Apple faces a looming deadline to produce what it says are more than 1 million documents related to recent App Store changes. On Friday, Judge Thomas S. Hixson denied the company's attempt to extend that deadline, describing the request as "bad behavior." So Apple's deadline is still Monday, September 30: "It's up to Apple to figure out how to meet the deadline, but Monday is indeed the deadline." This is just the latest chapter in the ongoing legal dispute between Apple and Fortnite-maker Epic Games, which ...

The U.K.s’ antitrust authority has concluded that Amazon’s partnership and equity investment in AI startup Anthropic can’t be investigated under current merger rules due to the size and scope of the deal.The U.K. Competition and Markets Authority’s (CMA) announcement comes six months to the day after news emerged that Amazon had completed a $4 billion investment in Anthropic, one of several heavily funded AI-focused startups. The three-year-old firm develops large language models (LLMs) and an associated ch ...

Reset your clocks: Meta has been hit with yet another privacy penalty in Europe. On Friday Ireland’s Data Protection Commission (DPC) announced a reprimand and a €91 million fine — around $101.5M at current exchange rates — after concluding a multi-year investigation into a 2019 security breach by Facebook’s parent company. The DPC opened a statutory inquiry into the incident in question in April 2019 under the bloc’s General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) after Meta, or Facebook as the company was still ...

Mark Zuckerberg said Wednesday during Meta Connect 2024 that Meta AI is one of the most used AI assistant across the world with “almost” 500 million monthly active users. Zuckerberg said that Meta AI is on track to become the most used assistant across the world.“We’re almost at 500 million monthly activities, and we haven’t even launched in some of the bigger countries yet,” Zuckerberg said at the event, pointing out that it hasn’t launched in the EU yet. Meta had previously noted that there are more than ...

At its annual Meta Connect event on Wednesday, Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg announced that the company has rebuilt its social apps for mixed reality. “We’ve got all new Instagram and Facebook experiences to bring your feeds and your Reels with you into mixed reality,” Zuckerberg said. “A really nice interface so you can lean back enjoy your content on nice, big screens.” The official announcement comes as Zuckerberg announced back in June that the company was testing a way for users to watch Reels on its Quest ...

Hidden among the Meta Connect 2024 hardware announcements comes word that the social media giant is sunsetting two key members of its Quest VR headset line. With the budget Quest 3S now up for preorder, Meta will no longer sell the Quest 2 and Quest Pro once back stock is deleted.The end of the Quest 2 isn’t surprising. The headset is old in the tooth, celebrating its fourth birthday in October. Meta kept the legacy device on sale as a way to offer a cheaper alternative to the Quest 3. The new Quest 3S, how ...

Meta has acquired the Threads.com domain name, according to Whois records of the URL that were updated on September 24.Users on domain-related forums pointed out this transfer, and TechCrunch confirmed the Whois records of Threads.com separately, which list Meta’s Instagram as the registrant. TechCrunch reached out to Meta to understand if it plans to move its Threads social network to Threads.com, but the company didn’t offer an immediate response. The social networking company had launched it on Threads ...

Google has filed a complaint with the European Commission (EC), alleging that Microsoft uses anti-competitive licensing practices to strongarm companies into staying on its Azure cloud infrastructure.The complaint relates to a 2019 licensing change which made it more expensive to run Windows Server software on rival clouds. That change prompted European not-for-profit trade association, Cloud Infrastructure Services Providers in Europe (CISPE), to file an antitrust complaint with the EC in 2022. In July, Mi ...

What is going on with Google’s long-touted migration to an alternative adtech stack (aka its Privacy Sandbox proposal)? What indeed. The entire multi-year endeavour to reshape the commercial web looks dangerously close to being killed off after the latest intervention by the U.K.’s antitrust regulator, the Competition and Markets Authority (CMA).This comes on top of the u-turn that Google made around third-party tracking cookies. Originally they were going to be depreciated; as of July, cookies look like th ...

Salesforce is on a buying spree.After snatching up data management firm Own earlier in the month, Salesforce today announced its plans to buy Zoomin, an enterprise knowledge platform. Zoomin — which we’ve covered a handful of times before — unifies a company’s docs, like product user guides and tutorials, in one portal. The terms of the deal weren’t disclosed. Salesforce expects it to be finalized in Q4 of its fiscal year 2025 (January 31), subject to customary closing conditions.Founded in 2019 by Gal Oro ...