Hasta La Gadget!

BMW Motorrad Austria and design studio Vagabund have collaborated to create the BMW CE 02, an electric scooter that blends futuristic design with retro elements, exemplifying a retro-futuristic aesthetic. This partnership follows their previous customization of the BMW CE 04, which included unique features like a surfboard rack and a smiley face. The latest customization introduces Teenage Engineering’s speaker-like radio and a cylindrical container for a portable umbrella.

Paul Brauchart and Philipp Rabl, co-founders of Vagabund Moto GmbH, emphasize that the BMW CE 02 offers the perfect canvas for their creative vision. They aimed to merge the futuristic design with nostalgic elements to evoke a sense of familiarity and appeal to a broad audience. The result is a stylish electric scooter designed for urban environments.

The design inspiration includes influences from retro-audio and Dieter Rams’ minimalist designs. The OB-4 Magic Radio from Teenage Engineering, known for its minimalist aesthetic, perfectly complements the retro-futuristic theme. The scooter also features an innovative “electric exhaust” that serves as an umbrella drawer, adding both functionality and a nod to retro design.

The custom BMW CE 02 was first envisioned during the BMW Motorrad Days in Berlin, where Vagabund was impressed by its modular design.

Given the green light by BMW, Vagabund took full control of the project, managing everything in-house or through partner companies. Their love for music and retro design significantly influenced the customization process.

The CE 02 by Vagabund is a one-off project, showcased in a custom 3.6-meter high steel-like packaging, resembling a collectible item. This specially designed packaging can be dismantled and transported, ensuring that the custom electric scooter garners attention wherever it goes.

While the CE 02 remains a unique, non-commercial project, it highlights the innovative and creative potential of collaborations between automotive and design studios.

BMW And Vagabund Unveil Retro-Futuristic CE 02 Electric Scooter

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X will soon close its longtime San Francisco office and move employees to offices elsewhere in the Bay Area, according to an email from CEO Linda Yaccarino reported by The New York Times. Yaccarino’s note to employees comes several weeks after Elon Musk threatened to move X’s headquarters out of California and into Austin, Texas.

Yaccarino’s note, however, doesn’t seem to mention Texas. According to The New York Times, she told employees the closure will happen over the “next few weeks” and that employees will work out of “a shared engineering space in Palo Alto” that’s also used by xAI, as well as other “locations in San Jose.”

Twitter, and now X, has had a rocky relationship with its home base since Musk’s takeover of the company. Musk banned employees from working remotely shortly after taking over the company in 2022, and ordered many Twitter workers back to the office in the mid-Market neighborhood of San Francisco.

He later ran afoul of the city’s Department of Building Inspection for installing a giant flashing X on top of the building, and for reportedly converting office space into hotel rooms for employees to sleep in. The company’s landlord had also sued X over unpaid rent, The San Francisco Chronicle reported earlier this year. The lawsuit was later dismissed.

Despite Musk’s frequent complaints about San Francisco and its elected leaders, he had previously vowed to keep the company’s headquarters in the city. “Many have offered rich incentives for X (fka Twitter) to move its HQ out of San Francisco,” Musk tweeted last year.

“Moreover, the city is in a doom spiral with one company after another left or leaving. Therefore, they expect X will move too. We will not. You only know who your real friends are when the chips are down. San Francisco, beautiful San Francisco, though others forsake you, we will always be your friend.”

But, even before Musk’s recent posts about moving to Austin, there were other signs X may be getting ready to leave after all. The San Francisco Chronicle reported in July that X’s landlord was looking to sublease much of the company’s 800,000 square-foot headquarters.

X didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment.

This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/social-media/x-is-reportedly-closing-its-san-francisco-office-203650428.html?src=rss

In the latest example of a troubling industry pattern, NVIDIA appears to have scraped troves of copyrighted content for AI training. On Monday, 404 Media’s Samantha Cole reported that the $2.4 trillion company asked workers to download videos from YouTube, Netflix and other datasets to develop commercial AI projects. The graphics card maker is among the tech companies appearing to have adopted a “move fast and break things” ethos as they race to establish dominance in this feverish, too-often-shameful AI gold rush.

The training was reportedly to develop models for products like its Omniverse 3D world generator, self-driving car systems and “digital human” efforts.

NVIDIA defended its practice in an email to Engadget. A company spokesperson said its research is “in full compliance with the letter and the spirit of copyright law” while claiming IP laws protect specific expressions “but not facts, ideas, data, or information.” The company equated the practice to a person’s right to “learn facts, ideas, data, or information from another source and use it to make their own expression.” Human, computer… what’s the difference?

YouTube doesn’t appear to agree. Spokesperson Jack Malon pointed us to a Bloomberg story from April, quoting CEO Neal Mohan saying using YouTube to train AI models would be a “clear violation” of its terms. “Our previous comment still stands,” the YouTube policy communications manager wrote to Engadget.

That quote from Mohan in April was in response to reports that OpenAI trained its Sora text-to-video generator on YouTube videos without permission. Last month, a report showed that the startup Runway AI followed suit.

NVIDIA employees who raised ethical and legal concerns about the practice were reportedly told by their managers that it had already been green-lit by the company’s highest levels. “This is an executive decision,” Ming-Yu Liu, vice president of research at NVIDIA, replied. “We have an umbrella approval for all of the data.” Others at the company allegedly described its scraping as an “open legal issue” they’d tackle down the road.

It all sounds similar to Facebook’s (Meta’s) old “move fast and break things” motto, which has succeeded admirably at breaking quite a few things. That included the privacy of millions of people.

In addition to the YouTube and Netflix videos, NVIDIA reportedly instructed workers to train on movie trailer database MovieNet, internal libraries of video game footage and Github video datasets WebVid (now taken down after a cease-and-desist) and InternVid-10M. The latter is a dataset containing 10 million YouTube video IDs.

Some of the data NVIDIA allegedly trained on was only marked as eligible for academic (or otherwise non-commercial) use. HD-VG-130M, a library of 130 million YouTube videos, includes a usage license specifying that it’s only meant for academic research. NVIDIA reportedly brushed aside concerns about academic-only terms, insisting their batches were fair game for its commercial AI products.

To evade detection from YouTube, NVIDIA reportedly downloaded content using virtual machines (VMs) with rotating IP addresses to avoid bans. In response to a worker’s suggestion to use a third-party IP address-rotating tool, another NVIDIA employee reportedly wrote, “We are on [Amazon Web Services](#) and restarting a [virtual machine](#) instance gives a new public IP[.](#) So, that’s not a problem so far.”

404 Media’s full report on NVIDIA’s practices is worth a read.

This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/ai/nvidias-ai-team-reportedly-scraped-youtube-netflix-videos-without-permission-204942022.html?src=rss

Google is in deep trouble after a federal judge ruled that the company illegally abused a monopoly over the search industry. The ruling follows a 10-week trial held in 2023 that stemmed from a 2020 lawsuit filed by the Department of Justice and several states. 

“Google is a monopolist, and it has acted as one to maintain its monopoly,” Judge Amit Mehta of the US District Court for the District of Columbia wrote in the ruling. “It has violated Section 2 of the Sherman Act.”

Mehta has not imposed any remedies on Google at the time of writing. The judge may order Google to change how it operates or even sell parts of its business. 

The lawsuit claimed that Google illegally acted to maintain its dominant position in search through a number of actions, such as paying the likes of Apple, Samsung and Mozilla billions of dollars per year to be the default search engine on their phones and web browsers. The DOJ argued that Google facilitates almost 90 percent of web searches and that by paying to be the default option, it prevented rivals from achieving the kind of scale needed to compete. As such, Google is deemed to benefitted in terms of both revenue and data collection.

“Those search access points are preset with a ‘default’ search engine,” the ruling reads. “The default is extremely valuable real estate. Because many users simply stick to searching with the default, Google receives billions of queries every day through those access points. Google derives extraordinary volumes of user data from such searches. It then uses that information to improve search quality.”

According to Mehta, Google has acknowledged that losing its position as the default search engine on various platforms would harm its bottom line. “For instance, Google has projected that losing the Safari default would result in a significant drop in queries and billions of dollars in lost revenues,” the ruling states.

During the trial, Google argued that its significant slice of market share was due to having a better product that consumers appreciated. It’s likely to appeal Mehta’s ruling.

Engadget has contacted Google for comment.

In addition, the DOJ claimed that Google held a monopoly over ads that appear in search results. It argued that Google artificially inflated the prices of ads beyond what they’d cost in a free market.

In his ruling, Mehta agreed that “Google has exercised its monopoly power by charging supracompetitive prices for general search text ads. That conduct has allowed Google to earn monopoly profits.” However, the judge added that Google does not hold monopoly power in the broader market of search advertising.

Meanwhile, Mehta declined to impose sanctions on Google for failing to preserve employee chat messages that may have been pertinent to the case. The ruling notes that, since 2008, Google deletes chat messages between its employees by default after 24 hours.

“The court’s decision not to sanction Google should not be understood as condoning Google’s failure to preserve chat evidence,” Mehta wrote. “Any company that puts the onus on its employees to identify and preserve relevant evidence does so at its own peril. Google avoided sanctions in this case. It may not be so lucky in the next one.”

Google and the DOJ are set to return to federal court in September over an ad tech case.

This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/big-tech/google-is-a-monopolist-in-search-us-judge-rules-in-antitrust-case-193358356.html?src=rss

Ahead of the full release of iOS 18, iPadOS 18, macOS Sequoia and more, Apple continues to bring updates to the betas it’s made available to early testers. Today, the company has dropped the fifth developer beta to those platforms, and with it comes a few changes to Safari and Photos. Specifically, Apple’s browser is getting some tools that could make surfing today’s cluttered and overwhelming web pages a lot less distracting, with something called Distraction Control. 

Is Safari’s Distraction Control an ad blocker?

To be clear, this isn’t intended to be an ad blocker. It’s for parts of a page that distract you, like an overlay asking you to subscribe or even requests to use cookies. When you land on a website, you can press the Page Menu button in the Search field (where the Reader and Viewer buttons are). There, you can tap “Hide Distracting Items” and go on to choose which parts of a page you want to filter out. Subsequently, that part will be blocked on all websites you visit.

There are a few important caveats, though. The first time you click on Distraction Control, Apple will inform you that it won’t permanently remove ads or other areas where content might change or get updated. Since on-page banner ads usually refresh on each visit, this renders Distraction Control useless for those elements. 

You’ll also be the one selecting which parts of the site to hide, and there’s no artificial intelligence automatically detecting which components might be deemed distracting. You’ll see a blue outline over certain areas and can tap to select them. According to Apple, nothing will be hidden unless a user proactively selects it. You’ll also be able to unhide items afterwards, by going back to the hide icon in the search field and choosing “Show hidden items.”

If something you’ve chosen to block, like a headline or an ad, has changed in any way, it will resurface upon your next visit to the same website. On a different page, this will likely not work since it is probably different across publishers anyway.

How does Distraction Control handle those pesky GDPR cookie requests?

Theoretically, you would also be able to use Distraction Control to hide the dialogs with the GDPR-stipulated cookies permission requests. If you choose to block those across the internet, the website would just be told you closed its request without an answer. Based on the legal requirements in different regions, the website would then have to proceed based on that information. 

It’s not yet clear how Distraction Control will handle paywalls, especially since there are different ways that content is protected. 

The fifth developer beta also brings with it features that were teased at WWDC, like a redesigned Reader and Highlights, which brings up summarized information from a website like a business’ hours or phone number. There’s also a new Viewer experience that works when Safari detects a video on the page and puts in front and center. It’ll also give you system playback controls in this mode, including picture-in-picture. 

If you’re curious about how the new tools and Distraction Control work, you can run Apple’s developer beta. Just know that since you’ll be opting in to preview software, there may be bugs or quirks, so make sure to backup your data before you proceed. According to the information accompanying the iOS 18 beta 5 update, it requires 7.11GB of storage, too.

This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/safari-can-block-distracting-ads-and-other-website-clutter-with-the-latest-ios-18-and-macos-betas-172041678.html?src=rss