me when it first came out" — and the Pin obliges. ("The Sony Walkman WM-F73 was released in 1986...") In another demo it correctly supplied the designer of an Air Jordan basketball shoe.

They're also working on integrating this into a Nutrition Tracking application. (A demonstrator held a doughnut and asked the Pin to identify how much sugar was in it.) If you tell the Pin that you've eaten the doughnut, it can then calculate your intake of carbs, protein, and fats.

And in the video the Pin responded within seconds to the command "Make a spreadsheet about top consumer tech reviewers on YouTube [with] real names, subscriber counts, and URLs." It performed the research and created the spreadsheet, which appears on the demonstrator's laptop, apparently logged in to Humane's cloud-based user platform.

In the video Humane's co-founder stresses that its Ai Pin does all this without downloading applications, "which allows me to stay present in the moment and flow." But while it can also make phone calls and sends text messages, Imran Chaudhri adds that "Ai Pin is a completely new form factor for compute. It's never been about replacing. It's always been about creating new ways to interact with what you need. So instead of having to sit down to use a computer, or reaching in to your pocket and pulling out your phone and navigating apps, Ai Pin allows you to simply act on something the moment you think about it — letting AI do all the work for you."

Or, as they say later "This is about technology adapting and reacting to you. Not you having to adapt to it."

There's also talk about their "AI OS" — named Cosmos — with the Pin described as "our first entry point" into that operating system, with other devices planned to support it in the future. (Mashable's reporter notes that Humane's Ai Pin is backed by OpenAI CEO Sam Altman, and writes "I was impressed with how well it worked.") The video even ends with an update for SDK developers. In the second half of 2024, "you're going to be able to connect your services to the Ai Pin using REST APIs and OAuth." Phase two will let developers run their code directly on Humane's cloud platform — while Phase three will see developers codes on Ai Pin devices, "to get access to the mic, the camera, the sensors, and the laser. We are so excited to see what you're gonna build."

Humane says its Ai Pin will start shipping at the end of March, with priority orders arriving starting on April 11th.

prisoninmate shares a report from 9to5Linux: Dubbed "Kathmandu" after the host city of the GNOME.Asia 2023 conference in Kathmandu, Nepal, the GNOME 46 desktop environment is here to introduce major new features like headless remote desktop support that lets you connect to your GNOME system remotely without there being an existing session. While experimental, Variable Refresh Rate (VRR) support is another major new feature in GNOME 46, which will allow you to change the variable refresh rate of your monitor from the GNOME Settings app in the Displays section. Talking about GNOME Settings, the GNOME 46 release brings a new System panel that incorporates the Region, Language, Date, Time, Users, Remote Desktop, and About panels, as well as new Secure Shell settings. Check out the release notes and the official release video here.

GNOME 46 will be available shortly in many distributions, such as Fedora 40 and Ubuntu 24.04. You can try it today by looking for a beta release here.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Wired: YouTube has updated its rulebook for the era of deepfakes. Starting today, anyone uploading video to the platform must disclose certain uses of synthetic media, including generative AI, so viewers know what they're seeing isn't real. YouTube says it applies to "realistic" altered media such as "making it appear as if a real building caught fire" or swapping"the face of one individual with another's." The new policy shows YouTube taking steps that could help curb the spread of AI-generated misinformation as the US presidential election approaches. It is also striking for what it permits: AI-generated animations aimed at kids are not subject to the new synthetic content disclosure rules.

YouTube's new policies exclude animated content altogether from the disclosure requirement. This means that the emerging scene of get-rich-quick, AI-generated content hustlers can keep churning out videos aimed at children without having to disclose their methods. Parents concerned about the quality of hastily made nursery-rhyme videos will be left to identify AI-generated cartoons by themselves. YouTube's new policy also says creators don't need to flag use of AI for "minor" edits that are "primarily aesthetic" such as beauty filters or cleaning up video and audio. Use of AI to "generate or improve" a script or captions is also permitted without disclosure. [...]

The exemption for animation in YouTube's new policy could mean that parents cannot easily filter such videos out of search results or keep YouTube's recommendation algorithm from autoplaying AI-generated cartoons after setting up their child to watch popular and thoroughly vetted channels like PBS Kids or Ms. Rachel. Some problematic AI-generated content aimed at kids does require flagging under the new rules. In 2023, the BBC investigated a wave of videos targeting older children that used AI tools to push pseudoscience and conspiracy theories, including climate change denialism. These videos imitated conventional live-action educational videos -- showing, for example, the real pyramids of Giza -- so unsuspecting viewers might mistake them for factually accurate educational content. (The pyramid videos then went on the suggest that the structures can generate electricity.) This new policy would crack down on that type of video. "We require kids content creators to disclose content that is meaningfully altered or synthetically generated when it seems realistic," says YouTube spokesperson Elena Hernandez. "We don't require disclosure of content that is clearly unrealistic and isn't misleading the viewer into thinking it's real."

An anonymous reader quotes a report from TorrentFreak: Back in 2004, in the pre-Web 2.0 era, research indicated that BitTorrent was responsible for an impressive 35% of all Internet traffic. At the time, file-sharing via peer-to-peer networks was the main traffic driver as no other services consumed large amounts of bandwidth. Fast-forward two decades and these statistics are ancient history. With the growth of video streaming, including services such as YouTube, Netflix, and TikTok, file-sharing traffic is nothing more than a drop in today's data pool. [...]

This week, Canadian broadband management company Sandvine released its latest Global Internet Phenomena Report which makes it clear that BitTorrent no longer leads any charts. The latest data show that video and social media are the leading drivers of downstream traffic, accounting for more than half of all fixed access and mobile data worldwide. Needless to say, BitTorrent is nowhere to be found in the list of 'top apps'. Looking at upstream traffic, BitTorrent still has some relevance on fixed access networks where it accounts for 4% of the bandwidth. However, it's been surpassed by cloud storage apps, FaceTime, Google, and YouTube. On mobile connections, BitTorrent no longer makes it into the top ten. The average of 46 MB upstream traffic per subscriber shouldn't impress any file-sharer. However, since only a small percentage of all subscribers use BitTorrent, the upstream traffic per user is of course much higher.

Starting Monday, YouTube creators will be required to label when realistic-looking videos were made using artificial intelligence, part of a broader effort by the company to be transparent about content that could otherwise confuse or mislead users. From a report: When a user uploads a video to the site, they will see a checklist asking if their content makes a real person say or do something they didn't do, alters footage of a real place or event, or depicts a realistic-looking scene that didn't actually occur. The disclosure is meant to help prevent users from being confused by synthetic content amid a proliferation of new, consumer-facing generative AI tools that make it quick and easy to create compelling text, images, video and audio that can often be hard to distinguish from the real thing.

Online safety experts have raised alarms that the proliferation of AI-generated content could confuse and mislead users across the internet, especially ahead of elections in the United States and elsewhere in 2024. YouTube creators will be required to identify when their videos contain AI-generated or otherwise manipulated content that appears realistic -- so that YouTube can attach a label for viewers -- and could face consequences if they repeatedly fail to add the disclosure.

Pi was calculated to 100 trillion decimal places in 2022 by a Google team lead by cloud developer advocate Emma Haruka Iwao.

But 2024's "pi day" saw a new announcement... After successfully breaking the speed record for calculating pi to 100 trillion digits last year, the team at StorageReview has taken it up a notch, revealing all the numbers of Pi up to 105 trillion digits! Spoiler: the 105 trillionth digit of Pi is 6!

Owner and Editor-in-Chief Brian Beeler led the team that used 36 Solidigm SSDs (nearly a petabyte) for their unprecedented capacity and reliability required to store the calculated digits of Pi. Although there is no practical application for this many digits, the exercise underscores the astounding capabilities of modern hardware and an achievement in computational and storage technology...

For an undertaking of this size, which took 75 days, the role of storage cannot be understated. "For the Pi computation, we're entirely restricted by storage, says Beeler. "Faster CPUs will help accelerate the math, but the limiting factor to many new world records is the amount of local storage in the box. For this run, we're again leveraging Solidigm D5-P5316 30.72TB SSDs to help us get a little over 1P flash in the system.

"These SSDs are the only reason we could break through the prior records and hit 105 trillion Pi digits."
"Leveraging a combination of open-source and proprietary software, the team at StorageReview optimized the algorithmic process to fully exploit the hardware's capabilities, reducing computational time and enhancing efficiency," Beeler says in the announcement.

There's a video on YouTube where the team discusses their effort.

When it comes to TikTok, "The Chinese government is signaling that it won't allow a forced sale..." reported the Wall Street Journal Friday, "limiting options for the app's owners as buyers begin lining up to bid for its U.S. operations..."

"They have also sent signals to TikTok's owner, Beijing-based ByteDance, that company executives have interpreted as meaning the government would rather the app be banned in the U.S. than be sold, according to people familiar with the matter."

But that's not always how it plays out. McClatchy notes that in 2019 the Committee on Foreign Investment in the U.S. ordered Grindr's Chinese owners to relinquish control of Grindr. "A year later, the Chinese owners voluntarily complied and sold the company to San Vicente Acquisition, incorporated in Delaware, for around $608 million, according to Forbes."

And CNN reminds us that the world's most-populous country already banned TikTok more than three years ago: In June 2020, after a violent clash on the India-China border that left at least 20 Indian soldiers dead, the government in New Delhi suddenly banned TikTok and several other well-known Chinese apps. "It's important to remember that when India banned TikTok and multiple Chinese apps, the US was the first to praise the decision," said Nikhil Pahwa, the Delhi-based founder of tech website MediaNama. "[Former] US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo had welcomed the ban, saying it 'will boost India's sovereignty.'"

While India's abrupt decision shocked the country's 200 million TikTok users, in the four years since, many have found other suitable alternatives. "The ban on Tiktok led to the creation of a multibillion dollar opportunity ... A 200 million user base needed somewhere to go," said Pahwa, adding that it was ultimately American tech companies that seized the moment with their new offerings... Within a week of the ban, Meta-owned Instagram cashed in by launching its TikTok copycat, Instagram Reels, in India. Google introduced its own short video offering, YouTube Shorts. Homegrown alternatives such as MX Taka Tak and Moj also began seeing a rise in popularity and an infux in funding. Those local startups soon fizzled out, however, unable to match the reach and financial firepower of the American firms, which are flourishing.
In fact, at the time India "announced a ban on more than 50 Chinese apps," remembers the Washington Post, adding that Nepal also announced a ban on TikTok late last year.

Their article points out that TikTok has also been banned by top EU policymaking bodies, while "Government staff in some of the bloc's 27 member states, including Belgium, Denmark and the Netherlands, have also been told not to use TikTok on their work phones." Canada banned TikTok from all government-issued phones in February 2023, after similar steps in the United States and the European Union.... Britain announced a TikTok ban on government ministers' and civil servants' devices last year, with officials citing the security of state information. Australia banned TikTok from all federal government-owned devices last year after seeking advice from intelligence and security agencies.
A new EFF web page warns that America's new proposed ban on TikTok could also apply to apps like WeChat...

Google enjoys a competitive edge in generative AI due to its trove of data and AI-optimised chips, Microsoft has told EU antitrust regulators, underscoring the rivalry between the two tech giants. From a report: The comments by Microsoft were in response to a consultation launched by the European Commission in January on the level of competition in generative AI. The growing popularity of generative AI, which can generate human-like responses to written prompts and is exemplified by Microsoft-backed OpenAI's ChatGPT and Google's chatbot Gemini, has triggered concerns about misinformation and fake news.

"Today, only one company - Google - is vertically integrated in a manner that provides it with strength and independence at every AI layer from chips to a thriving mobile app store. Everyone else must rely on partnerships to innovate and compete," Microsoft said in its report to the Commission. It said Google's self-supply AI semiconductors would give it a competitive advantage for the years to come, while its large sets of proprietary data from Google Search Index and YouTube enabled it to train its large language model Gemini. "YouTube provides an unparalleled set of video content; it hosts an estimated 14 billion videos. Google has access to such content; but other AI developers do not," Microsoft said.

The openVertebrate (oVert) project is now complete, offering free online access to incredibly detailed 3D images of over 13,000 vertebrates. New Atlas reports: More than a research project, oVert was a collaboration between like-minded specialists across 25 institutions whose sole objective was to add value to museum collections by making them more widely available. Importantly, these images provide an insight that would only otherwise be obtained by destructive dissection and tissue sampling. Over the course of six years, project members took CT scans of more than half the classes, or genera, of all amphibians, reptiles, fishes, birds, and mammals, rendering models that provide an intimate look at the creatures, inside and out. [...]

For a working example of the incredible detail and information contained in oVert's images, head to Sketchfab to view a sample of interactive 3D models like the olive sea snake. Or go to MorphoSource to access the full oVert repository. [...] If you have 30 minutes to spare, check out the full video produced by the Florida Museum, which showcases a collection of diverse oVert specimens. A study presenting a summary of the oVert project was published in the journal BioScience.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from BleepingComputer: YouTube is no longer showing recommended videos to users logged out of a Google account or using Incognito mode, making people concerned they are being bullied into always being signed into the service. This change, which is now rolling out, shows a simple YouTube homepage without any videos or tips on what to watch. Before, even in incognito mode or when not logged in, Google would still show you video suggestions. Now, users see a message saying "Get Started" and "Start watching videos to help us build a feed of videos you'll love" when they open YouTube in incognito mode, with videos no longer being recommended.

An anonymous Slashdot reader shared this report from The Washington Post: A YouTube contractor was addressing the Austin City Council on Thursday, calling on them to urge Google to negotiate with his union, when a colleague interrupted him with jaw-dropping news: His 43-person team of contractors had all been laid off...

The YouTube workers, who work for Google and Cognizant, unanimously voted to unionize under the Alphabet Workers Union-CWA in April 2023. Since then, the workers say that Google has refused to bargain with them. Thursday's layoff signifies continued tensions between Google and its workers, some of whom in 2021 formed a union...

Workers had about 20 minutes to gather their belongings and leave the premises before they were considered trespassing.
Video footage of the moment is embedded at the top of the article. "I was speechless, shocked," said the contractor who'd been speaking. He told the Washington Post "I didn't know what to do. But angered, that was the main feeling." The council meeting was streaming live online and has since spread on social media. The contractors view the layoff as retaliation for unionizing, but Google and information technology subcontractor Cognizant said it was the normal end of a business contract.

The ability for layoffs to spread over social media highlights how the painful experience of a job loss is frequently being made public, from employees sharing recordings of Zoom meetings to posting about their unemployment. The increasing tension between YouTube's contractors and Google comes as massive layoffs continue to hit the tech industry — leaving workers uneasy and companies emboldened. Google already has had rounds of cuts the past two years.

Google has been in a long-running battle with many of its contractors as they seek the perks and high pay that full-time Google workers are accustomed to. The company has tens of thousands of contractors doing everything from food service to sales to writing code... Google maintains that Cognizant is responsible for the contractors' employment and working conditions, and therefore isn't responsible for bargaining with them. Cognizant said it is offering the workers seven weeks of paid time to explore other roles at the company and use its training resources.

Last year, the National Labor Relations Board ruled that Cognizant and Google are joint employers of the contractors. In January, the NLRB sent a cease-and-desist letter to both employers for failing to bargain with the union. Since then the issue of joint employment, which would ultimately determine which company is responsible for bargaining, has landed in an appeals court and has yet to be ruled on.
"Workers say they don't have sick pay, receive minimal benefits and are paid as little as $19 an hour," according to the article, "forcing some to work multiple jobs to make ends meet." Sam Regan, a data analyst contractor for YouTube Music, told the Washington Post that he was one of the last workers to leave the meeting where the layoffs were announced.

"Upon leaving, he heard one of the security guards call the non-emergency police line to report trespassers."

The first privately built spacecraft has successfully landed on the lunar surface on Thursday. "We can confirm, without a doubt, that our equipment is on the surface of the moon," said Stephen Altemus, CEO of Intuitive Machines, the Houston-based company that operated the Odysseus spacecraft. "Welcome to the moon." From a report: As it approached the surface of the moon, Odysseus lost contact with NASA, resulting in several anxious minutes for those who worked on the joint project. But after approximately 15 minutes of searching, officials confirmed that they were once again receiving signals from the spacecraft. "A commercial lander named Odysseus, powered by a company called Intuitive Machines, launched up on a Space X rocket, carrying a bounty of NASA scientific instruments and bearing the dream of a new adventure, a new adventure in science, innovation and American leadership, well, all of that aced the landing of a lifetime," NASA Administrator Bill Nelson said after contact had been reestablished. "Today for the first time in more than a half century, the U.S. has returned to the moon."

Altemus had estimated that Odysseus had an 80% chance of successfully landing on the moon, citing previous failed attempts as an advantage. "We've stood on the shoulders of everybody who's tried before us," Altemus said. It was the first American mission to land on the moon since Apollo 17 in 1972 and the first private spacecraft ever to make a soft landing there. While it was a private mission, NASA paid Intuitive Machines $118 million to deliver six instruments to the moon. And the U.S. space agency provided streaming video of the landing.

In a new report today, Nielsen found that YouTube is once again the overall top streaming service in the U.S., with 8.6% of viewing on television screens. Netflix was a close second at 7.9% of TV usage. TechCrunch reports: In a blog post celebrating the achievement, the Google-owned streaming service announced that viewers now watch a daily average of over 1 billion hours of YouTube content on their televisions, which could indicate that there's a preference for user-generated videos among U.S. consumers rather than traditional TV shows. Sixty-one percent of Gen Z reported that they favor user-generated content over other content formats. [...]

Although YouTube may have precedence in the living room, TikTok continues to dominate on mobile devices. The short-form video app recently began testing the ability for TikTokers to upload 30-minute videos, which could step on YouTube's toes. TikTok also entered the spatial reality space, launching a native app on the Apple Vision Pro. Meanwhile, YouTube decided to not build a dedicated app for the device.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: Nintendo's Satellaview, a Japan-only satellite add-on for the Super Famicom, is a rich target for preservationists because it was the home to some of the most ephemeral games ever released. That includes a host of content for Nintendo's own games, including F-Zero. That influential Super Nintendo (Super Famicom in Japan) racing title was the subject of eight weekly broadcasts sent to subscribing Japanese homes in 1996 and 1997, some with live "Soundlink" CD-quality music and voiceovers. When live game broadcasts were finished, the memory cartridges used to store game data would report themselves as empty, even though they technically were not. Keeping that same 1MB memory cartridge in the system when another broadcast started would overwrite that data, and there were no rebroadcasts.

As reported by Matthew Green at Press the Buttons (along with Did You Know Gaming's informative video), data from some untouched memory cartridges was found and used to re-create some of the content. Some courses, part of a multi-week "Grand Prix 2" event, have never been found, despite a $5,000 bounty offering and extensive effort. And yet, remarkably, the 10 courses in those later broadcasts were reverse-engineered, using a VHS recording, machine learning tools, and some manual pixel-by-pixel re-creation. The results are "north of 99.9% accurate," according to those who crafted it and exist now as a mod you can patch onto an existing F-Zero ROM. [...] Their work means that, 25 years later, a moment in gaming that was nearly lost to time and various corporate currents has been, if not entirely restored, brought as close as is humanly (and machine-ably) possible to what it once was.

Nvidia is releasing an early version of Chat with RTX today, a demo app that lets you run a personal AI chatbot on your PC. From a report: You can feed it YouTube videos and your own documents to create summaries and get relevant answers based on your own data. It all runs locally on a PC, and all you need is an RTX 30- or 40-series GPU with at least 8GB of VRAM. I've been briefly testing out Chat with RTX over the past day, and although the app is a little rough around the edges, I can already see this being a valuable part of data research for journalists or anyone who needs to analyze a collection of documents. Chat with RTX can handle YouTube videos, so you simply input a URL, and it lets you search transcripts for specific mentions or summarize an entire video.

Minesto, a marine energy tech developer based in Sweden, has deployed their new Dragon 12 tidal energy harvester to the Faroe Islands. Operating like an underwater kite, the Dragon 12 "uses lift generated by tidal flows to fly patterns faster than the currents, harvesting renewable energy," reports New Atlas. From the report: Where devices like Orbital's O2 tidal turbine more or less just sit there in the water harvesting energy from tidal currents, Minesto's Dragon series are anchored to the sea bed, and fly around like kites, treating the currents like wind. Just as land-based wind energy kites fly in figure 8 patterns to accelerate themselves faster than the wind, so does the Dragon underwater. This, says Minesto, lets the Dragon pull more energy from a given tidal current than other designs -- and it also changes the economic equations for relevant sites, making slower tidal flows worth exploiting.

These are by no means small kites -- the Dragon 12 needs to be disassembled to fit in a shipping container. It rocks a monster 12-meter (39-ft) wingspan, and weighs no less than 28 tons. But compared to other offshore power options like wind turbines, it's an absolute minnow, and extremely easy to install using a single smallish boat and a sea bed tether. As with any renewable energy project, the key figure here is LCoE (levelized cost of energy) -- so what's it gonna cost? Well, back in 2017, Minesto projected about US$108/MWh once its first hundred megawatts of capacity are installed -- with costs falling thereafter as low as $54/MWh.

The Dragon 12, like other tidal devices, will be more effective in some places than others -- and Denmark's Faroe Islands, an archipelago in the chilly North Atlantic between Scotland and Iceland, offer ideal conditions. Home to about 55,000 people and more than a million puffins, the Faroe Islands funnel tidal currents through a number of slim channels. This accelerates the water significantly, and thus increases the energy that devices like the Dragon 12 can harvest. That's where the first Dragon has been deployed, and on Friday, it was connected to the local power grid to begin delivering energy. You can watch a video of the Dragon 12 on YouTube.

Technology made its mark on the Super Bowl ads this year. Microsoft purchased a long inspirational ad for Copilot, ending with the tagline "Your everyday AI companion." (Although another message made the opposite point. "With artificial intelligence, the future is in good hands," an announcer says ironically -- while the ad shows the minions from Despicable Me 4.)

Google's ad showed how its Pixel 8 smartphone helps people with vision problems take photos. T-Mobile touted its internet service.

And for some reason CrowdStrike's ad about its endpoint security software took place in the Old West...

VW ended an ad looking at its history with a shot of its new electric vehicle, the ID.Buzz minivan, while Kia had its own heart-tugging ad touting their electric EV9.

And Pfizer ran a minute-long ad showing the history of medical progress, culminating with a pointer to their new domain, LetsOutdoCancer.com.

Even NASA got into the action, releasing a video showing an astronaut catching a pass in zero gravity. ("Including its solar panels, the Space Station is the same size as a regulation football field.")

And some people even tried watching the Super Bowl on their new Apple Vision Pro...

Last night in San Francisco's Chinatown, "A person jumped on the hood of a Waymo driverless taxi and smashed its windshield..." reports the Verge, "generating applause before a crowd formed around the car and covered it in spray paint, breaking its windows, and ultimately set it on fire." The fire department arrived minutes later, according to a report in The Autopian, but by then flames had already fully engulfed the car.... Waymo representative Sandy Karp told The Verge via email that the fully autonomous car "was not transporting any riders" when it was attacked and fireworks were tossed inside the car, sparking the flames...

The fire takes place against the backdrop of simmering tension between San Francisco residents and automated vehicle operators... Just last week, a Waymo car struck a cyclist who had reportedly been following behind a truck turning across its path.
The "burnt-out husk of the electric Waymo Jaguar" appears in a video posted on YouTube, according to the article. "Another set of videos posted by software developer Michael Vendi gives a view into the scene as it played out and the fire grew."

San Francisco's 49ers play in the Super Bowl this afteroon, so last night's celebrations for Chinese New Year could be followed by additional celebrations tonight. Police Chief Bill Scott is already urging residents to behave responsibly. "Please don't light anything on fire."