Add source Login
AT&T's home internet is getting a $5 price hike

AT&T's home internet is getting a $5 price hike

AT&T has been sending out emails to its home internet subscribers, notifying them that their plans will cost $5 more a month starting on December 1. The company has confirmed the price hike to The Verge , who noted that it already raised its prices by $5 a month in November 2024 and that it's raising prices again despite earning $4.9 billion in profit last quarter. AT&T wrote in its email that it's charging $5 more for its its home internet plans "[t]o ensure [it continues] providing the quality service and support [customers] deserve." "As we work to meet the evolving needs of our business and manage increasing operational costs, we’re adjusting our internet plan rates to help maintain the high-quality service our customers expect," AT&T spokesperson Jim Kimberly told The Verge . The company is providing customers the chance to offset the additional charges, however, by giving them a $10 monthly discount if they enroll an eligible bank account in Autopay and Paperless Billing if they haven't yet. If they enroll a debit card, they will get a discount of $5 a month. It's not quite clear how long the discounts will last. And for customers who've enabled Autopay in the past, well, tough luck. The price hike will not apply to new customers who've only signed up over the past year, though, and those under AT&T's Access program for qualifying low-income households. This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/big-tech/atts-home-internet-is-getting-a-5-price-hike-130010486.html?src=rss

AT&T's home internet is getting a $5 price hike

AT&T's home internet is getting a $5 price hike

AT&T has been sending out emails to its home internet subscribers, notifying them that their plans will cost $5 more a month starting on December 1. The company has confirmed the price hike to The Verge , who noted that it already raised its prices by $5 a month in November 2024 and that it's raising prices again despite earning $4.9 billion in profit last quarter. AT&T wrote in its email that it's charging $5 more for its its home internet plans "[t]o ensure [it continues] providing the quality service and support [customers] deserve." "As we work to meet the evolving needs of our business and manage increasing operational costs, we’re adjusting our internet plan rates to help maintain the high-quality service our customers expect," AT&T spokesperson Jim Kimberly told The Verge . The company is providing customers the chance to offset the additional charges, however, by giving them a $10 monthly discount if they enroll an eligible bank account in Autopay and Paperless Billing if they haven't yet. If they enroll a debit card, they will get a discount of $5 a month. It's not quite clear how long the discounts will last. And for customers who've enabled Autopay in the past, well, tough luck. The price hike will not apply to new customers who've only signed up over the past year, though, and those under AT&T's Access program for qualifying low-income households. This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/big-tech/atts-home-internet-is-getting-a-5-price-hike-130010486.html?src=rss

AT&T's home internet is getting a $5 price hike

AT&T's home internet is getting a $5 price hike

AT&T has been sending out emails to its home internet subscribers, notifying them that their plans will cost $5 more a month starting on December 1. The company has confirmed the price hike to The Verge , who noted that it already raised its prices by $5 a month in November 2024 and that it's raising prices again despite earning $4.9 billion in profit last quarter. AT&T wrote in its email that it's charging $5 more for its its home internet plans "[t]o ensure [it continues] providing the quality service and support [customers] deserve." "As we work to meet the evolving needs of our business and manage increasing operational costs, we’re adjusting our internet plan rates to help maintain the high-quality service our customers expect," AT&T spokesperson Jim Kimberly told The Verge . The company is providing customers the chance to offset the additional charges, however, by giving them a $10 monthly discount if they enroll an eligible bank account in Autopay and Paperless Billing if they haven't yet. If they enroll a debit card, they will get a discount of $5 a month. It's not quite clear how long the discounts will last. And for customers who've enabled Autopay in the past, well, tough luck. The price hike will not apply to new customers who've only signed up over the past year, though, and those under AT&T's Access program for qualifying low-income households. This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/big-tech/atts-home-internet-is-getting-a-5-price-hike-130010486.html?src=rss

AT&T's home internet is getting a $5 price hike

AT&T's home internet is getting a $5 price hike

AT&T has been sending out emails to its home internet subscribers, notifying them that their plans will cost $5 more a month starting on December 1. The company has confirmed the price hike to The Verge , who noted that it already raised its prices by $5 a month in November 2024 and that it's raising prices again despite earning $4.9 billion in profit last quarter. AT&T wrote in its email that it's charging $5 more for its its home internet plans "[t]o ensure [it continues] providing the quality service and support [customers] deserve." "As we work to meet the evolving needs of our business and manage increasing operational costs, we’re adjusting our internet plan rates to help maintain the high-quality service our customers expect," AT&T spokesperson Jim Kimberly told The Verge . The company is providing customers the chance to offset the additional charges, however, by giving them a $10 monthly discount if they enroll an eligible bank account in Autopay and Paperless Billing if they haven't yet. If they enroll a debit card, they will get a discount of $5 a month. It's not quite clear how long the discounts will last. And for customers who've enabled Autopay in the past, well, tough luck. The price hike will not apply to new customers who've only signed up over the past year, though, and those under AT&T's Access program for qualifying low-income households. This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/big-tech/atts-home-internet-is-getting-a-5-price-hike-130010486.html?src=rss

World's largest open-source multimodal dataset delivers 17x training efficiency, unlocking enterprise AI that connects documents, audio and video

World's largest open-source multimodal dataset delivers 17x training efficiency, unlocking enterprise AI that connects documents, audio and video

AI models are only as good as the data they're trained on. That data generally needs to be labeled, curated and organized before models can learn from it in an effective way. One of the big missing links in the AI ecosystem has been the availability of a large high-quality open-source multimodal dataset. That changes today with the debut of the EMM-1 dataset which is comprised of 1 billion data pairs and 100M data groups across 5 modalities: text, image, video, audio and 3d point clouds. Multimodal datasets combine different types of data that AI systems can process together. This mirrors how humans perceive the world using multiple senses simultaneously. These datasets enable AI systems to make richer inferences by understanding relationships across data types, rather than processing each modality in isolation. EMM-1 is developed by data labeling platform vendor Encord . The company's platform enables teams to curate, label and manage training data at scale using both automated and human-in-the-loop workflows. Alongside the new model, Encord developed the EBind training methodology that prioritizes data quality over raw computational scale. The approach enabled a compact 1.8 billion parameter model to match the performance of models up to 17 times larger while slashing training time from days to hours on a single GPU rather than GPU clusters. "The big trick for us was to really focus on the data and to make the data very, very high quality," Encord Co-Founder and CEO Eric Landau told VentureBeat in an exclusive interview. "We were able to get to the same level of performance as models 20 times larger, not because we were super clever on the architecture, but because we trained it with really good data overall." The data quality advantage Encord's dataset is 100 times larger than the next comparable multimodal dataset, according to Landau. It operates at petabyte scale with terabytes of raw data and over 1 million human annotations. But scale alone doesn't explain the performance gains. The technical innovation centers on addressing what Landau calls an "under-appreciated" problem in AI training: data leakage between training and evaluation sets. "The leakage problem was one which we spent a lot of time on," Landau explained. "In a lot of data sets, there is a kind of leakage between different subsets of the data. Leakage actually boosts your results. It makes your evaluations look better. But it's one thing that we were quite diligent about." Data leakage occurs when information from test data inadvertently appears in training data, artificially inflating model performance metrics. Many benchmark datasets suffer from this contamination. Encord deployed hierarchical clustering techniques to ensure clean separation while maintaining representative distribution across data types. The company also used clustering to address bias and ensure diverse representation. How EBind boosts efficiency The data quality improvements work in tandem with an architectural approach designed for efficiency Encord's EBind extends the CLIP (Contrastive Language-Image Pre-training) approach (originally developed by OpenAI) from two modalities to five. CLIP learns to associate images and text in a shared representation space, enabling tasks like searching for images using text descriptions. Where CLIP learns to associate images and text in a shared latent space, EBind does the same across images, text, audio, 3D point clouds and video. The architectural choice prioritizes parameter efficiency. Rather than deploying separate specialized models for each modality pair, EBind uses a single base model with one encoder per modality. "Other methodologies, what they do is they use a bunch of different models, and they route to the best model for embedding these pairs, so they tend to explode in the number of parameters," Landau said. "We found we could use a single base model and just train one encoder per modality, so keeping it very simple and very parameter efficient, if we fed that overall architecture really, really good data." The resulting model rivals OmniBind , a much larger competitor in the multimodal space, but requires dramatically fewer computational resources for both training and inference. This makes EBind deployable in resource-constrained environments including edge devices for robotics and autonomous systems. The enterprise value of a multi-modal dataset Multimodal models enable enterprise use cases that span different data types. Most organizations store different data types in separate systems: documents in content management platforms, audio recordings in communication tools, training videos in learning management systems and structured data in databases. Multimodal models can search and retrieve across all of these simultaneously. "Enterprises have all different types of data. They don't just have documents. They have audio recordings, and they have training videos, and they have CSV files," Landau said. "Let's say you're a lawyer and you have a case file that has video evidence and also documents and recordings, and it's all scattered across a lot of silos of data. You can use EBind to pick all of the relevant data and bundle together to search and surface the right data much quicker than you would have before." The same principle applies across verticals. Healthcare providers can link patient imaging data to clinical notes and diagnostic audio. Financial services firms can connect transaction records to compliance call recordings and customer communications. Manufacturing operations can tie equipment sensor data to maintenance video logs and inspection reports. Beyond office environments, physical AI represents another frontier. Landau highlighted autonomous vehicles that benefit from both visual perception and audio cues like emergency sirens. In manufacturing and warehousing, robots that combine visual recognition with audio feedback and spatial awareness can operate more safely and effectively than vision-only systems. Enterprise use case: Extending computer vision with multimodal context Captur AI , an Encord customer, illustrates how companies are planning to use the dataset for specific business applications. The startup provides on-device image verification for mobile apps, validating photos in real-time for authenticity, compliance and quality before upload. The company works with shared mobility providers like Lime and delivery companies capturing billions of package photos. Captur AI processes over 100 million images on-device and specializes in distilling models to 6-10 megabytes so they can run on smartphones without cloud connectivity. But CEO Charlotte Bax sees multimodal capabilities as critical for expanding into higher-value use cases. "The market for us is massive. You submit photos for returns and retails. You submit photos to insurance companies for claims. You submit photos when you're listing something on eBay," Bax told VentureBeat in an exclusive interview. "Some of those use cases are very high risk or high value if something goes wrong, like insurance, the image only captures part of the context and audio can be an important signal." Bax cited digital vehicle inspections as a prime example. When customers photograph vehicle damage for insurance claims, they often describe what happened verbally while capturing images. Audio context can significantly improve claim accuracy and reduce fraud. "As you're doing that, oftentimes the customer is actually describing what's happened," Bax said. "A few of our potential prospects in InsurTech have asked us if we can actually do audio as well, because then that adds this additional bit of context for the user who's submitting the claim." The challenge lies in maintaining Captur AI's core advantage: running models efficiently on-device rather than requiring cloud processing. The company plans to use Encord's dataset to train compact multimodal models that preserve real-time, offline capabilities while adding audio and sequential image context. "The most important thing you can do is try and get as much context as possible," Bax said. "Can you get LLMs to be small enough to run on a device within the next three years, or can you run multimodal models on the device? Solving data quality before image upload is the interesting frontier." What this means for enterprises Encord's results challenge fundamental assumptions about AI development and suggest that the next competitive battleground may be data operations rather than infrastructure scale. Multimodal datasets unlock new capabilities. The ability to train models that understand relationships across data types opens use cases that single-modality systems cannot address. Data operations deserve equal investment with compute infrastructure. The 17x parameter efficiency gain from better data curation represents orders of magnitude in cost savings. Organizations pouring resources into GPU clusters while treating data quality as an afterthought may be optimizing the wrong variable. For enterprises building multimodal AI systems, Landau's assessment captures the strategic shift. "We were able to get to the same level of performance as models much  larger, not because we were super clever on the architecture, but because we trained it with really good data overall," he said.

3 ways Chrome invades your privacy—and what you can do about it

3 ways Chrome invades your privacy—and what you can do about it

Chrome is the most popular browser in the world by a country mile. With more than 77% of the browser market across all kinds of devices, it’s most people’s first choice—especially after a fresh Windows install . But Chrome isn’t some privacy-centric upstart that puts the user first. Just like Google’s “free” search engine, Chrome’s users are the product. The browser collects a lot of information about how, when, and where it’s used, and that can make some people uneasy. If you’re in the nothing-to-hide, nothing-to-fear camp, feel free to mosey along and enjoy your browsing experience with Chrome ( resource hog or not ). But if you’d rather limit how much data Chrome, and by extension, Google, has on you, there are steps you can take. We don’t know everything Chrome gathers; Google keeps those details deliberately vague. But thanks to court filings, independent studies, and forensic testing from privacy researchers, we do have a clear picture of some of the data Chrome collects behind the scenes. Here’s what the evidence shows, and what you can do about it. Telemetry data: How you use the browser Disabling telemetry data in Chrome can help restore some privacy. Jon Martindale Just about every app collects data on how you use the app in question. It’s one of the best tools the developers have for figuring out what works and what doesn’t, and how they can improve the user experience based on the very real habits of its users. Chrome does much the same, but it’s certainly not something you have to be onboard with if you don’t want to. Chrome actually has a built-in tool for disabling at least a portion of its telemetry recording. In the Chrome browser, select the three-dot menu icon in the top-right, then Settings > You and Google and look for Help improve Chrome’s features and performance . Toggle it off. To further restrict how Google tracks you across sites and services, you can logout of the browser and change Chrome’s sign-in habits. Navigate to Settings > You and Google and consider some of the available options. Select the Sign out of Chrome button to log out. You can also use the drop-down menu on the right to decide what happens when you sign in to other Google services. You don’t have to sign in to Chrome just to take advantage of your YouTube Premium account . Your browsing history: The websites you visit Reduce unwanted tracking by changing Chrome’s settings on web searches. Jon Martindale Unsurprisingly, Google’s Chrome web browser knows the websites you visit while using it. It’s been caught out collecting even in incognito mode in the past and had to settle a lawsuit just a few years ago, deleting enormous reams of data on user browser activity that it collected, even when it wasn’t supposed to. Although we probably can’t trust Google to entirely disregard what you’re looking at in Chrome, you can at least tell it not to track some of it. Using incognito mode is a good start, but you can also adjust Chrome’s settings to reduce the chance it’s tracking which websites you visit. Navigate to Settings > You and Google and next to Make searches and browsing better make sure to toggle that option to Off . For good measure, also turn off Enhanced spell check , as that sends what you’re typing to Google. It’ll stop the spellchecker working, but it’s a small price to pay for enhancing your privacy (at least a little). You might also want to navigate to Settings > You and Google > Sync and Google services , and toggle off Improve search suggestions so that you only send your searches to whatever search engine you’re using, not also to your default one (which is probably Google). If you don’t mind reducing your security a little, you can also navigate to Settings > Privacy and security > Security and make sure that under Safe browser , you select No protection . Any other option sends at least a portion of the URL you’re visiting and the page content to Google to check if it’s safe or not. Also toggle off Help improve security on the web for everyone for similar reasons. Alternatively, if you want to improve your protection, the AI enhanced safe browsing feature is interesting . Your purchasing habits and advert effectiveness Reducing the amount of personalized ads through Chrome can help reduce another layer of data collection. Jon Martindale Google makes the majority of its money from advert sales, which is why it wants to collect so much data on its users in the first place: to better target ads at them. Although you can’t stop Google sharing some information with advertisers, you can reduce the amount the adverts that do reach you that are personalized. Select the three-dot menu icon and navigate to Settings > Privacy and security . Select Ads privacy followed by each of the tree options in turn: Ad topics , Site-suggested ads , and Ads measurement . Toggle all of them to off to restrict the data Chrome shares with advertisers. Alternatively, you can sack off all the adverts altogether by using an adblocker. Popular options include Ublock Origin and Ghostery and they’re simple to install – they’re some of my favorite Chrome extensions , in fact. You may need to chop and change which one you use on occasion, though, as Google and Chrome updates regularly break certain functions of one blocker or another. It’s an ongoing cat and mouse game. Extra tips worth considering Alongside advertisers, Chrome also helps others collect data on you and your browsing habits too. Using anti-tracker and advert blocking extensions and apps is the best way to block them out, but you can also use Chrome to make it more difficult for them as well. Navigate to Settings > Privacy and security > Third Party Cookies . Toggle on the Block third-party cookies off to cut down on what other sites and services can track about you, though certain site features may not work correctly. Navigate to Settings > Privacy and security > Third Party Cookies and toggle Send a ‘Do not Track’ request with your browsing traffic , to On . There’s no guarantee a site will listen to it, but if they do, it’s there at least. Settings > Privacy and security > Delete browsing data . You can do this manually to remove any browsing data Chrome has collected on you, but you can also have it do it automatically after you close the browser, or on a trigger of your setting. It won’t stop Chrome collecting any data, but it will make sure there’s no record of it on your local machine. Using another browser The ultimate way to stop Google collecting so much data about you via Chrome, is to simply not use Chrome. I know that’s a tricky proposition when it’s so often the default browser option and much of the internet is built with Chrome in mind. However, that’s not as strictly true as it might seem and you don’t even need to ditch the style of browser you’ve grown used to in moving over. Chrome is based on the Chromium open source project but it’s not the only one. It’s the underlying core of Opera, Microsoft’s Edge, Vivaldi, and the Brave Browser. Any of them will feel quite similar to Chrome, even if they don’t work in quite the same way. There’s also the venerable Firefox, which privacy proponents tend to be quite fond of. There’s also Colibri for a very minimalist browser experience, or Maxthon, which makes bold claims about its lack of user tracking. Give one of them a try. You might find you like it.

3 ways Chrome invades your privacy—and what you can do about it

3 ways Chrome invades your privacy—and what you can do about it

Chrome is the most popular browser in the world by a country mile. With more than 77% of the browser market across all kinds of devices, it’s most people’s first choice—especially after a fresh Windows install . But Chrome isn’t some privacy-centric upstart that puts the user first. Just like Google’s “free” search engine, Chrome’s users are the product. The browser collects a lot of information about how, when, and where it’s used, and that can make some people uneasy. If you’re in the nothing-to-hide, nothing-to-fear camp, feel free to mosey along and enjoy your browsing experience with Chrome ( resource hog or not ). But if you’d rather limit how much data Chrome, and by extension, Google, has on you, there are steps you can take. We don’t know everything Chrome gathers; Google keeps those details deliberately vague. But thanks to court filings, independent studies, and forensic testing from privacy researchers, we do have a clear picture of some of the data Chrome collects behind the scenes. Here’s what the evidence shows, and what you can do about it. Telemetry data: How you use the browser Disabling telemetry data in Chrome can help restore some privacy. Jon Martindale Just about every app collects data on how you use the app in question. It’s one of the best tools the developers have for figuring out what works and what doesn’t, and how they can improve the user experience based on the very real habits of its users. Chrome does much the same, but it’s certainly not something you have to be onboard with if you don’t want to. Chrome actually has a built-in tool for disabling at least a portion of its telemetry recording. In the Chrome browser, select the three-dot menu icon in the top-right, then Settings > You and Google and look for Help improve Chrome’s features and performance . Toggle it off. To further restrict how Google tracks you across sites and services, you can logout of the browser and change Chrome’s sign-in habits. Navigate to Settings > You and Google and consider some of the available options. Select the Sign out of Chrome button to log out. You can also use the drop-down menu on the right to decide what happens when you sign in to other Google services. You don’t have to sign in to Chrome just to take advantage of your YouTube Premium account . Your browsing history: The websites you visit Reduce unwanted tracking by changing Chrome’s settings on web searches. Jon Martindale Unsurprisingly, Google’s Chrome web browser knows the websites you visit while using it. It’s been caught out collecting even in incognito mode in the past and had to settle a lawsuit just a few years ago, deleting enormous reams of data on user browser activity that it collected, even when it wasn’t supposed to. Although we probably can’t trust Google to entirely disregard what you’re looking at in Chrome, you can at least tell it not to track some of it. Using incognito mode is a good start, but you can also adjust Chrome’s settings to reduce the chance it’s tracking which websites you visit. Navigate to Settings > You and Google and next to Make searches and browsing better make sure to toggle that option to Off . For good measure, also turn off Enhanced spell check , as that sends what you’re typing to Google. It’ll stop the spellchecker working, but it’s a small price to pay for enhancing your privacy (at least a little). You might also want to navigate to Settings > You and Google > Sync and Google services , and toggle off Improve search suggestions so that you only send your searches to whatever search engine you’re using, not also to your default one (which is probably Google). If you don’t mind reducing your security a little, you can also navigate to Settings > Privacy and security > Security and make sure that under Safe browser , you select No protection . Any other option sends at least a portion of the URL you’re visiting and the page content to Google to check if it’s safe or not. Also toggle off Help improve security on the web for everyone for similar reasons. Alternatively, if you want to improve your protection, the AI enhanced safe browsing feature is interesting . Your purchasing habits and advert effectiveness Reducing the amount of personalized ads through Chrome can help reduce another layer of data collection. Jon Martindale Google makes the majority of its money from advert sales, which is why it wants to collect so much data on its users in the first place: to better target ads at them. Although you can’t stop Google sharing some information with advertisers, you can reduce the amount the adverts that do reach you that are personalized. Select the three-dot menu icon and navigate to Settings > Privacy and security . Select Ads privacy followed by each of the tree options in turn: Ad topics , Site-suggested ads , and Ads measurement . Toggle all of them to off to restrict the data Chrome shares with advertisers. Alternatively, you can sack off all the adverts altogether by using an adblocker. Popular options include Ublock Origin and Ghostery and they’re simple to install – they’re some of my favorite Chrome extensions , in fact. You may need to chop and change which one you use on occasion, though, as Google and Chrome updates regularly break certain functions of one blocker or another. It’s an ongoing cat and mouse game. Extra tips worth considering Alongside advertisers, Chrome also helps others collect data on you and your browsing habits too. Using anti-tracker and advert blocking extensions and apps is the best way to block them out, but you can also use Chrome to make it more difficult for them as well. Navigate to Settings > Privacy and security > Third Party Cookies . Toggle on the Block third-party cookies off to cut down on what other sites and services can track about you, though certain site features may not work correctly. Navigate to Settings > Privacy and security > Third Party Cookies and toggle Send a ‘Do not Track’ request with your browsing traffic , to On . There’s no guarantee a site will listen to it, but if they do, it’s there at least. Settings > Privacy and security > Delete browsing data . You can do this manually to remove any browsing data Chrome has collected on you, but you can also have it do it automatically after you close the browser, or on a trigger of your setting. It won’t stop Chrome collecting any data, but it will make sure there’s no record of it on your local machine. Using another browser The ultimate way to stop Google collecting so much data about you via Chrome, is to simply not use Chrome. I know that’s a tricky proposition when it’s so often the default browser option and much of the internet is built with Chrome in mind. However, that’s not as strictly true as it might seem and you don’t even need to ditch the style of browser you’ve grown used to in moving over. Chrome is based on the Chromium open source project but it’s not the only one. It’s the underlying core of Opera, Microsoft’s Edge, Vivaldi, and the Brave Browser. Any of them will feel quite similar to Chrome, even if they don’t work in quite the same way. There’s also the venerable Firefox, which privacy proponents tend to be quite fond of. There’s also Colibri for a very minimalist browser experience, or Maxthon, which makes bold claims about its lack of user tracking. Give one of them a try. You might find you like it.