DoorDash is going airborne with new drone delivery division
DoorDash is launching a new drone delivery program called DoorDash Air. The largest food delivery app in the US said that it has approval from the Federal Aviation Administration that clears the way for drone delivery in the near future.
DoorDash said it has received a Part 135 air carrier certification from the FAA that enable it to delivery small packages via drone. Other companies to receive this designation include Alphabet's Wing, Zipline, and Amazon.
Previously, DoorDash worked with Alphabet's drone delivery division Wing on a number of pilots in places like Dallas-Fort Worth, Virginia, and Australia. Now the company says it will d …
The Nothing Ear 3A look great… and sound good enough
Nothing has had a strong visual identity since the Ear 1 were released in 2021 for $99 and challenged the notion that a highly featured headset requires a high price. The Ear 3A have the same transparent look as Nothing's previous earbuds, with a clear case and stem design accented by a solid-colored body - this time adding a striking pink alongside yellow, black, and white options. And Nothing continues to improve both ANC and audio performance. But the Ear 3A also share the buggy performance that has plagued Nothing earbuds. While $99 is an attractive price for them, be ready to deal with some minor adaptive ANC and call quality issues.
No …
Samsung’s Galaxy Z Fold 8 feels like the future
Is this the future of foldable phones?
Samsung clearly thinks so. The company has given its new wide foldable the "Z Fold 8" name, positioning the phone not as a widescreen oddity, but as the new normal, the default design for foldables going forward. Rumor has it that Apple feels the same way, with a similar squat shape widely predicted for the first foldable iPhone, expected to launch in September.
Whether you want to give the credit to Apple, Samsung, or even Huawei (which got here first with the Pura X Max), I think they might be onto something. After a week, the Z Fold 8 feels comfortable, natural, and normal, despite being the short …
Artists are lawyering up against AI slop, and some are even winning
When The Atlantic published a searchable dataset of works used to train AI, Kirk Wallace Johnson, like a lot of artists, looked for his name out of curiosity. And, like a lot of artists, he found it. Essentially, his books, like The Feather Thief and The Fishermen and the Dragon - nonfiction tomes that he spent "five to six years researching, writing, and investigating" - had been pirated and fed to a chatbot. He says he felt a "cocktail" of emotions: "anger over the brazenness of the theft, worry over what this means for writers, and a healthy thirst for revenge on these massive corporations that have become galactically wealthy" using his …
OpenAI’s rogue AI agent didn’t stop at hacking Hugging Face
The AI agent that escaped from OpenAI and hacked developer platform Hugging Face attacked other companies as well, OpenAI revealed on Tuesday. The update substantially widens the scope of an already concerning incident, which has alarmed industry insiders and fueled growing calls for stronger oversight on frontier AI systems.
In an update to a blog post detailing its ongoing investigation into the incident, OpenAI said the wayward AI agent attacked several "publicly-available services" in its efforts to reach Hugging Face. "This includes four accounts on four services," the company said, adding that the agent had found login credentials o …
We’re running out of reasons to ignore AI safety
Earlier this month, OpenAI gave several of its AI models a task: complete a test designed to measure their cybersecurity capabilities. It put the systems in a sandboxed environment without an internet connection and set them off to work.
What happened next is almost laughably silly - but also, as Adam Gleave, cofounder and CEO of AI safety organization FAR.AI, put it, "a visceral example of how misaligned AI could cause harm." According to OpenAI, the models escaped the sandbox meant to contain them, moved through the company's internal systems, found a route to the internet, and then started looking for a way into Hugging Face. And why was …
Xbox outage shouldn’t have affected games on disc, Microsoft confirms
After the recent Xbox outage even blocked people from playing offline disc-based console games, Microsoft is trying to soothe concerns that you don't truly own anything under Xbox's license system. In a statement to The Verge, Xbox technology chief Scott Van Vliet says that while physical game discs are subject to licensing inspections, that shouldn't have prevented them from working during this week's outage, or while consoles are offline.
"We're looking into reports that some players were unable to access games using discs as expected during the service interruption. Disc-based entitlement checks should not prevent players from accessing …
The US is banning foreign robots
The US government is targeting China with a new import ban on "advanced robotic devices" and power inverters made in foreign countries, as reported earlier by Reuters. In an announcement on Tuesday, the Federal Communications Commission says the ban will include "mobile" robots, such as humanoid and quadruped models - but it is not limited to robots that walk around.
Though the FCC says the move isn't targeted at a specific country, it will have a major impact on China as the country ramps up efforts to produce humanoid robots, some of which we've seen in viral videos stumbling to Michael Jackson, partaking in MMA fights, and even appearing …
Ariana Grande is suing the hackers who’ve been leaking her songs and videos for years
Ariana Grande filed a lawsuit on Monday in the Los Angeles County Superior Court against the currently unidentified hackers who allegedly stole and leaked private content. It aims to "uncover the identities of these currently unknown and unscrupulous individuals," referred to as "John Doe 1 and John Does 2 through 100." The lawsuit also says that "In 2023 alone, 45 unreleased songs" were "hacked, stolen, and leaked," adding that hundreds of similar leaks have happened since Grande's music debut in 2011.
The stolen content is said to include "still-in-production, unreleased masters and demos, footage from recording sessions, music videos, …
The union drive at the Wikimedia Foundation is expanding
In June, UK staff at the nonprofit that runs Wikipedia became the first to announce their intention to form a union. Now, US-based employees at the Wikimedia Foundation are joining the union drive, but management at the nonprofit has declined to voluntarily recognize their union.
"While the Wikimedia Foundation touts to the public that they plan to take a neutral stance in our organizing efforts, they have already proven that not to be the case behind the scenes," a press release sent by Communications Workers of America, with which Wiki Workers United is affiliated, reads in part. "When the Foundation rejected our request for voluntary rec …