Cloudflare's 2024 internet traffic report highlights a 17.2% global increase in traffic, with Google maintaining its position as the most visited service and the U.S. responsible for 34.6% of bot traffic. The Register reports: One surprise (or perhaps not) is that IPv6 traffic is actually down as a percentage of the packets that passed through Cloudflare's network. It says that 28.5 percent of global traffic was IPv6 during 2024, whereas last year's report put this figure at 33.75 percent. The company also reveals that a fifth of all TCP connections (20.7 percent) are unexpectedly terminated before any useful data can be exchanged. Causes of this could vary from DoS attacks, quirky client behavior, or a network interrupting a connection to filter content.

Coudflare says about half of these incidents were connections closed "Post SYN" -- after its server has received a client's SYN packet, but before a subsequent acknowledgement (ACK) or any useful data. These can be attributed to DoS attacks or internet scanning, while Post-ACK or Post-PSH anomalies are more often associated with connection tampering activity such as filtering, especially if they occur at high rates in specific networks. Mobile device traffic accounted for about 41.3 percent of the total, which is roughly the same as last year. This is largely split between the Apple and Android ecosystems, with iOS on almost a third and Android accounting for two-thirds. [...]

Google's Chrome appears to be the most popular browser by far, accounting for 65.8 percent of all requests during 2024. Just 15.5 percent came from Apple's Safari browser, which leads the way on iOS devices, naturally. Microsoft's Edge accounted for 6.9 percent of browsing, while Mozilla Firefox stood at 4 percent. For search engines, Google also claimed the top spot, with a greater than 88 percent share of all search traffic that passed through Cloudflare. Yandex and Baidu were next with 3.1 percent and 2.7 percent, respectively, while Bing trailed with 2.6 percent. DuckDuckGo accounted for 0.9 percent of searches. You can read Cloudflare's full Year in Review here.

Google DeepMind announced a next-gen video-generating AI tool to rival OpenAI's Sora. Called Veo 2, it can generate AI video clips longer than two minutes with resolutions up to 4K (4096 x 2160). TechCrunch reports: In Google's experimental video creation tool, VideoFX, where Veo 2 is now exclusively available, videos are capped at 720p and eight seconds in length. (Sora can produce up to 1080p, 20-second-long clips.) VideoFX is behind a waitlist, but Google says it's expanding the number of users who can access it this week.

Eli Collins, VP of product at DeepMind, also told TechCrunch that Google will make Veo 2 available via its Vertex AI developer platform "as the model becomes ready for use at scale." "Over the coming months, we'll continue to iterate based on feedback from users," Collins said, "and [we'll] look to integrate Veo 2's updated capabilities into compelling use cases across the Google ecosystem ... [W]e expect to share more updates next year."

An anonymous reader shares a report: Google announced it's rolling out ChromeOS M131 to non-beta users, bringing with it a handy "Safety reset" feature that lets Chromebook users reset their laptops without totally wiping them. The update also introduced a new "Flash notifications" accessibility option to help those who might not otherwise easily hear or see them.

Like Powerwash in ChromeOS, Safety reset will wipe the slate clean if you're experiencing computer virus-like behavior such as unusual pop-ups. But where Powerwash is a full factory reset, Safety reset preserves local data and apps, as well as things like bookmarks and saved passwords, according to a help document about the feature.

BrianFagioli shares a report from BetaNews: As we close out 2024, we Linux enthusiasts are once again looking ahead to what the future holds. While Linux has long been the unsung hero of technology, powering servers, supercomputers, and the cloud, it's also a dominant force in the consumer space, even if many don't realize it. With Android leading the way as the most widely used Linux-based operating system, 2025 is shaping up to be another landmark year for the open source world Here are the predictions mentioned in the article:

- Linux will continue to dominate the enterprise sector
- Linux will further solidify its role in powering cloud infrastructure, with major providers like AWS and Google Cloud relying on it.
- Gaming on Linux is set to grow in 2025
- Linux will play a major role in AI development
- Linux's appeal to developers and tech enthusiasts will remain strong
- The open source movement will grow stronger

What additional predictions do you have for Linux in 2025?

Tucked away in a blog post about Google's quantum computing chip, Willow, Google Quantum AI founder Hartmut Neven wrote that the chip was so "mind-boggling" fast that it seemed to borrow computational power from other universes. According to Neven, the chip's performance suggests the existence of parallel universes, writing, "We live in a multiverse." TechCrunch reports: Here's the passage: "Willow's performance on this benchmark is astonishing: It performed a computation in under five minutes that would take one of today's fastest supercomputers 1025 or 10 septillion years. If you want to write it out, it's 10,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 years. This mind-boggling number exceeds known timescales in physics and vastly exceeds the age of the universe. It lends credence to the notion that quantum computation occurs in many parallel universes, in line with the idea that we live in a multiverse, a prediction first made by David Deutsch."

This drop-the-mic moment on the nature of reality was met with skepticism by some, but, surprisingly, others on the internet who profess to understand these things argued that Nevan's conclusions were more than plausible. The multiverse, while stuff of science fiction, is also an area of serious study by the founders of quantum physics. The skeptics, however, point out that the performance claims are based on the benchmark that Google itself created some years ago to measure quantum performance. That alone doesn't prove that parallel versions of you aren't running around in other universes -- just where the underlying measuring stick came from.

Google's NotebookLM and its podcast-like Audio Overviews are being updated with a new feature that allows listeners to interact with the AI "hosts." Google describes how this feature works in a blog post. The Verge reports: In addition to the interactive Audio Overviews, Google is introducing a new interface for NotebookLM that organizes things into three areas: a "sources" panel for your information, a "chat" panel to talk with an AI chatbot about the sources, and a "studio" panel that lets you make things like Audio Overviews and Study Guides. I think it looks nice.

Google is announcing a NotebookLM subscription, too: NotebookLM Plus. The subscription will give you "five times more Audio Overviews, notebooks, and sources per notebook," let you "customize the style and tone of your notebook responses," let you make shared team notebooks, and will offer "additional privacy and security," Google says. The subscription is available today for businesses, schools and universities, and organizations and enterprise customers. It will be added to Google One AI Premium in "early 2025." Google is also launching "Agentspace," a platform for custom AI agents for enterprises.

Major tech companies are scaling back workplace perks amid industry-wide layoffs and increased focus on AI development. Google, Meta, and Salesforce have reduced or eliminated benefits ranging from massage services to retreat centers, marking a shift from the lavish "perks culture" that defined Silicon Valley for two decades.

Netflix has informally shortened its parental leave, while Meta fired employees for misusing meal vouchers. The industry saw over 264,000 layoffs in 2023, suggesting the end of an era where companies competed for talent with luxury amenities

Leaders of the U.S. House of Representatives committee on China told Apple and Google's parent Alphabet to prepare to remove TikTok from U.S. app stores on January 19, following a federal appeals court decision upholding legislation requiring Chinese-based ByteDance to divest the platform or face a ban.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from 9to5Google: Besides phones and tablets, Android is available on smartwatches, TVs, and even cars. Google today announced Android XR as the next form factor the operating system is coming to. Google is using the catch-all term of extended reality (XR) to describe virtual (VR), mixed (MR), and augmented reality (AR). Android XR is for all device types, including headsets that offer video or optical see-through, screen-less "AI glasses," and AR glasses with displays. Going into Android XR, Google believes it has a proven track record of creating platforms. That is more than just making an operating system for themselves, but also catering to OEM partners, cultivating a developer ecosystem, and managing an app store.

[...] Google says Android XR is the first OS built from the ground up with Gemini. Google and Samsung are starting with the headset, which both consider a good starting point. Samsung has a developer kit called Project Moohan (or "infinity" in Korean) that is lightweight, has an external battery, and powered by the Snapdragon XR2+ Gen 2. Google imagines Android XR headsets as offering an infinite desktop for productivity. In this scenario, you're at a desk with a physical keyboard and mouse. A few partners already have this dev kit and more are being distributed to partners starting this week. Meanwhile, first-party apps like Chrome, YouTube, Google TV, Google Photos, and Google Maps are being optimized for Android XR.

However, glasses are the end goal and frames running Android XR are coming for "directions, translations or message summaries without reaching for your phone," though they are paired like any other wearable. The final realization of this vision is in-lens display. However, Google does not think that displays are a must, and this opens the door to display-less glasses that have microphones and cameras for input, while Gemini capably handles output. Google will "soon begin real-world testing of prototype glasses running Android XR with a small group of users." With today's launch, Google is releasing the Android XR SDK Developer Preview and an Android XR Emulator.

You can get a glimpse into the world of Android XR via this YouTube video.

Google unveiled Gemini 2.0 yesterday, almost exactly one year after Google's initial Gemini launch. The new release offers enhanced multimodal capabilities like native image and audio output, real-time tool use, and advanced reasoning to enable agentic experiences, such as acting as a universal assistant or research companion. VentureBeat reports: During a recent press conference, Tulsee Doshi, director of product management for Gemini, outlined the system's enhanced capabilities while demonstrating real-time image generation and multilingual conversations. "Gemini 2.0 brings enhanced performance and new capabilities like native image and multilingual audio generation," Doshi explained. "It also has native intelligent tool use, which means that it can directly access Google products like search or even execute code."

The initial release centers on Gemini 2.0 Flash, an experimental version that Google claims operates at twice the speed of its predecessor while surpassing the capabilities of more powerful models. This represents a significant technical achievement, as previous speed improvements typically came at the cost of reduced functionality. Perhaps most significantly, Google introduced three prototype AI agents built on Gemini 2.0's architecture that demonstrate the company's vision for AI's future. Project Astra, an updated universal AI assistant, showcased its ability to maintain complex conversations across multiple languages while accessing Google tools and maintaining contextual memory of previous interactions. [...]

For developers and enterprise customers, Google introduced Project Mariner and Jules, two specialized AI agents designed to automate complex technical tasks. Project Mariner, demonstrated as a Chrome extension, achieved an impressive 83.5% success rate on the WebVoyager benchmark for real-world web tasks -- a significant improvement over previous attempts at autonomous web navigation. Supporting these advances is Trillium, Google's sixth-generation Tensor Processing Unit (TPU), which becomes generally available to cloud customers today. The custom AI accelerator represents a massive investment in computational infrastructure, with Google deploying over 100,000 Trillium chips in a single network fabric.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Tom's Hardware, written by Avram Piltch: Microsoft's Recall feature recently made its way back to Windows Insiders after having been pulled from test builds back in June, due to security and privacy concerns. The new version of Recall encrypts the screens it captures and, by default, it has a "Filter sensitive information," setting enabled, which is supposed to prevent it from recording any app or website that is showing credit card numbers, social security numbers, or other important financial / personal info. In my tests, however, this filter only worked in some situations (on two e-commerce sites), leaving a gaping hole in the protection it promises.

When I entered a credit card number and a random username / password into a Windows Notepad window, Recall captured it, despite the fact that I had text such as "Capital One Visa" right next to the numbers. Similarly, when I filled out a loan application PDF in Microsoft Edge, entering a social security number, name and DOB, Recall captured that. (Note that all info in these screenshots is made up). I also created my own HTML page with a web form that said, explicitly, "enter your credit card number below." The form had fields for Credit card type, number, CVC and expiration date. I thought this might trigger Recall to block it, but the software captured an image of my form filled out, complete with the credit card data. Recall did refuse to capture the credit card fields on the payment pages of Pimoroni and Adafruit. "So, when it came to real-world commerce sites that I visited, Recall got it right," adds Piltch. "However, what my experiment proves is that it's pretty much impossible for Microsoft's AI filter to identify every situation where sensitive information is on screen and avoid capturing it."

Harvard University announced Thursday it's releasing a high-quality dataset of nearly one million public-domain books that could be used by anyone to train large language models and other AI tools. From a report: The dataset was created by Harvard's newly formed Institutional Data Initiative with funding from both Microsoft and OpenAI. It contains books scanned as part of the Google Books project that are no longer protected by copyright.

Around five times the size of the notorious Books3 dataset that was used to train AI models like Meta's Llama, the Institutional Data Initiative's database spans genres, decades, and languages, with classics from Shakespeare, Charles Dickens, and Dante included alongside obscure Czech math textbooks and Welsh pocket dictionaries. Greg Leppert, executive director of the Institutional Data Initiative, says the project is an attempt to "level the playing field" by giving the general public, including small players in the AI industry and individual researchers, access to the sort of highly-refined and curated content repositories that normally only established tech giants have the resources to assemble. "It's gone through rigorous review," he says.

Leppert believes the new public domain database could be used in conjunction with other licensed materials to build artificial intelligence models. "I think about it a bit like the way that Linux has become a foundational operating system for so much of the world," he says, noting that companies would still need to use additional training data to differentiate their models from those of their competitors.

An anonymous reader shares a report: Russia has reportedly cut some regions of the country off from the rest of the world's internet for a day, effectively siloing them, according to reports from European and Russian news outlets reshared by the US nonprofit Institute for the Study of War (ISW) and Western news outlets.

Russia's communications authority, Roskomnadzor, blocked residents in Dagestan, Chechnya, and Ingushetia, which have majority-Muslim populations, ISW says. The three regions are in southwest Russia near its borders with Georgia and Azerbaijan. People in those areas couldn't access Google, YouTube, Telegram, WhatsApp, or other foreign websites or apps -- even if they used VPNs, according to a local Russian news site.

Russian digital rights NGO Roskomsvoboda told TechRadar that most VPNs didn't work during the shutdown, but some apparently did. It's unclear which ones or how many actually worked, though. Russia has been increasingly blocking VPNs more broadly, and Apple has helped the country's censorship efforts by taking down VPN apps on its Russian App Store. At least 197 VPNs are currently blocked in Russia, according to Russian news agency Interfax.

Google has announced an experimental AI-powered code agent called "Jules" that can automatically fix coding errors for developers. From a report: Jules was introduced today alongside Gemini 2.0, and uses the updated Google AI model to create multi-step plans to address issues, modify multiple files, and prepare pull requests for Python and Javascript coding tasks in GitHub workflows.

Microsoft introduced a similar experience for GitHub Copilot last year that can recognize and explain code, alongside recommending changes and fixing bugs. Jules will compete against Microsoft's offering, and also against tools like Cursor and even Claude and ChatGPT's coding abilities. Google's launch of a coding-focused AI assistant is no surprise -- CEO Sundar Pichai said in October that more than a quarter of all new code at the company is now generated by AI.

"Jules handles bug fixes and other time-consuming tasks while you focus on what you actually want to build," Google says in its blog post. "This effort is part of our long-term goal of building AI agents that are helpful in all domains, including coding."

Google today unveiled Project Mariner, its first AI agent capable of autonomously navigating web browsers, operating through a Chrome extension that controls cursor movements and form-filling to replicate human interactions online.

The Gemini-powered prototype, developed by Google's DeepMind division, is initially available to a select group of testers. During demos, the agent performed tasks like creating shopping carts on grocery websites, though with noticeable five-second delays between actions. The system captures browser screenshots and processes them through Gemini in the cloud to generate navigation commands.

It operates only in Chrome's active tab, requiring users to observe its actions rather than running in the background. Project Mariner achieved an 83.5% success rate on the WebVoyager benchmark for web-based tasks. The agent has built-in limitations, including inability to complete purchases, accept cookies, or agree to terms of service. Google Labs Director Jaclyn Konzelmann described the project as a "fundamentally new UX paradigm shift" that could transform how users interact with websites. The company said it is engaging with web ecosystem stakeholders as development continues.

An anonymous reader shares a report: Google recently asked the U.S. government to break up Microsoft's exclusive agreement to host OpenAI's technology on its cloud servers, according to a person who has been directly involved in the effort. The conversation took place after the Federal Trade Commission, one of the primary federal antitrust enforcement agencies, asked Google about Microsoft's business practices as part of a broader investigation, this person said.

Firms that compete with Microsoft in renting out cloud servers, including Google and Amazon, want to host OpenAI's artificial intelligence themselves so their cloud customers don't need to also tap Microsoft servers to get access to the startup's technology, this person said.

Google has achieved a major breakthrough in quantum error correction that could enable practical quantum computers by 2030, the company announced in a paper published Monday in Nature. The research demonstrated significant error reduction when scaling up from 3x3 to 7x7 grids of quantum bits, with errors dropping by half at each step. The advance addresses quantum computing's core challenge of maintaining stable quantum states, which typically last only microseconds.

Google's new quantum chip, manufactured in-house, maintains quantum states for nearly 100 microseconds -- five times longer than previous versions. The company aims to build a full-scale system with about 1 million qubits, projecting costs around $1 billion by decade's end.

IBM, Google's main rival, questioned the scalability of Google's "surface code" error correction approach, claiming it would require billions of qubits. IBM is pursuing an alternative three-dimensional design requiring new connector technology expected by 2026. The breakthrough parallels the first controlled nuclear chain reaction in 1942, according to MIT physics professor William Oliver, who noted that both achievements required years of engineering to realize theoretical predictions from decades earlier.

Further reading: Google: Meet Willow, our state-of-the-art quantum chip.

Microsoft AI CEO Mustafa Suleyman predicts conversational AI will become the primary way people interact with technology, replacing traditional web browsers and search engines within the next few years. In an interview with The Verge, Suleyman, who oversees Microsoft's consumer AI products including Bing and Copilot, called current search interfaces "completely broken" and "a total pain," arguing that voice-based AI interactions will prove "100 times easier" for users. He said: The UI that you experience is going to be automagically produced by an LLM in three or five years, and that is going to be the default. And they'll be representing the brands, businesses, influencers, celebrities, academics, activists, and organizations, just as each one of those stakeholders in society ended up getting a podcast, getting a website, writing a blog, maybe building an app, or using the telephone back in the day.

The technological revolution produces a new interface, which completely shuffles the way that things are distributed. And some organizations adapt really fast and they jump on board and it kind of transforms their businesses and their organizations, and some don't. There will be an adjustment. We'll look back by 2030 and be like, "Oh, that really was the kind of moment when there was this true inflection point because these conversational AIs really are the primary way that we have these interactions." And so, you're absolutely right. A brand and a business are going to use that AI to talk to your personal companion AI because I don't really like doing that kind of shopping. And some people do, and they'll do that kind of direct-to-consumer browsing experience. Many people don't like it, and it's actually super frustrating, hard, and slow.

And so, increasingly you'll come to work with your personal AI companion to go and be that interface, to go and negotiate, find great opportunities, and adapt them to your specific context. That'll just be a much more efficient protocol because AIs can talk to AIs in super real-time. And by the way, let's not fool ourselves. We already have this on the open web today. We have behind-the-scenes, real-time negotiation between buyers and sellers of ad space, or between search ranking algorithms. So, there's already that kind of marketplace of AIs. It's just not explicitly manifested in language. It's operating in vector space.

Bruce Perens, original co-founder of the Open Source Initiative, has responded to questions from Slashdot readers about a new alternative he's developing that hopefully helps "Post Open" developers get paid.

But first, "One of the things that's clear from the Slashdot patter is that people are not aware of what I've been doing, in general," Perens says. "So, let's start by filling that in..."

Read on for the rest of his wide-ranging answers....

Google's app store claims that their text-messaging app Google Messages means "conversations are end-to-end encrypted".

"That is some serious bullshit," argues tech blogger John Gruber: It's shamefully misleading regarding Google Messages's support for end-to-end encryption... Google Messages does support end-to-end encryption, but only over RCS and only if all participants in the chat are using a recent version of Google Messages. But the second screenshot in the Play Store listing flatly declares "Conversations are end-to-end encrypted", full stop...

I realize that "Some conversations are end-to-end encrypted" will naturally spur curiosity regarding which conversations are encrypted and which aren't, but that's the truth. And users of the app should be aware of that. "RCS conversations with other Google Messages users are encrypted" would work.

Then, in the "report card" section of the listing, it states the following:

Data is encrypted in transit
Your data is transferred over a secure connection

Which, again, is only true sometimes. It's downright fraudulent to describe Google Messages's transit security this way.... [D]epending who you communicate with — iPhone users, Android users with old devices, Android users who use other text messaging apps — it's quite likely most of your messages won't be secure... E2EE is never available for SMS, and never available if a participant in the chat is using any RCS client (on Android or Apple Messages) other than Google Messages. That's an essential distinction that should be made clear, not obfuscated.
Gruber's earlier blog post had pointed out that the RCS standard "has no encryption; E2EE RCS chats in Google Messages use Google's proprietary extension and are exclusive to the Google Messages app, so RCS chats between Google Messages and other apps, most conspicuously Apple Messages, are not encrypted."

And in his newer post, Gruber adds, "While I'm at it, it's also embarrassing that Google Voice has no support for RCS at all. It's Google's own app and service, and Google has been the world's most vocal proponent of RCS messaging."