Daily Tech News 7 August 2024

• Lots of juicy details from that Google antitrust ruling. (The Verge)
  
  Google pays device makers enormous amounts of money to direct search requests to them. 20% of Apple's profits come directly from Google.
  
  Estimates from the two companies suggest that it would cost Apple $20 billion in development costs and $6 billion per year in operating expenses to replace Google Search with its own platform, and when Google is paying you $20 billion a year not to do that the decision is pretty simple.
  
  The only problem is that if you are deemed to have a monopoly - which doesn't necessarily mean an absolute monopoly - this is illegal.
  
  Exactly what will happen is still anyone's guess, but Google has few friends on either side of the political aisle. Deemed insufficiently woke for the Democrats, the company has burned every imaginable bridge on the conservative side, many of them twice.

• Western Digital has announced 32TB hard drives, 128TB enterprise SSDs, 16TB external SSDs, 8TB SD cards, and 4TB micro SD cards. (Tom's Hardware)
  
  Coming soon. No prices, no shipping dates.
  
  
  
• Micron meanwhile has announced the first PCIe 6.0 SSDs with transfer rates of 26GB per second. (WCCFTech)
  
  Coming soon. No prices, no shipping dates. No surprise, since PCIe 6.0 doesn't exist yet.
  
  
  
• Where does Facebook's AI slop come from? (404 Media)
  
  Curiously enough, mostly from Facebook.
  
  
  
• Google is discontinuing the Chromecast, a $29 smart TV device that does everything you need for watching streaming services. (The Verge)
  
  Oh no. I was going to... No, that was the Fire TV. Never mind.
  
  
  
• Googler has announced the Google TV Streamer, a $99 smart TV device that does everything you need for watching streaming services. (The Verge)
  
  What a coincidence.
  
  
  
• Twitter has joined a long list of tech companies moving out of downtown San Francisco. (San Francisco Standard)
  
  Employees apparently aren't as fond as they used to be of wading through the daily swamp of human excrement and used needles.
  
  
  
• NASA has had to reschedule the next SpaceX flight to the ISS because the Boeing Starliner is still stuck there. (WCCFTech)
  
  Literally stuck, it would seem. A software issue means that it can't safely undock.
  
  Boeing is working on it.

posted by Pixy Misa at 04:15 AM

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