Bloomberg : The US-led Iran bombing campaign causes longer delivery times for Amazon, Shein, and others in the Middle East, one of the fastest-growing e-commerce markets — Major e-commerce platforms are warning of longer delivery times to the Middle East after the US-led bombing campaign …
Another major antitrust lawsuit has launched in the UK. This time its against Sony, which could be on the hook for almost £2 billion ($2.7 billion) for overcharging PlayStation users. A class action case for about 12.2 million users argues that Sony "occupies a dominant position in relation to the digital distribution of PlayStation games and in-game content and that it has been unfairly charging its UK customers too much for digital games and in-game content purchased through the PlayStation Store." It argues that Sony "has a near monopoly" on add-on content and digital games through the PlayStation store, allowing it to set the prices and take a 30 percent commission. The class action encompasses anyone in the UK who owned a PlayStation console and purchased digital games or made in-game purchases through the PlayStation store between August 19, 2016 and February 12, 2026. It's being run as an opt-out lawsuit, so anyone meeting the criteria can qualify without taking any action. If the lawsuit is successful then each person could receive about £162 ($217). Sony has argued that allowing downloads from third-party stores could bring security and privacy risks, according to the Financial Times . It further states that the digital sales commission makes up profits lost for selling their consoles with minimal profit. This lawsuit follows the success of a similar class action decided in October. The UK's Competition Appeal Tribunal found that Apple had been abusing its dominant market position and overcharging App Store users. In December, Apple filed an appeal against the £1.5 billion ($2 billion) fine. This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/big-tech/sony-faces-a-27-billion-antitrust-lawsuit-in-the-uk-114113889.html?src=rss
Claude : Anthropic launches a tool to bring a user's preferences and context from other AI platforms to Claude via one copy-paste command, available on all paid plans — Bring your preferences and context from other AI providers to Claude. With one copy-paste, Claude updates its memory and picks up right where you left off.
Newegg's latest combo bundle slaps a 1TB WD Black SN850X SSD in with a Gigabyte X870 motherboard and Ryzen 7 9850XD processor.
Louisiana lawmakers are preparing for a major fight over sweepstakes websites in the 2026 Regular Session, as a newly filed… Continue reading Louisiana bill targets sweepstakes sites and their financial backers The post Louisiana bill targets sweepstakes sites and their financial backers appeared first on ReadWrite .
Seth Rogen paid tribute to Catherin O'Hara while accepting the Best Actress in a Comedy Series award on her behalf at the Actor Awards.
From the AirPods Pro to the AirPods Max, these are the best headphones for your iPhone and beyond.
At a glance Expert's Rating Pros Fast 20Gbps performance (with better cable) Great heft and silicon jacket Good looking Cons Included cable is substandard Very, very expensive Our Verdict Given the high price of this SSD, it should ship with a better cable. Price When Reviewed This value will show the geolocated pricing text for product undefined Best Pricing Today Best Prices Today: Glyph Atom EX20 20Gbps SSD Retailer Price Check Price comparison from over 24,000 stores worldwide Product Price Price comparison from Backmarket This boutique USB SSD from Glyph is one of the more impressive to roll through our lab recently. In terms of design and performance, that’s a good thing — but the price is also impressively high. That’s more than likely due to the ongoing rise in NAND prices, which is affecting the entire storage industry, in addition to others. Read on to learn more, then see our roundup of the best external drives for comparison. What are the Glyph Atom EX20’s features? The Atom EX20 is an exceptionally good-looking, USB 3.2×2 (20Gbps) external SSD from Glyph. It’s all black and clad in a silicone jacket that’s ribbed in a tread pattern to provide a very sure grip. The Type-C port and activity light on the end of the Atom EX20. At 7.5 ounces (jacket included), the Atom EX20 is hardly the lightest external SSD I’ve tested, but the heft also gives you a sense of quality. It measures, jacket included, approximately 4.4-inches long, by 2.4-inches wide, by a little under an inch thick. Both the Type-C port and activity light are on the same end of the unit, with the port offset to the left. The Atom EX20 is warrantied for three years with two of data recovery and one year of replacement. There’s no TeraBytes Written (TBW) rating, but figure around 600TBW, which is a whole lot of data. Remember, reads don’t count, only writes. How much is the Glyph Atom EX20? SSD prices have risen quite a bit recently, but I was still a bit surprised at the Atom EX20’s rather steep pricing for a 20Gbps SSD: $310 for 1TB, $420 for 2TB, $700 for 4TB, and $1,500 for 8TB. And those prices we list are discounts, as shown below. The 4TB price from Glyph’s web site. Basically, those prices are more in line with faster 40Gbps USB4, than 20Gbps USB 3.2×2. With that in mind, the 40Gbps and only slightly pricier Glyph Atom EX40 (see the upcoming review) is the better deal. Note that the 40Gbps version of the OWC 1M2 enclosure is currently only $90 and can be married with an NVMe SSD for less than $300. You might also wait six months to see if the whole AI/data center bubble bursts and SSD prices drop. Glyph Atom EX20 performance caveats Using the bundled 7-inch Type-C cable caused issues on our Windows test bed, with the EX20 initially writing at only 50- to 80MBps, and writing at only 20MBps on an M4 Mac. For whatever reason, read performance was over 2GBps, so the cable issue is a particularly vexing conundrum. If you want the best, least problematic Type-C cable, use a Thunderbolt cable — they’re completely compatible with USB and manufactured to tight tolerances. Indeed, using one solved the Atom EX20’s write performance issue. This is not the first time I’ve used a bundled cable that didn’t allow full performance — the TerraMaster D1 SSD Pro had the same issue, albeit it was an 80Gbps cable that throttled to 20Gbps. Note also, that as with all USB 3.2×2 SSDs, the Atom EX20 will fall back to 10Gbps without a dedicated 20Gbps port. This is because most systems without one don’t support the protocol, but do support the 10Gbps USB 3.2 Gen 2 standard. How fast is the Glyph Atom EX20? Once I switched cables, the 4TB Atom EX20 turned in a blistering performance. One that garnered it the number-two spot among all 20Gbps SSDs. The only drive to beat it was the Asus TUF Gaming A2 , which is actually an unpopulated enclosure that I filled with an extremely fast Samsung 9100 Pro . That was not particularly fair of us. So because of that, consider the EX20 the top dog in pre-populated 20Gbps USB. That’s borne out by the drive’s CrystalDiskMark 8 numbers shown below. Among already populated 20Gbps SSDs, the Glyph Atom EX20 is the boss hog. Longer bars are better. The Glyph Atom EX20 again competed nicely with its rivals ( Corsair EX400U , Crucial X10 ) in the CrystalDiskMark 4K tests. The Glyph Atom EX20 was again running with the big boys in the CrystalDiskMark 4K tests. Longer bars are better. The Atom EX20 was competitive in our real-world 48GB transfers, though it didn’t show as much potential in the FastCopy tests as the Crucial X10. The Atom EX20 was again competitive in our real-world 48GB transfers, though it didn’t show as much potential in the FastCopy tests as the Crucial X10. Shorter bars are better. Being a 4TB SSD certainly helped the Atom EX20 in our 450GB write test (the others are 2TB). It had plenty of secondary cache to play with and never slowed significantly. Being a 4TB SSD certainly helped the Atom EX20 in our 450GB write test. It had plenty of secondary cache to play with and never slowed significantly. Shorter bars are better. I have no complaints about the Atom EX20’s performance — it’s a very fast 20Gbps USB SSD. Should you buy the Glyph Atom EX20? In light of my experience with the cable and the price, the buy recommendation is… perhaps . If cost is no concern, make that a yes. Put another way, the design and performance are excellent (cable excepted), but at the moment, it’s very expensive, as many boutique vendor SSDs are. Note that Glyph is looking into the cable issue, and will likely fix it by the time you read this. That said, test yours first thing using CrystalDiskMark 8 or another synthetic benchmark to make sure. How we test Drive tests currently utilize Windows 11 24H2, 64-bit running off of a PCIe 4.0 Samsung 990 Pro in an Asus Z890-Creator WiFi (PCIe 4.0/5.0) motherboard. The CPU is a Core Ultra i5 225 feeding/fed by two Crucial 64GB DDR5 5600MHz modules (128GB of memory total). Both 20Gbps USB and Thunderbolt 5 are integrated into the motherboard and Intel CPU/GPU graphics are used. Internal PCIe 5.0 SSDs involved in testing are mounted in an Asus Hyper M.2 x16 Gen5 adapter card sitting in a PCIe 5.0 slot. We run the CrystalDiskMark 8.04 (and 9), AS SSD 2 , and ATTO 4 synthetic benchmarks (to keep article length down, we report only the first) to find the storage device’s potential performance. Then we run a series of 48GB transfer and 450GB write tests using Windows Explorer drag and drop to show what users will see during routine copy operations, as well as the far faster FastCopy run as administrator to show what’s possible. A 25GBps two-SSD RAID 0 array on the aforementioned Asus Hyper M.2 x16 Gen5 is used as the second drive in our transfer tests. Formerly the 48GB tests were done with a RAM disk serving that purpose . Each test is performed on a NTFS-formatted and newly TRIM’d drive so the results are optimal. Note that in normal use, as a drive fills up, performance may decrease due to less NAND for secondary caching, as well as other factors. This issue has abated somewhat with the current crop of SSDs utilizing more mature controllers and far faster, late-generation NAND .
New York Times : An unpublished draft of Changpeng Zhao's memoir, “Freedom of Money”, details secret negotiations in 2023 that led to his imprisonment and a run-in with ICE — In a draft of his memoir, Changpeng Zhao, the founder of Binance, laid out the secret negotiations that led to his imprisonment and a run-in with ICE.
In an exclusive interview, Google’s new AI infrastructure chief says the tech giant has a “significant investment” planned. At current levels, Forbes projects it could be a very big number indeed.
AI tools like Sora from OpenAI or Veo promise cinematic-quality videos at the touch of a button. That said, the results can sometimes look artificial or distorted. This usually isn’t a limitation of the model itself, it’s about how it’s used. In this guide, we’ll share five proven techniques to dramatically improve the quality of your AI-generated videos. 1. Describe the subject as specifically as possible AI video models will usually fill in the gaps themselves, but that’s exactly the problem. That’s why you need to be crystal clear in your description. If you’re not specific, this will lead to to incorrect backgrounds, distorted objects, or unwanted details. Instead of a general description like “Create a 10 second clip of a cat playing,” you should be more detailed with the following: Appearance of the subject Environment and lighting Action and mood In sticking with the cat example, you could write: “A small, short-haired brown domestic cat with white paws plays with a stuffed animal in the shape of a squirrel. The scene takes place in a bright living room of a detached house, with warm daylight coming in through a window on the left. The floor is made of light wood, and a sofa can be seen blurred in the background. The cat nudges the toy with its paw, jumps back briefly, and then watches it curiously. The mood is calm, playful, and natural, the camera remains at the cat’s eye level and does not move.” 2. Use multiple runs AI videos are not deterministic. This means that even with identical prompts, the results usually differ significantly. A failed video doesn’t automatically mean that the prompt was bad. Experienced users deliberately create multiple versions of the same clip. Even small variations in movement, perspective, or timing can make the difference between unusable and surprisingly good. The rule of thumb is simple: if five to ten runs don’t produce a convincing result, the problem doesn’t lie with the tool, it’s the prompt. 3. Keep scenes deliberately short and focused Most AI video generators are designed to produce short, self-contained sequences lasting only a few seconds. If several actions, locations, or perspective changes are combined within a single clip, the likelihood of errors increases significantly: characters suddenly change their appearance, objects disappear, and movements often appear unnatural or jerky. Prompts that describe a complete sequence are particularly problematic. Here’s an example: “A person leaves their flat in the morning, walks through a busy street, enters a café, orders a coffee, sits down by the window, and looks out thoughtfully.” Many AI models are still very unreliable when it comes to depicting such dramatic arcs. In the generated video below, numerous errors and inconsistencies appear right from the start, as the sequences appear out of order: Sora/PC-Welt A better description would be: “A person is sitting in a small café at a window seat. Warm light falls in from the right. The person is drinking coffee and looking calmly out the window. The camera is static, slightly to the side at face level. The mood is calm and thoughtful.” The video generated from this prompt is not perfect, but it’s better: Sora/PC-Welt 4. Avoid text in the video Text remains one of the biggest weaknesses of current AI video generators. While many models already achieve high visual quality in images and movements, they quickly reach their technical limits when it comes to displaying text: letters change their shape, words remain incomplete or appear as strings of characters that are difficult to decipher. The main problems are longer texts, changing lettering, or content such as book pages, road signs, or packaging labels. The more text the AI has to display, the higher the probability of errors. If text in the video is unavoidable, you should consciously reduce it and only use simple words or very short phrases. 5. Limit the number of objects in the image AI video models struggle to display multiple people or objects at the same time. As the number of visible elements increases, the likelihood of errors rises significantly: faces change, bodies briefly merge, or objects appear unexpectedly and disappear. Videos look much more stable when the action is separated in time or space. Instead of showing several people at once, focus on them one after the other. For example, the camera can pan from one person to the next, or clearly position a main character in the foreground while others remain outside the frame. An example: “Two people sit opposite each other, talking and gesturing, while other people walk by in the background.” This prompt is more likely to result in distorted faces or unstable interactions. Here’s a much better example: “One person is sitting at a table and talking. The camera initially shows only this person. Then the camera slowly pans to the second person sitting opposite. At no point are both people completely in focus at the same time.”
As of March 2, the Fire TV Stick 4K Select is back to its lowest-ever price of $14.99 at Amazon.
A move to the ISOCELL HP6 with LOFIC support could significantly improve both photos and videos.
The feature could soon let users search for and play radio stations through its interface.
Forget 'AI vs. jobs.' Augmented intelligence amplifies human potential, demanding trust, ethics, and collaboration.
The post Google Photos for Android Finally Gains Sticker Creation appeared first on Android Headlines .
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