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NVIDIA may give the US government a cut of its profits to sell AI chips to China, AOL's dial-up internet still exists, but not for much longer, and The Space Invaders movie is apparently still happening Aug 11, 2025

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The debate over whether AI chipmakers should be allowed to sell their products to China has taken an unusual turn. The US government has reportedly given NVIDIA and Advanced Micro Devices permission to make the sales but for one big catch: 15 percent of the sales. In other news, AOL said it will discontinue its dial-up service on September 30, officially marking the end of an era in Internet history. It may come as a shock to most that AOL still runs its dial-up Internet service, but some thousands of users still rely on this outdated method as an affordable way to access the Internet in more rural areas. And it appears the movie version of the arcade game Space Invaders is back in the works.

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Instagram adds a new friends map feature that sure looks a lot like the Snap Map Aug 08, 2025

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The update also finally adds reposting features, as well.

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The FCC will review EAS, Wild headset prototypes could be the future of VR, and HBO Max will crack down on password sharing Aug 08, 2025

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The Federal Communications Commission is planning a review of the US emergency alert systems. The announcement of this plan notes that the infrastructure underlying the EAS — which includes radio, television, satellite and cable systems — is 31 years old, while the framework underpinning the Wireless mobile device alert is 13 years old. Also, Meta previewed some of its latest virtual reality prototypes this week, with concepts that are compelling on the specs and long on the design. The company shared some details on its Tiramisu project, dubbing it "hyperrealistic VR." This set promises three times the contrast, 14 times the maximum brightness and 3.6 times the angular resolution of the Meta Quest 3. In actual stats, that's up to 1,400 nits of brightness and an angular resolution of 90 pixels per degree; and HBO Max will begin an "aggressive" messaging campaign about the practice beginning next month, according to an earnings report. Beyond stricter messaging, the company is looking to close any and all loopholes that allow users to share account passwords by the end of the year.

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OpenAI is giving ChatGPT Enterprise to the executive branch workforce for $1 Aug 07, 2025

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Over 2 million civilian workers at dozens of agencies will have access for at least one year.

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Apple will invest another $100 billion to avoid tariffs, Google says AI in Search is driving more queries and clicks, and TeaOnHer app for men which has security problems Aug 07, 2025

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Apple plans to invest an additional $100 billion in the US, the company announced on Wednesday. The investment follows President Trump's announcement yesterday that he would impose a 100 percent tariff on chip imports, with an exemption for any companies "building in the United States." In other news, Google Search head Liz Reid penned a blog post that puts quite a different spin on things. The Google VP claims traffic from search to websites is "relatively stable" and that click quality has increased. Reid's framing boils down to everything is peachy, and AI is making things better — even for websites! And A new app called TeaOnHer has emerged that attempts to flip the script, with men sharing information about women they date. And a new app called TeaOnHer has emerged with men sharing information about women they date which flips the script on the app Tea. And while Tea drew scrutiny last month after a data breach revealed user information, including potentially identifying details such as phone numbers and personal anecdotes, the copycat app seems to be suffering from the same problem.

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Illinois is the first state to ban AI therapists Aug 06, 2025

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The new law may test the Trump administration's will to disallow state-level regulations.

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Grok's image and video generator now has an NSFW 'spicy' mode, ElevenLabs launched its own royalty-free AI music service, and Intel's next-gen manufacturing process is reportedly still struggling Aug 06, 2025

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Elon Musk’s chatbot is seldom out of the news. When it isn’t vomiting antisemetic rhetoric or fixating on conspiracy theories without invitation, it’s inviting you to romance its anime-inspired AI companions. Grok’s NSFW credentials now extend to xAI’s new image and video generator. In other news, AI startup Eleven Labs just announced a service called Eleven Music, which generates fake songs that are cleared for commercial use. It's a prompt-based affair, so it can create just about anything users dream up; also, Intel is reportedly still struggling with a chipmaking process crucial to its future. Reuters reports that the company's 18A process is still producing low yields and high defect rates.

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NASA's latest mission to the ISS features a bacterial experiment Aug 05, 2025

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Four crew members are joined by several strains of disease-causing bacteria for their journey to the ISS.

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Perplexity is allegedly scraping websites it's not supposed to, again plus a failed NASA Lunar mission and Amazon reorg of Wondery Aug 05, 2025

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Web crawlers deployed by Perplexity to scrape websites are allegedly skirting restrictions, according to a new report from Cloudflare. Specifically, the report claims that the company's bots appear to be "stealth crawling" sites by disguising their identity to get around robots.txt files and firewalls. In other news, the Lunar Trailblazer mission to the moon officially ended on July 31, but it wasn't a complete journey. NASA said that its teams lost contact with the satellite shortly after its launch several months prior; Four years after Amazon’s acquisition of podcast network Wondery, the tech giant is dismantling its $300 million purchase and reorganizing various audio properties into separate teams at the company.

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Uber Eats is stuffing AI slop into your meal Aug 04, 2025

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In better news, merchants can now live-chat with customers too.

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