Mercedes-Benz is launching its high-power charging hub network in the fourth quarter of 2023 with speeds as high as 400kW — more than any EV on the market can handle, the company announced. The stations will launch in Atlanta, Georgia (the company's US home base), Chengdu, China and Mannheim, Germany. The automaker plans to build 400 hub locations with 2,000 chargers in the US, and 2,000 around the world by the end of 2024.

Earlier this year, Mercedes-Benz announced plans to team with ChargePoint to build the "Mercedes-Benz High-Power Charging Network." The first installations were to include both CCS and Tesla's NACS (North American Charging Standard) connectors and be open to non-Mercedes EVs. 

Now, the company has said that "depending on region, the charging stations offer a charging rate of currently up to 400kW, provided via the respective standard charging systems CCS1 (North America), CCS2 [Europe], NACS [Tesla] and GB/T [China]." It promised that each vehicle can be charged at its maximum power rating via intelligent charging management, to keep wait times to a minimum. Hubs will be located at "main traffic areas and select Mercedes-Benz dealerships," the company added.

Last month, Mercedes said it would adopt NACS for its North American EVs. Prior to that, it will give owners access to the Tesla Supercharger network through a CCS-to-NACS adapter arriving in 2024 (Tesla currently has around 1,847 Supercharger stations in the US with 20,040 Supercharger ports — nearly two-thirds of all DC Fast EV charging ports). 

Mercedes-Benz's deal with Tesla is independent of its own branded charging network. Last month, the company announced plans to team up with six other automakers including BMW, GM, Honda, Hyundai, Kia and Stellantis to create a network of 30,000 new EV fast-charging stations across North America starting in summer 2024. Those will also offer both CCS and NACS connectors.

Last year, the Republican National Committee (RNC) filed a lawsuit against Google accusing it of political bias over its Gmail spam filters. Now, a federal judge has dismissed that lawsuit, noting that Google was effectively protected by Section 230 of US law, and that the RNC had not "sufficiently pled that Google acted in bad faith" by filtering out campaign emails, The Washington Post has reported. 

According to the lawsuit, Google intentionally marked "millions" of RNC emails as spam, so the group sought reimbursement for "donations it allegedly lost as a result" of that. As evidence, it cited a study finding that Gmail was more likely than Yahoo and other mail systems to mark Republican emails as spam. (One of the study's authors told the Post last year that its findings were cherry-picked.)

Calling the lawsuit a "close case," US District Court judge Daniel Calabretta said the RNC had "failed to plausibly allege its claims" that Google's spam filtering was done in bad faith. Google said that the emails in questions were likely flagged as spam because of user complaints, and cited RNC domain authentication issues and frequent mailouts as other potential issues. 

The court also decided that RNC emails could be deemed "objectionable" based on the CAN-SPAM Act, and the fact that Google flagged them as such was covered by Section 230, which provides immunity to online platforms from civil liability based on third-party content. All that said, the judge said Republicans could still amend the lawsuit to better establish a lack of good faith by Google. 

Interestingly, during last year's mid-term US elections, Google created a loophole allowing political campaigns to dodge Gmail spam filters. However, the RNC reportedly didn't take advantage of the program. Google has since ended the experiment, following largely negative feedback from the public. 

The release of Dune: Part Two has been pushed back to March 15th amid ongoing writer and actor strikes, according to Variety. The hotly anticipated film was originally scheduled for November 3rd, but Warner Bros. and producer Legendary Entertainment agreed to delay it over four months — likely because the film wouldn't meet its full box office potential without publicity from the star-studded cast. 

The studio and production company held out on delaying the film as long as possible, according The Hollywood Reporter, but would have needed to start advertising the film by early September. It reportedly hoped the extra time would allow the cast, which includes Timothée Chalamet, Zendaya, Austin Butler, Florence Pugh and Christopher Walken, to participate in a full marketing push.

Along with Part Two, Godzilla x Kong: The New Empire and Lord of the Rings: The War of the Rohirrim have been pushed back to April 12th, 2024 and December 13th, 2024, respectively. Those dates were shuffled largely to accommodate Dune: Part Two. 

The ongoing labor actions by writers and actors in Hollywood are a result of long-simmering tensions over a number of issues, but particularly due to residual payments from Netflix and other streaming platforms. Warner Bros. Discovery was at the center of these in the recent past, as it elected to release some films either directly to its HBO Max (now MAX) streaming platform with zero or limited theatrical releases. However, CEO David Zaslav said last year that the company "will fully embrace theatrical" going forward. 

Dune: Part One performed well enough at the box office with a $402 million gross, but hype for the sequel is much higher. "Part One is more of a contemplative movie. Part Two is an action-packed, epic war movie. It is much more dense. We went to all new locations," said director Denis Villeneuve. 

Apple's 15-inch MacBook Air M2 is already more affordable than any other laptop the company has ever offered with this size of screen. Now, you can grab the 256GB model at Amazon for just $1,099 (in midnight and space gray), back down to the lowest price we've seen to date. And if you need even more storage, the 512GB model is available for $1,299 ($200 off), also an all-time low price. 

The 15-inch MacBook Air is more than just a larger version of the 13-inch model, as Engadget's Nathan Ingraham discovered during his review. While it's still as thin and light as you'd expect, he found that the combination of the large screen and powerful processing made it good enough that he could see using it as his only computer.

That's in large part due to Apple's M2 chipset that gives the 15-inch Air a great price to performance ratio. It also offers a comfortable keyboard and trackpad, plus battery life that actually exceeded the company's 18 hour spec for video playback during out testing. The bigger screen has a 2,880 x 1,864 resolution, but it shares the same pixels per inch (224) as that of the 13-inch version. Though it lacks the punch of the mini LED displays found on the MacBook Pros, the Liquid Retina panel still offers 500 nits of brightness and a 60Hz refresh rate. 

While Apple's M2 chipset is a year old at this point, the 15-inch Air model only came out in June so it's unlikely to be refreshed anytime soon. If your focus is content creation, a MacBook Pro might be a better choice. But if you do a mix of things from productivity to video editing, the 15-inch Air is an great choice — especially for road warriors who want to carry the least amount of weight possible. If you want to grab either the 256GB or 512GB models, it's best to act soon, though, as stock tends to run out fast. 

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If you've been wondering who's making the most money from the AI boom, NVIDIA may have the answer in it's latest earnings report. The company announced revenue of $13.51 billion in the second quarter, more than doubling the $6.7 billion it made last year and crushing market expectations. On top of that, it earned $6.18 billion in GAAP net income, nine times the $656 million it made in Q2 2022. 

NVIDIA's gaming segment did pretty well too, thanks to $2.49 billion in Q2 revenue, up 22 percent from last year. During the quarter, it started shipping the budget-oriented GeForce RTX 4060 GPU, announced the Avatar Cloud Engine (ACE) for games and saw the addition of 35 DLSS games including Diablo IV. (Earlier this week, it unveiled DLSS 3.5 designed to use AI to make ray-traced games look better.)

But it was very much the AI and data center segments that pushed NVIDIA to new heights. It saw a record $10.32 billion in revenue in that sector alone, up 141 percent from Q1 2023 and 171 percent from a year ago. 

Earlier this year, CEO Jensen Huang said that back in 2018, NVIDIA had a "bet the company" moment when it started using AI to power DLSS, "and while we were reinventing CG with AI, we were reinventing the GPU for AI." He later added that "the future is a large language model (LLM) at the front of just about everything," from VFX to heavy industry. 

NVIDIA's prescience is now paying off with the company's flagship H100 Tensor Core GPU. It's also been building more complex systems like the HGX box, which puts eight H100 GPUs into a single computer. All of that helped it create immense cashflows with top customers spending heavily on NVIDIA GPU tech to build complex AI models — like Microsoft with its Azure segment. 

In addition, the company's use of custom software and apps makes it difficult for customers to switch rivals like AMD. "Our Data Center products include a significant amount of software and complexity which is also helping for gross margins," said NVIDIA finance chief Colette Kress in an analyst call.

All that led to a perfect storm of profit. "During the quarter, major cloud service providers announced massive NVIDIA H100 AI infrastructures. Leading enterprise IT system and software providers announced partnerships to bring NVIDIA AI to every industry. The race is on to adopt generative AI," Huang said in a statement. "Companies worldwide are transitioning from general-purpose to accelerated computing and generative AI." The company expects more to come, forecasting around $16 billion in revenue for Q3. 

The logical next step for widescreen gaming monitors is a model that can display the equivalent of two UHD (3,840 x 2,160) screens — and Samsung teased just such a thing earlier this year at CES 2023. Now, the Odyssey Neo G9 model has a price and release date, arriving in October 2023 for $2,500, Samsung announced. 

That's about what you'd pay for two really nice 4K monitors, but the price seems justified. It's a mini-LED with HDR 1000 support, meaning it offers 1,000 nits of peak brightness (or around 450 nits total on average) and 10-bit color processing, along with a 240Hz refresh rate, 1ms response time, two HDMI 2.1 ports, one HDMI 2.0 port and a DisplayPort 2.1 input. Buyers will also get AMD's FreeSync Premium Pro variable refresh rate and of course an incredibly wide 57-inch (32:9) 7,680 x 2,160 aspect ratio with a fairly extreme 1000R curvature. 

It comes with picture-in-picture and picture-by-picture, giving you multiple inputs at a glance. Other features include an ergonomic stand, plus Core Lighting+ and CoreSync that offers ambient lighting working in unison with games and other visuals. 

Samsung talked up the value of DisplayPort 2.1, which has three times the bandwidth of DisplayPort 1.4 and allows for 4K 240Hz gaming. It has only been announced or seen on a handful of displays to date. The only way to make use of it so far, though, would be with AMD's latest Radeon RX 7900XT and RX 7900XTX GPUs (or its pro W7000 cards) — as the standard is nowhere to be found on NVIDIA's latest RTX 4000 series cards. 

As such, driving such a display at anywhere near the top specs for gaming would require an expensive PC setup. The monitor would be useful for other purposes, though, like as an incredible multi-tasking productivity display or a versatile content creation monitor (if you can handle the curve). As mentioned, it arrives in the US in October for $2,500. 

Meta is considerably expanding Messenger's encryption feature, rolling it out to "millions more people's chats" starting today, the company announced. The end-to-end encryption (E2EE) standard, which first arrived a year ago, will be available as standard to all users by the end of 2023. Meta also described how it made the transition, calling it "an incredibly complex and challenging engineering puzzle." 

The system keeps conversations safe from eavesdropping and interception using public key cryptography — meaning no one, even law enforcement, can access conversations. At the same time, your message history will also be encrypted. Meta first focused on WhatsApp, which now offers full E2EE, but Messenger will have the same level of protection by year's end.

Getting there wasn't easy though, apparently. "It quickly became apparent that transitioning our services to E2EE would be an incredibly complex and challenging engineering puzzle," the company wrote. "We not only needed to transition to a new server architecture but to rewrite our code base to work on multiple different devices, rather than just the server."

Citing an example of a rich preview from YouTube, Meta said its servers currently pull the URL data and then show the video preview in a Messenger chat. With E2EE, though, the app itself visits the shared URL, pulls the relevant image and text information, then sends it. That slows the process down a touch, but it means users still get a full feature set but with the privacy of encryption. 

Meta said it's also testing on-device recovery for encrypted chats, requiring users to set up a PIN or generate a code. It's also trialing an option to save chats on cloud storage services like iCloud. Meanwhile, Meta will complete its E2EE trifecta by also enabling it for Instagram DMs by the end of 2023. 

That will effectively catch the company up to services like Signal, bringing end-to-end encryption fully into the mainstream. It might also draw the ire of nations like Spain, which has advocated banning encryption within the European Union, ostensibly as a way to stop the spread of child sexual abuse material (CSAM) and other criminal activities. 

Meta will soon offer Stories and Reels in chronological order, among other changes, to comply with the European's Digital Services Act (DSA), the company announced. The changes were expected after the European Commission announced that it had reached an agreement in April to create new rules that would require platforms like Facebook to offer alternative systems "not based on profiling" as a key requirement. 

Meta said it has mobilized over 1,000 people to "develop solutions to the DSA's requirements." Some of the changes will increase transparency about how its systems work and provide users more options to tailor their experiences on Facebook and Instagram. At the same time, it's establishing an "independent compliance function" to ensure it meets ongoing regulatory obligations. 

Starting later this month, Meta will offer Reels, Stories, Search and other parts of Facebook and Instagram that are unranked by Meta using its AI recommendation process. "For example, on Facebook and Instagram, users will have the option to view Stories and Reels only from people they follow, ranked in chronological order, newest to oldest," wrote Meta President of Global Affairs Nick Clegg. 

It's not clear how Meta will implement the change. The main Feed on Instagram already allows users to sort by Following instead of using the algorithm-based approach. However, the "Following" feature is effectively a secondary page on Instagram, and the app always defaults to the algorithmic "For You" option when first opened. Facebook is even more of a hassle, forcing you to select a menu, go into Feeds and tap "Friends" rather than "All." 

Users will also be able to view Search results based only on the words they enter, rather than results personalized specifically to them based on their previous activity and personal interests. The company is also providing more information about how its AI systems rank content via 22 system cards for Facebook and Instagram, adding to its "Why Am I Seeing This" feature. 

"These cards provide information about how our AI systems rank content for Feed, Reels, Stories, and other surfaces; some of the predictions each system makes to determine what content might be most relevant to people; and the options available to help customize an experience on Facebook and Instagram," Meta said.

Meta is also expanding its Ad library to display and archive all ads (for one year) that target EU users, including date run, parameters used for targeting (age, gender, location), who received the ad and more. It's also rolling out two new tools for researchers that include publicly available content from Pages, Posts, Groups and Events. 

The company said that it "welcomes the principles of transparency, accountability and user empowerment at the heart of the DSA," adding it has "long advocated for a harmonized regulatory regime." However, Meta previously expressed extreme displeasure when Apple introduced changes that allowed users to easily opt out of targeted advertising starting with iOS 14. To that end, observers will no doubt be keenly interested in how the changes are implemented and whether they follow the letter, if not the spirit, of the new law.

Microsoft is significantly restructuring its Activision Blizzard merger proposal by selling cloud gaming rights for Activision Blizzard games to rival Ubisoft, it wrote in a blog post late yesterday. That would address a key concern of UK regulators, which blocked the deal in part become of Microsoft's potential dominance in cloud gaming — but nothing is likely to be approved until October 18th. 

"As a result of the agreement with Ubisoft, Microsoft believes its proposed acquisition of Activision Blizzard presents a substantially different transaction under UK law than the transaction Microsoft submitted for the CMA’s consideration in 2022," Microsoft President Brad Smith wrote. 

If the merger goes through, Microsoft would transfer "cloud streaming rights for all current and new Activision Blizzard PC and console games released over the next 15 years to Ubisoft Entertainment SA, a leading global game publisher. The rights will be in perpetuity," Smith added. That means Microsoft wouldn't be able to make Activision Blizzard games exclusive for Xbox Cloud Gaming, nor have any say on how they're released on rival services. It will also allow Ubisoft to offer Activision Blizzard cloud gaming services on Apple and other non-Windows systems. 

As for the terms of the transaction, "Ubisoft will compensate Microsoft for the cloud streaming rights to Activision Blizzard’s games through a one-off payment and through a market-based wholesale pricing mechanism, including an option that supports pricing based on usage," Smith said. 

In its own blog post, Ubisoft indicated that Activision Blizzard titles will be available across a range of services if the deal goes through. "With a single subscription to Ubisoft+ Multi Access, players will soon be able to play their favorite Ubisoft and Activision Blizzard games across multiple platforms including PC, Xbox consoles and Amazon Luna, and on the PlayStation platform through Ubisoft+ Classics," wrote Ubisoft's Daniel O'Connor.

The UK's CMA (Competition and Markets Authority) blocked the proposed merger earlier this year citing cloud gaming monopoly concerns as the primary issue. However, after the US Federal Trade Commission (FTC) lost its own appeal to block the merger, the CMA agreed to extend negotiations until August 29th. "Based upon the discussion to date, both sides — Microsoft and the CMA — have confidence that Microsoft notifying a restructured transaction is capable of addressing the concerns that the CMA has identified," the CMA said in July. 

The UK regulator will now examine the restructured deal and deliver a decision by October 18th, it said in an article published today. "This is not a green light. We will carefully and objectively assess the details of the restructured deal and its impact on competition, including in light of third-party comments," said CMS chief executive Sarah Cardell. "Our goal has not changed — any future decision on this new deal will ensure that the growing cloud gaming market continues to benefit from open and effective competition driving innovation and choice."

A Tesla data breach earlier this year affecting more than 75,000 people was caused by "insider wrongdoing," according to a notification on Maine's Attorney General website. The 75,735 people impacted were likely current or former Tesla employees. "While we have not identified evidence of misuse of the data in a manner that may cause harm to you, we are nonetheless providing you with this notice to ensure that you are aware of what happened and the measures we have taken," the company wrote in a letter to employees.

The breach occurred on May 10th, when the German-language newspaper Handelsblatt said it received 100GB of data from "several informants" within Tesla. The "Tesla files" reportedly contained 23,000 internal files, containing 2,400 reports of self-acceleration issue and 1,500 cases of braking function problems. The latter included 139 complaints about unintentional emergency braking and 383 incidences of phantom stops from false collision warnings. 

In the employee letter, Tesla provided more information about the incident, confirming the May 10 breach date and that Handelsblatt had obtained Tesla confidential information. "The investigation revealed that two former Tesla employees misappropriated the information in violation of Tesla’s IT security and data protection policies and shared it with the media outlet." 

The data also included employee names and contact information including physical addresses, email addresses and mobile phone numbers. "The outlet has stated that it does not intend to publish the personal information, and in any event, is legally prohibited from using it inappropriately," Tesla stated. It added that several lawsuits resulted in the seizure of devices thought to carry the data, and that it had "obtained court orders that prohibit the former employees from further use, access, or dissemination of the data."

Last year, the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration opened a probe into Tesla's phantom braking issue following owner complaints. And in August 2022, it was reported that Tesla is facing a class-action lawsuit over the same problem.