Samsung is unveiling and Antarctica is ailing, but first: a cartoon about marriage in the age of social media .Here's the news you need to know, in two minutes or less.

But this week, the Department of Transportation made some tweaks to its vehicle design rules when it said it would allow the robotic delivery vehicle company Nuro to operate up to 5,000 mini-cars that don’t quite fit conventional guidelines.

And flaws in a widely used Cisco protocol have put millions of workplace phones, routers, and network switches at risk .On the lighter side of hacking—well, it's all relative—artist Simon Weckert fooled Google Maps into thinking there was a traffic jam in Berlin by carting around 99 smartphones in little red wagon .

Facebook and Twitter also collaborated with Google and Apple on remediation efforts, and the Indiana University researchers won an additional bug bounty award from Google for their findings.

Soon enough, Weckert realized that it was the mass of people, or more specifically their smartphones, that had inadvertently tricked Google into seeing gridlock on an empty street.

Apple yesterday touted a “new” version of Apple Maps, one that includes faster navigation, more detailed roads, real-time transit updates, lists of favorite places, and access to Look Around, street-level 3-D imagery that’s similar to Google’s Street View .

That existing model allows companies and advertisers at least some access to marketing data; one argument for preserving it is that if browsers become too restrictive, those parties will pull content from the open web and move it to mobile apps instead.

Across the street a retro McDonnell Douglas sign perches above the aerospace giant’s former factory, and just around the corner Virgin Orbit is developing air-launched rockets .It’s a fitting headquarters for SpinLaunch, a company breathing new life into the decades-old idea of using giant mechanical slings to hurl rockets into orbit.

A Disturbing Look at a Massive Facial Recognition DatabaseThere are really two stories worth reading about Clearview AI, a company that claims to have scraped 3 billion images from the internet—including social media sites—to power an unprecedented facial recognition database.

Barnett, along with executives from Basecamp, Sonos, and Tile, testified at a high-profile congressional hearing in Boulder, Colorado, Friday where they told lawmakers how the anticompetitive practices of Amazon, Google, Facebook, and Apple have negatively impacted their businesses.

Google researchers made headlines early this month for a study that claimed their artificial intelligence system could outperform human experts at finding breast cancers on mammograms.Machine-enabled healthcare may bring us many benefits in the years to come, but those will be contingent on the ways in which it’s used.

The Commerce Department is, in fact, still weighing further AI software controls, and the Trump administration is increasingly scrutinizing how Silicon Valley interacts with China.“I don’t think any US government official expects to keep China from developing AI—they are doing quite well—but they don’t want companies like Google or Microsoft helping them,” says James Lewis, senior vice president of the Center for Strategic & International Studies, a Washington DC think tank.

Last month, both Google and Apple removed a popular social messaging app called ToTok from their official app stores.This seems to imply that in reviewing ToTok, Google didn't find anything about the app that violates Play Store policies.

In the case of TikTok, that means China, which means government employees are probably right to take extra precautions .China's 'Cloud Hopper' Hacking Campaign Did Even More Damage Than ThoughtA 2018 indictment detailed how China's elite APT10 hackers used access to so-called managed service providers to steal intellectual properly from dozens of companies.

“The structures in the ice fascinated me and the patterns changed all the time,” Hegen says.But Matti Leppäranta, who teaches geophysics at the University of Helsinki, says the gray and white areas result from air bubbles in the ice and “very shallow snow dunes” atop of it.

From the time they started their company in the late 1990s, they gleefully drew the boxes that subsequent founder-savants would later check off: pursuing ideas that conventional wisdom deemed crazy; dismissing traditional business practices; and maintaining control of their company even after going public, bypassing oversight by granting themselves powerful voting shares.

If you want to learn how to properly spin your ride around, it’s best to tap Knox for a real-life lesson.Plus, the latest news on artificial intelligence 🏃🏽‍♀️ Want the best tools to get healthy?

Google figures that since it has a big (encrypted) database of all your passwords, it might as well compare them against a 4-billion-strong public list of compromised usernames and passwords that have been exposed in innumerable security breaches over the years.

WIRED: You gave a research talk about building new kinds of computers to power machine learning.W: Mustafa Suleyman, a cofounder of DeepMind, the London AI startup that’s part of Alphabet and a major player in machine learning research, recently moved over to Google.

The disco clam is saved, and the mantis shrimp is not only out of a meal but is itself at risk of being eaten, by hanging out there like a punch-drunk prizefighter.

He also lamented the limitations of that technology, which involves designing software called artificial neural networks that can get better at a specific task by experience or seeing labeled examples of correct answers.“We’re kind of like the dog who caught the car,” Aguera y Arcas said.

While Bermejo-Vega thinks Google’s demonstration does provide scientific value of the technology’s viability, she emphasizes their success was “narrow.” In addition, all quantum computers, including Google’s, perform inconsistently because they are prone to errors that researchers don’t know how to correct.

Hackers are surging and cloud providers are splurging, but first: a cartoon about eyewear from the future .Here's the news you need to know, in two minutes or less.

On August 10, 2015, Google CEO Larry Page shocked the business world by announcing he was restructuring the company he cofounded into a holding company called Alphabet.

As the company faces a series of antitrust investigations and mounting employee unrest, its two cofounders, Larry Page and Sergey Brin, announced on Tuesday they were stepping down from their leadership roles at the company.

The data-moving tool has been created as a result of the Data Transfer Project (DTP), which was set up in 2018 and is a collaboration between the world's biggest tech companies: Apple, Facebook, Google, Microsoft , and are the group's key members.

While I continue to use Google at work (more out of necessity, as my employer runs on G-Suite), on my phone I’m all about DuckDuckGo. I had, based on zero evidence, convinced myself that finding things on the internet was hard and, inevitably, involved a fair amount of tracking.

Google has a veritable hardware ecosystem up and running with its ever-expanding line of Nest smart speakers, routers, Pixel phones, not to mention its new Stadia game-streaming service .Google Pixel 3A for $300 ($100 off) at Best Buy or Amazon: Our favorite phone of the year was already affordable.

Rivers and Berland believe they are being retaliated against for speaking up, as part of a small but vocal group of employee activists who have criticized various company policies and projects over the past few years.

Within 12 minutes the clip was up on Twitter, and for a little while the internet came together to ignore the terrifying news cycle and gather 'round the great unifier: the objective hilarity of a fart.