Meta has sued the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) in an attempt to stop regulators from reopening a landmark $5 billion privacy settlement from 2020 and to allow it to monetize kids’ data across apps like Facebook, Instagram and Whatsapp. This comes after a federal judge ruled on Monday that the FTC would be allowed to expand on 2020’s privacy settlement, paving the way for the agency to propose tough new rules on how the social media giant could operate in the wake of the Cambridge Analytica scandal.

Today’s lawsuit demands an immediate stop to the FTC’s proceedings, calling it an “obvious power grab” and an “unconstitutional adjudication by fiat.” A Meta spokesperson even referred to the FTC as “prosecutor, judge, and jury in the same case”, as reported by Bloomberg. This is the second attempt by Facebook’s parent company to stop the sanctions in court.

The FTC, for its part, says that Meta has repeatedly violated the terms of 2020’s settlement regarding user privacy. The agency also says that the company has violated the Children’s Online Privacy Protection Act (COPPA) by monetizing the data of younger users. The FTC has already been given the go ahead by a judge to restrict this type of monetization, a decision Meta hopes to overturn.

The FTC also seeks to implement new restrictions that limit Meta’s use of facial recognition, as well as a complete moratorium on new products and services until a third-party completes an audit to determine if the company’s complying with its privacy obligations.

“Facebook has repeatedly violated its privacy promises,” Samuel Levine, director of the FTC’s Bureau of Consumer Protection, said in a statement. “The company’s recklessness has put young users at risk, and Facebook needs to answer for its failures.” To that end, multiple states have sued Meta to stop the monetization of children’s data, along with the EU.

The FTC has been a consistent thorn in Meta’s side, as the agency tried to stop the company’s acquisition of VR software developer Within on the grounds that the deal would deter "future innovation and competitive rivalry." The agency dropped this bid after a series of legal setbacks. It also opened up an investigation into the company’s VR arm, accusing Meta of anti-competitive behavior.

Corporations have been all over the FTC lately in attempts to paint the agency as a prime example of government overreach. Beyond Meta, biotech giant Illumina is suing the FTC to halt a decision that stops it from a $7 billion acquisition of the cancer detection startup Grail.

Google is rolling out a trio of system updates to Android, Wear OS and Google TV devices. Each brings new features to associated gadgets. Android devices, like smartphones, are getting updated Emoji Kitchen sticker combinations. You can remix emojis and share with friends as stickers via Gboard.

Google Messages for Android is getting a nifty little refresh. There’s a new beta feature that lets users add a unique background and an animated emoji to voice messages. Google’s calling the software Voice Moods and says it’ll help users better express how they’re “feeling in the moment.” Nothing conveys emotion more than a properly-positioned emoji. There are also new reactions for messages that go far beyond simple thumbs ups, with some taking up the entire screen. In addition, you’ll be able to change chat bubble colors.

The company’s also adding an interesting tool that provides AI-generated image descriptions for those with low-vision. The TalkBack feature will read aloud a description of any image, whether sourced from the internet or a photo that you took. Google’s even adding new languages to its Live Caption feature, enhancing the pre-existing ability to take phone calls without needing to hear the speaker. Better accessibility is always a good thing.

Wear OS is getting a bunch of little updates. You can control more smart home devices and light groups directly from a watch, which comes in handy when creating mood lighting. You can also tell your smart home devices that you are home or away with a tap. There’s a new Assistant Routines feature that automates daily tasks and an Assistant At a Glance shortcut on the watch face that displays information relevant to your day, like the weather and traffic data.

As for Google TV, there are ten new free channels to choose from, bringing the grand total to well over 800. None of these channels require an additional subscription, but they will have commercials. All of these updates begin rolling out today, but it could be a few weeks before they hit everyone’s inbox.

If you’ve long dreamed of watching a very small number of vehicles roll off an assembly line, today’s your chance. Tesla is holding a livestream event to highlight deliveries of its long-awaited Cybertruck. The company has only managed to manufacture ten of them so far, despite a 2019 reveal, so that’s what we’ll be watching.

You can catch the Texas-based livestream on X, of course, but the event is also available via Tesla’s website. It all goes down at 3PM EST. Being as how there will only be ten trucks to show off, the livestream should also go over pertinent details regarding battery range, towing capacity, up-to-date pricing and, of course, general availability. Tesla plans on ramping up production in 2024 for the cute lil dystopian wonder cars.

It’s easy to make jokes at the automaker’s expense, given the recent history of its CEO, but this is something of a big deal. It’s Tesla’s first truck, despite looking nothing like a classic pickup. The aesthetics are absolutely wild, with it resembling something out of a 1970s sci-fi flick instead of something you’d spot at a tailgate party. As for performance, it remains to be seen if the Cybertruck can compete with rival vehicles in the off-road market.

Tesla’s Cybertruck has been plagued with issues from inception. During its 2019 product debut, Elon Musk crowed about the unbreakable glass window and invited a customer to try to break it by hurling a bowling ball. Well, it shattered, leading to a muttered curse from the embattled CEO. Despite that embarrassment, the company still says the vehicle boasts a “nearly impenetrable” exoskeleton that resists dents, damage and long-term corrosion. We shall see. There have been multiple delays and a redesign back in 2020.

There’s also the matter of price. When it was first revealed, the Cybertruck was set to cost around $40,000. However, the company’s been fairly silent on the subject since then and a lot has changed since 2019. You can reserve a vehicle right now from Tesla by plopping down $100, but who knows when actual shipments will start. Despite that, Musk recently told investors that it has accrued more than one million reservations. Those folks will be waiting a while, as even generous estimates allow for Tesla to manufacture around 200,000 Cybertrucks each year.

The real question. Will Joe Rogan be one of the ten lucky golden ticket holders? We just might find out at 3PM EST.

Content platform Substack just released a spate of new video capabilities, placing it in direct competition with YouTube and Patreon, among others. The video tools include a direct upload option, which is handy, and customizable paywalls for content creators. Before this, users were forced to upload videos to YouTube and embed a link. The upload tool is now readily accessible via the dashboard. It’ll even automatically split the audio and video for podcasters who want to court both audiences. 

As for the paywall options, you now get the same level of flexibility available to non-video users. Content creators can select a slice of the video to give away for free, locking the rest behind a paywall. The free preview segment should transition smoothly into a prompt to become a paying subscriber.

There’s also a new AI tool that generates transcripts from videos, for those who like to, gasp, read. The transcript is automatically created alongside the video upload and users can post it to the main feed. Additionally, viewers can click anywhere on the transcript to jump to that section of the video.

Video sharing has gotten a much-needed upgrade. Viewers can create their own custom clips sourced from any video. This creates a shareable link that includes branded visuals at the end featuring the creator’s logo and URL, so there will be no obvious thievery. Obviously, viewers can quickly share links to the entire clip if they want. Users can even directly download videos for publication on services like TikTok and Instagram. Again, that bumper will be there to give credit to the original creator.

The company wrote in a blog post that these new tools, taken together, make it so “the friction in starting a media business based on video has been reduced to almost zero.” To commemorate the launch, Substack is rolling out a number of exclusive video shows. There’s a food culture program with chef Nancy Silverton, a talk show starring actress Amber Tamblyn and a news program anchored by Chris Cuomo, among many others.

Substack has certainly been busy adding new features. The platform recently unveiled a Twitter-esque feature called Notes and last year launched a chat feature to make it more of a social space.

Netflix continues to bet big on gaming. The streamer just announced that Rockstar’s Grand Theft Auto: The Trilogy – The Definitive Edition will hit its platform on December 14. The game will be free to play for Netflix subscribers, like the rest of its library. Each of the three titles included in the collection have been updated for mobile. These games include the iconic Grand Theft Auto III, Grand Theft Auto: Vice City, and Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas. They'll be playable via the Netflix app, but also available as standalone apps on Android and iOS.

The gameplay’s a bit dated by modern standards but Grand Theft Auto III basically invented the open-world genre, and the sequels further refined the model. Many players actually point to San Andreas as being a high watermark for the series, even outpacing more recent titles. In any event, this trilogy can hold you over until the eventual release of Grand Theft Auto VI. To that end, the forthcoming Rockstar sequel should be getting a trailer any day now.

Netflix has been snagging all kinds of games for its ever-growing library, from the massively popular roguelike Hades to the equally popular, uh, roguelike Dead Cells. The platform’s library also includes Braid, Death’s Door, Katana Zero and other hit indies.

The company’s also developing its own games, thanks to snatching up developer Night School, the team behind Oxenfree and Afterparty. This acquisition has already borne fruit, as Oxenfree II: Lost Signals released earlier this year to wide acclaim. Incidentally, the sequel isn’t stuck on Netflix, as it’s also available on Nintendo Switch, PS4, PS5 and PC via Steam. So the streamer might not be using games as just a way to lure in new subscribers. Netflix could be in it for the long haul.

Beyond Oxenfree II, other original games to hit the platform include Slayaway Camp 2: Netflix & Kill and a whole lot of titles based on pre-existing TV shows. There’s a game based on the recently-canceled fantasy epic Shadow and Bone and forthcoming titles inspired by Money Heist and The Dragon Prince, among others.

Sony has revealed the PlayStation Plus monthly games lineup for December, and it’s a doozy. There’s no clear headliner here, but a trio of interesting games are about to drop, including the gorgeous open-world exploration game Sable and the cleaning-based tour de force Powerwash Simulator.

First up, there’s Sable, a game that was on everyone’s radar for years before an official release, thanks to the eye-catching graphical style. The "coming-of-age adventure and exploration game” casts you as the titular hero Sable as you ride a hoverbike through vast deserts and mysterious landscapes, encountering the remains of spaceships and other ancient artifacts. The art style is incredible and the soundtrack is by Japanese Breakfast, if that’s your bag (and it should be.) The game’s only available for PS5.

Powerwash Simulator, as the name suggests, is a cleaning sim that has you clearing grime from just about anything you can think of, from Back to the Future’s Delorean to Final Fantasy VII’s Midgar. Most of the game, however, takes place in the town of Muckingham and boasts plenty of upgrade options for your power washer and the ability to play with friends via online co-op. The gameplay is relaxing, though more complex than it lets on at first. It’s available for both PS4 and PS5.

Finally, there’s Lego 2K Drive. This is an open-world driving game comprised entirely of Lego vehicles. There are races just about everywhere you look and, of course, the ability to make your own vehicles by connecting virtual blocks. There’s local couch co-op and online play, with the latter allowing access to the entire game map. Both PS4 and PS5 players can access this game.

It’s also worth noting that some games are about to leave the service, so get those downloads ready. PlayStation Plus members have until December 4 to snag Mafia II: Definitive Edition, Dragon Ball: The Breakers and Aliens Fireteam Elite.

GM is massively slashing spending on its self-driving vehicle subsidiary Cruise after a string of debilitating setbacks, according to a conference call by company executives transcribed by TechCrunch. GM Chair and CEO Mary Barra said that operations would resume in some capacity, but that any plans for Cruise moving forward would be more “deliberate.”

To that end, the cuts will amount to hundreds of millions of dollars in the next year. This is expected to result in widespread layoffs at the San Francisco-based company that currently employees nearly 4,000 people. Earlier this month, Cruise CEO Kyle Vogt told staffers at an all-hands meeting that he’d have information regarding layoffs in the coming weeks, but he resigned shortly thereafter along with co-founder Dan Kan.

It looks like the entire company may get an overhaul, with CFO Paul Jacobson saying in today’s conference call that there would be specific restructuring information in the coming weeks after two independent safety and incident review boards finish their work. These boards were instituted after a collision between a Cruise robotaxi and a pedestrian. It was also found that the company’s driverless algorithm had trouble recognizing children, which is never good.

GM has invested billions of dollars in Cruise since acquiring the company in 2016. This spending has increased in recent years as the company had planned an aggressive launch in more than a dozen cities throughout the US before everything fell apart. To that end, GM’s latest earnings report indicates that Cruise spent $732 million in the first three quarters of 2023.

The point of today’s call wasn’t just to offer ill tidings for Cruise. Barra and Jacobson also noted that the recently-penned labor deal with United Autoworkers would cost GM $9.3 billion in the long-term, but the company remains optimistic about future growth, noting an adjusted earnings of $12.7 billion in 2023 and an accelerated $10 billion share buyback program.

GM has also named new executives to run Cruise. Mo Elshenawy was promoted from VP of engineering to co-president, with GM’s previous EVP of legal and policy taking up the other co-president role. GM’s CEO said that the company has “a lot of confidence with what the two co-presidents will do,” but notes that “GM will be leaning in to make sure that it meets our strict requirements from a safety perspective.”

Amazon Web Services (AWS) just kicked off its Las Vegas-based re:Invent conference with a stream of announcements, most of which involve the year’s most popular technology, AI. These news items, taken as a whole, give us a sneak peek at the company’s long-term goals for artificial intelligence platforms.

First of all, AWS unveiled its latest-generation of AI chips intended for model training and for running trained models. Trainium2, which is obviously for model training, has been designed to deliver up to 4x better performance and 2x energy efficiency when compared to its forebear. Amazon promises these chips will allow programmers to train models quickly and at a lower cost, due to a reduction in energy use. Anthropic, an Amazon-backed OpenAI competitor, has already announced plans to build models using Trainium2 chips.

Graviton4, on the other hand, is more for general use. These processors are based on Arm architecture, but consume less energy than Intel or AMD chips. Amazon promises an increase of 30 percent in general performance when using a trained AI model embedded within a Graviton4 processor. This should lower cloud-computing costs for organizations that regularly employ AI models and offer a slight uptick in speed for regular users just looking to make some fake photos of Harry Potter at a rave or whatever.

All told, Graviton4 should allow AWS customers to “process larger amounts of data, scale their workloads, improve time-to-results and lower their total cost of ownership.” It’s available today in preview with a wider release planned for the coming months.

Typically, when a company announces new in-house chips, that spells trouble for current third-party providers like NVIDIA. The company is a huge player in the enterprise AI space, thanks to companies using its GPUs for training and its Arm-based datacenter CPU Grace. Instead of eschewing the partnership in favor of proprietary chips, Amazon is further cementing the relationship by offering enterprise customers cloud access to NVIDIA’s latest H200 AI GPUs. It’ll also operate more than 16,000 Nvidia GH200 Grace Hopper Superchips expressly for NVIDIA’s research and development team. This is a similar approach to its chief AI rival, Microsoft, which also announced an enhanced partnership with NVIDIA at the same time it revealed its proprietary AI chip, Maia 100.

Amazon also announced a new business-focused AI chatbot called Q, a name that was likely inspired by the Star Trek demigod and not the Trump-adjacent conspiracy peddler. It’s described as a “new type of generative AI-powered personal assistant” and is specifically designed to help streamline work projects and customer service tasks. It can be tailored to suit any business and offers relevant answers to commonly-asked questions. Amazon Q can also generate content on its own and take actions based on customer requests. It’ll even customize interactions based on a user’s role within a company.

It’ll exist on communication apps like Slack and in text-editing applications commonly-used by software developers. To that end, Q can actually change source code and can connect to more than 40 enterprise systems, including Microsoft 365, Dropbox, Salesforce and Zendesk, among others. Amazon Q is currently available in preview, with a wider release coming soon. It’ll cost anywhere from $20 to $30 per user each month, depending on available features.

So what have we learned here? Amazon is betting big on AI, like everyone else. More specifically, it’s battling with old cloud rival Microsoft to be the go-to company for enterprise-based AI. It’s also using AI to continue its dominance in the cloud computing space, hoping to minimize any increase in market share for Microsoft and other players like Google and Alibaba.

Many companies give away free plugins in honor of the holiday season, but Universal Audio is taking things a step further. The audio giant is giving away free Volt 2 hardware interfaces with the purchase of a yearly subscription to its Spark plugin platform. These interfaces typically cost $170, so this is a pretty great deal for beginners, as the hardware plus the Spark software is pretty much everything you need.

Spark subscriptions are also on sale for the holidays, at $150 instead of $240, though this price point is fairly common. The end result? You pay $150 and you get a year of access to every available plugin on the service, plus the Volt 2. Not bad. The company’s subscription-based Spark platform allows access to dozens of popular UAD plugins, from iconic compressors like the 1176 to virtual instruments like the company’s Minimoog reproduction.

As for the Volt 2, this diminutive audio interface features a pair of TRS / XLR inputs on the front and associated gain control knobs. There’s a phantom power button for condenser mics and a proprietary Vintage Mode that runs the signal through a simple tube preamp emulation. These interfaces are powered via USB-C, though ship with a 5V jack for when you’re plugged into an iPad or another mobile device.

In our official review, we praised the Volt 2 audio interface for its low noise floor, simple controls and low latency, particularly when compared to rival Windows-based products. The biggest con was the price, which is normally the case for UAD products. Now that it’s down to $0 for this promotion, that worry has dissipated.

This isn’t the first time that UAD has leveraged the holiday season to give away free hardware. The company used to hand out free Satellite DSP accelerators to run its plugins with the purchase of higher-priced hardware items like the multi-channel 4-710d preamp and compressor.

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Back in June, the UK’s Competition and Markets Authority (CMA) began an in depth investigation into the planned $20 billion Adobe and Figma merger. The organization has released its findings and, well, they don’t paint a rosy picture. The probe tasked independent experts to determine whether or not the merger would reduce competition in the design space and the results suggest that, in fact, it’ll do just that.

It must be noted, however, that these are provisional findings. With that said, the CMA’s message is clear. The group states that the merger will “eliminate competition between two main competitors”, which is fairly obvious given Figma and Adobe’s standing in the industry. The findings also state that the deal would “reduce innovation” and the development of competing products. Finally, it’ll also “remove Figma as a threat” with regard to Adobe’s flagship software suites like Photoshop and Illustrator.

Figma is a giant player in the UK design space, accounting for 80 percent of the market. It’s also a major part of the country’s $19.4 billion app development sector. Without the merger, the CMA suggests, Figma would continue to develop or expand products that challenge Adobe. That goes away once the merger is in place because, you know, why challenge yourself?

The investigation concludes that the merger would eliminate competition between these two major players across multiple fields, including product design, image editing and illustration. These sectors account for $60 billion in annual revenue across the UK, adding up to nearly three percent of the national economy, with 850,000 skilled workers across the impacted industries. Another intent of the investigation was to suss out if the merger would damage the UK’s economy and it concluded it most likely will.

Again, these are provisional findings and the CMA has yet to consult the data to reach a final decision as to whether or not it’ll allow the sale to go through. It plans on taking some time to “listen to any further views,” likely referring to Adobe. To that end, Adobe argues that buying Figma would strengthen both companies, saying that the Creative Cloud apps would get some of Figma’s collaborative features and vice-versa. The company says it’s “deeply committed” to keeping Figma an independent entity and that it has no plans to change the pricing, including Figma’s free tier.

If the deal’s approved by the UK, which looks more unlikely with this report, Adobe still has some other battles to fight before this merger officially goes through. The acquisition still faces a US investigation, and the EU has issued its own dire warning.

This would be the larger-ever-purchase for Adobe in its storied 41-year history. Figma, on the other hand, is a relative newcomer to the market, springing forth in 2012.