The UK's Competition and Markets Authority (CMA) is concerned that the merger Three and Vodafone announced last year could lead to "substantial lessening of competition" and might conduct an in-depth investigation into the deal. Three years after Virgin Media's merger with O2, Three and Vodafone revealed their intention to enter a joint venture agreement that would knock off a standalone mobile network from consumers' choices in the region. go

Apparently, CMA regulators launched a preliminary investigation into their proposed deal back in January and had identified potential issues that could come with combining two of the four remaining mobile network operators in the UK. Those issues include the possibility of the merger leading to higher prices and lower quality of service, since competition typically helps keep prices low and compels operators to make investments meant to improve their network quality. In addition, the CMA is worried that having fewer networks could affect mobile virtual network operators' ability to negotiate for the best deals possible for their customers.

When the two companies announced the merger in 2023, they said that together, they will "have the scale needed to deliver a best-in-class 5G network" and open up "new opportunities for businesses across the length and breadth of the UK." But CMA regulators say their claims "need more detailed assessment." They've now given the companies five working days to respond to their concerns with "meaningful solutions," otherwise they'll proceed towards conducting a more in-depth investigation. 

In 2015, Three also made an attempt to purchase O2 for £10.25 billion ($12.9 billion), but the CMA and the European Commission blocked the purchase after concluding that it would reduce competition and lead to higher prices. The CMA approved the joint agreement between O2 and Virgin Media, a landline, cable and broadband operator, however, after it found those very same concerns to be unfounded. 

Threads has begun testing swipe gestures to help users improve the algorithm that populates the For You feed. It’s reportedly called Algo Tune as, well, it helps people tune their algorithms. It’s pretty rare when any social media site, particularly one run by Meta, allows users to adjust the parameters by which the great and powerful algorithm operates, so this feature is definitely worth keeping an eye on.

It works a lot like Tinder and other dating apps. If you don’t like something on your feed, you swipe left. If you like a post and want to see more like it, you swipe right. That’s pretty much it. The algorithm is allegedly tuned over time by these responses, adjusting your feed to provide more of the content you want and less of the stuff you don’t want. Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg calls it an “easy way to let us know what you want to see more of on your feed.”

This is just an experiment, for now, so the feature’s only rolling out to a select number of Threads users. The company also hasn’t released any specific information as to how all of the swiping actually influences the algorithm, but that’s par for the course when it comes to these things. The algo must remain protected at all costs.

The social media app sure has been busy lately, adding new tools at a rapid clip. Threads finally rolled out trending topics to all users, after experimenting with the feature since February. Meta also recently previewed fediverse integration, which would allow Threads posts on fellow social media app Mastodon. The company’s also been testing some features that let users save drafts and take photos directly in the app.

NVIDIA’s H100 chips are used by nearly every AI company in the world to train large language models hooked into services like ChatGPT. It’s been great for business. Now, the company is ready to make those chips look terrible, announcing a next-generation platform called Blackwell.

Named for David Harold Blackwell, a mathematician who specialized in game theory and statistics, NVIDIA claims Blackwell is the world’s most powerful chip, reaching speeds of 20 petaflops compared to just 4 petaflops the H100 provided. Yeah, throw it in the trash. You need new chips.

And if you didn’t know how powerful NVIDIA is, its press release for this new platform includes quotes from the CEOs of OpenAI, Microsoft, Alphabet, Meta and Tesla — yes, all CEOs you probably know the names of.

— Mat Smith

The biggest stories you might have missed

YouTube lays out new rules for realistic AI-generated videos

Apple can’t get out of facing a class-action lawsuit over AirTags stalking claims

The 5 best cordless vacuum cleaners for 2024

Sony may have paused PS VR2 production

​​You can get these reports delivered daily direct to your inbox. Subscribe right here!

Hackers gave pro players cheats during Apex Legends competition

The tournament is postponed until further notice.

Respawn

Yeah, this is bad. Respawn, the EA-owned studio behind Apex Legends, has postponed the North American Finals tournament after hackers broke into matches and equipped players with cheats. Footage of the hacks on Twitch show players being able to see their opponent’s location through walls, while notable player (and one of the best) ImperialHal was gifted an aimbot to hit enemies more easily. Respawn says it would share more information soon, but as of time of writing, the studio hasn’t elaborated.

Continue reading.

Logitech’s $999 4K livestreaming camera is triple the price of its 1080p model

The Mevo Core has improved built-in mics and works with any MFT lens.

Logitech is expanding its Mevo lineup of livestreaming cameras. The company’s new Mevo Core shoots in 4K, a big upgrade from the 1080p Mevo Start camera kit I tested a few years back. However, the trade-off is pricing as the new model will set you back three times as much for a three-camera setup. $999. So yes, this is probably for the pro streamers.

To emphasize that, the Core ships as a body only, but Logitech will sell lens bundle kits through Amazon and B&H Photo Video. You will need to buy an additional lens just to make it work. And it’s only compatible with micro four-third lenses — so there’s a high chance you’ll have to buy one.

Continue reading.

Apple wants to bring Google’s Gemini AI to iPhones

It’s like Google search on Safari all over again. Plus 15 years.

Apple is reportedly in talks with Google to integrate its Gemini AI in iPhones, according to Bloomberg. Gemini could be the cloud-based generative AI engine for Siri and other iPhone apps, while Apple’s models could be woven into the upcoming iOS 18 for on-device AI tasks.

There are regulatory concerns to consider—the Department of Justice has already sued Google over its search dominance, including the way it pays Apple and other companies to use its search engine. But given how Microsoft and OpenAI’s partnership turned the Bing search engine into something people were actually talking about, the team-up might be worth the risk.

Continue reading.

A budding startup called Interlune is trying to become the first private company to mine the moon’s natural resources and sell them back on Earth. Interlune will initially focus on helium-3 — a helium isotope created by the sun through the process of fusion — which is abundant on the moon. In an interview with Ars Technica, Rob Meyerson, one of Interlune’s founders and former Blue Origin president, said the company hopes to fly its harvester with one of the upcoming commercial moon missions backed by NASA. The plan is to have a pilot plant on the moon by 2028 and begin operations by 2030, Meyerson said.

Interlune announced this week that it’s raised $18 million in funding, including $15 million in its most recent round led by Seven Seven Six, the venture firm started by Reddit co-founder Alexis Ohanian. The resource it’s targeting, helium-3, could be used on Earth for applications like quantum computing, medical imaging and, perhaps some day down the line, as fuel for fusion reactors. ​​Helium-3 is carried to the moon by solar winds and is thought to remain on the surface trapped in the soil, whereas when it reaches Earth, it’s blocked by the magnetosphere.

Interlune aims to excavate huge amounts of the lunar soil (or regolith), process it and extract the helium-3 gas, which it would then ship back to Earth. Alongside its proprietary lunar harvester, Interlune is planning a robotic lander mission to assess the concentration of helium-3 at the selected location on the surface. 

Interlune

“For the first time in history,” Meyerson said in a statement, “harvesting natural resources from the Moon is technologically and economically feasible.” The founding team includes Meyerson and former Blue Origin Chief Architect Gary Lai, Apollo 17 astronaut Harrison H. Schmitt, former Rocket Lab exec Indra Hornsby and James Antifaev, who worked for Alphabet’s high-altitude balloon project, Loon. 

The FCC has raised the speeds required to describe internet service as “broadband” for the first time since 2015. The agency’s annual high-speed internet assessment concluded that 100 Mbps downloads and 20 Mbps uploads will be the new standard. The news will likely irk ISPs who would love to keep pointing to 25 Mbps / 3 Mbps speeds (the previous standards) and convincing people they’re getting high-speed broadband.

The FCC’s report broke down several areas where the country’s online infrastructure falls short. The agency concluded that broadband isn’t being deployed quickly enough to serve Americans, especially those in rural areas and those living on Tribal lands. “These gaps in deployment are not closing rapidly enough,” the agency wrote in its report.

More specifically, the agency said fixed terrestrial broadband service (not including satellite) has yet to be deployed to around 24 million Americans, including about 28 percent of people in rural areas and over 23 percent of those living on Tribal lands. On the mobile front, it added that about nine percent of Americans (including 36 percent in rural areas and over 20 percent on Tribal lands) lack adequate 5G cellular speeds of at least 35 Mbps down / 3 Mbps up.

The report set a long-term goal of broadband speeds of 1 Gbps down / 500 Mbps up “to give stakeholders a collective goal towards which to strive.” Those numbers may hint at where the Commission would like to move the goalposts the next time it updates them. In 2015, when the commission set the 25 Mbps / 3 Mbps requirements, FCC Chair Jessica Rosenworcel commented, “Frankly, it should be 100 Mbps”—the benchmark the agency finally moved to today, nine years later.

The FCC can’t police ISPs to force them to boost their speeds, but this type of move may be the best card it can play. What it can do is prevent them from marketing their services as “broadband” internet if they don’t meet these thresholds. It remains to be seen whether the companies providing the infrastructure play ball or opt for other marketing buzzwords to sell customers on glacial and outdated internet speeds.

Intel just broke another speed record when it comes to desktop CPUs. The company just introduced the Core i9-14900K CPU, which can reach up to 6.2GHz without overclocking, making it the fastest desktop processor available to consumers. The company did the same thing last year, but that chip maxed out at 6GHz. 

In addition to the record-breaking CPU speed, the i9-14900KS boasts a 24 cores/32 threads architecture and 36 megabytes of Intel’s proprietary Smart Cache technology, which shares the cache memory between the various cores. Intel says this will allow for “powerful performance in gaming and content creation workloads.”

The chip also makes use of Intel’s Thermal Velocity Boost tool, which is a feature in 11th Gen and later Intel Core chips that ups the clock frequency by 100 MHz when the temperature is below a threshold of 70 degrees C, or 158 degrees F. In other words, make sure your cooling system is on point.

As for metrics, the company promises that gamers will experience up to 15 percent better performance and that content creators should enjoy a 73 percent performance uptick when engaging in compute-intensive workflows. The i9-14900KS is compatible with Z790 and Z690 motherboards, but Intel recommends the latest BIOS to ensure the best results.

The Core i9-14900KS is available right now and starts at $700. It’s available at traditional retailers as a boxed product and will be integrated into systems from original equipment manufacturer (OEM) partners in the near future. Intel continues to focus on raw speed, rather than AI, which has been noticeable throughout this year’s product announcements.

As expected, the Embracer Group has sold much of Saber Interactive, which is known for the Metro series, Gloomhaven and remakes of classic Star Wars titles. The buyer is a group of private investors under the umbrella of Beacon Interactive, which is run by Saber co-founder Matthew Karch. 

Although Embracer says the deal is worth $247 million, it's actually worth around $500 million once liabilities are factored in, according to Bloomberg’s Jason Schreier. That’s because Beacon is said to have taken up an option to buy 4A Games and Zen Studios (the developers of the Metro and Zen Pinball series, respectively) as well.

As you might imagine given those latter points, the details of the sale are a little convoluted. Along with 4A and Zen, the sale includes all Saber-branded studios, Nimble Giant (Star Trek: Infinite), 3D animation studio Digic, support studio Fractured Byte, PR agency Sandbox Strategies, Mad Head Games (Scars Above), Slipgate Ironworks (Graven), New World Interactive (the Insurgency series) and publisher 3D Realms.

Embracer is hanging onto 34 Big Things (Redout), Shiver (which ported Mortal Kombat 11 to Switch), Snapshot (Phoenix Point) and Aspyr, which is behind the recent remaster of the original Tomb Raider trilogy and Star Wars: Battlefront Classic Collection, which came out on Thursday. The publisher is also retaining Tripwire (Maneater), Beamdog (Mythforce), Tuxedo Labs (Teardown) and Demiurge (Sega Heroes). Embracer-owned publisher Plaion will keep the long-term license and publishing rights for PC and console games in the Metro series too.

Overall, Beacon is scooping up at least 38 ongoing game development projects, along with some proprietary engine technology and game tools. Saber says it will retain 14 games, including Killing Floor 3. According to reporter Stephen Totilo, Beacon is taking on 2,950 workers and Embracer is retaining 800 (it has 14,140 workers overall).

"Embracer is now able to discontinue all operations in Russia, according to a previous board decision, while safeguarding many developer jobs under new independent ownership," Embracer CEO Lars Wingefors said. "At the same time, we keep key companies, valuable IPs and future publishing rights."

Embracer bought Saber for $525 million four years ago and it slotted some later purchases, including Demiurge and New World Interactive, into that division. Since last summer, Embracer has been on a major cost-cutting drive after an expected investment of $2 billion (reportedly from a group backed by Saudi Arabia’s sovereign wealth fund) fell apart. The company has shuttered several studios, and it laid off 1,387 people in the second half of 2023. It also canceled 29 unannounced games over a six-month period last year. It's believed that Gearbox (of Borderlands fame) may be set to leave Embracer too.

CrowdTangle saw its team disbanded in 2021, new user registrations cut off in 2022 and now the site will officially shut down on August 14, the Wall Street Journal reports. Journalists and academics alike have used CrowdTangle to study the flow of content on Facebook and Instagram, including conspiracy theories and fake news. Meta, which bought the company in 2016, choosing to shutter the company is an entirely unsurprising move given it has been the source for many of the social media conglomerate's failings.

A tool called Meta Content Library will replace CrowdTangle, but only academics and nonprofit researchers can use it. That's right — for-profit news organizations can't apply for access to what sounds like a watered-down version of CrowdTangle. Meta claims that its Content Library — which is the company's answer for the European Union's Digital Markets Act — has new features like data on public comments and searching content based on views. However, early testers found it lacked geography-based activity data or the ability to download data from public posts.

Meta and CEO Mark Zuckerberg certainly benefit from limiting how much people — especially reporters — can view about their doings. We recently published a deep dive into Zuckerberg's dangerous decisions, including going against warnings from experts and personally intervening to block a ban on Instagram's plastic surgery filters. Other horrors under his watch include Instagram's recommendation algorithm promoting content featuring child sexual exploitation and regularly dismissing requests from top lieutenants to further prioritize safety. Then, in court, his lawyers have claimed he should hold no responsibility for the lawsuits involving harm caused by Meta's platforms.

Amazon has released a full trailer for the live-action Fallout series that's coming to Prime Video soon. It's our most in-depth look yet at the show and early indications suggest that the creative team has captured the distinct blend of irreverence and violence that helped Bethesda's game series become so successful.

The clip focuses on Lucy (Ella Purnell), a young woman who emerges from a fallout bunker into what used to be Los Angeles, 200 years after a nuclear apocalypse. Lucy quickly discovers that life on the surface isn't quite as cushy as staying in a luxury vault. "Practically every person I've met up here has tried to kill me," she says, seconds before we see a robot attempt to harvest her organs.

The trailer (and the show) gets a helping hand from the otherworldly charm of Walton Goggins as a pitchman for living in a fallout shelter. His character somehow survives the apocalypse and is still around two centuries later, carving out a life as a mutated bounty hunter called The Ghoul. The trailer has a ton of other references to the games for fans to drink in.

Amazon also took the opportunity to reveal that Fallout will arrive on Prime Video on April 11, one day earlier than previously announced. You won't have to wait a week between episodes either, as the entire season will drop at once.

Meta is revamping how Facebook recommends videos across Reels, Groups, and the main Facebook Feed, by using AI to power its video recommendation algorithm, Facebook head Tom Alison revealed on Wednesday. The world's largest social network has already switched Reels, its TikTok competitor, to the new engine, and plans to use it in all places within Facebook that show video — the main Facebook feed and Groups — as part of a "technology roadmap" through 2026, Alison said at a Morgan Stanley tech conference in San Francisco.

Meta has made competing with TikTok a top priority ever since the app, which serves up vertical video clips and is known for its powerful recommendation engine that seems to know exactly what will keep users hooked, started exploding in popularity in the US in the last few years. When Facebook tested the new AI-powered recommendation engine with Reels, watch time went up by roughly 8 to 10 percent, Alison revealed. “So what that told us was this new model architecture is learning from the data much more efficiently than the previous generation,” Alison said. “So that was like a good sign that says, OK, we’re on the right track.”

So far, Facebook used different video recommendation engines for Reels, Groups, and the Facebook feed. But after seeing success with Reels, the company plans to use the same AI-powered engine across all these products.

“Instead of just powering Reels, we’re working on a project to power our entire video ecosystem with this single model, and then can we add our Feed recommendation product to also be served by this model,” Alison said. “If we get this right, not only will the recommendations be kind of more engaging and more relevant, but we think the responsiveness of them can improve as well.”

The move is a part of Meta’s strategy to infuse AI into all its products after the technology exploded with the launch of OpenAI’s ChatGPT at the end of 2022. The company is spending billions of dollars to buy up hundreds of thousands of pricey NVIDIA GPUs used to train and power AI models, Zuckerberg said in a video earlier this year.