Technology News

Alphabet’s profit jumped 34 percent in the third quarter as the parent company of search giant Google reported strong growth in its cloud business amid robust demand for computing and data services used to train and run generative artificial intelligence models.

The solid results released on Tuesday helped alleviate investors’ fears about the financial returns on the vast sums being spent on AI by Alphabet and other Big Tech peers as they seek to dominate the nascent sector. The standout unit was Google Cloud, where revenue increased 35 percent to $11.4 billion and operating profit increased sevenfold to $1.9 billion from $266 million in the same period last year.

Net income was $26.3 billion compared with $19.7 billion in the same period a year earlier, exceeding analysts’ expectations for $22.8 billion. Revenue rose 15 percent to $88.3 billion in the three months through to the end of September, beating the average estimate for $86.3 billion.

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"It’s what happens when you let a bunch of grifters take over,” a Trumpworld source said. Still, the polls remain even.

The first color Kindle is a nice upgrade, but Amazon missed out on a few opportunities to make the Colorsoft even more special.

Blue Origin took another significant step toward the launch of its large New Glenn rocket on Tuesday night by rolling the first stage of the vehicle to a launch site at Cape Canaveral, Florida.

Although the company's rocket factory in Florida is only a few miles from Launch Complex 36 at Cape Canaveral Space Force Station, because of the rocket and transporter's size, the procession had to follow a more circuitous route. In a post on LinkedIn, Blue Origin's chief executive, Dave Limp, said the route taken by the rocket to the pad is 23 miles long.

Limp also provided some details on GERT, the company's nickname for the "Giant Enormous Rocket Truck" devised to transport the massive New Glenn first stage.

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This kitchen gadget provides a way to brew incredibly fresh matcha, but it's really just a glorified tea leaf grinder.

In health care settings, it’s important to be precise. That’s why the widespread use of OpenAI’s Whisper transcription tool among medical workers has experts alarmed.

In health care settings, it’s important to be precise. That’s why the widespread use of OpenAI’s Whisper transcription tool among medical workers has experts alarmed.

This AI-infused 2-in-1 laptop has great performance and astounding battery life, but it’s buggy and sports a terrible keyboard.

There’s little doubt that some of the most important pillars of modern cryptography will tumble spectacularly once quantum computing, now in its infancy, matures sufficiently. Some experts say that could be in the next couple decades. Others say it could take longer. No one knows.

The uncertainty leaves a giant vacuum that can be filled with alarmist pronouncements that the world is close to seeing the downfall of cryptography as we know it. The false pronouncements can take on a life of their own as they’re repeated by marketers looking to peddle post-quantum cryptography snake oil and journalists tricked into thinking the findings are real. And a new episode of exaggerated research has been playing out for the past few weeks.

All aboard the PQC hype train

The last time the PQC—short for post-quantum cryptography—hype train gained this much traction was in early 2023, when scientists presented findings that claimed, at long last, to put the quantum-enabled cracking of the widely used RSA encryption scheme within reach. The claims were repeated over and over, just as claims about research released in September have for the past three weeks.

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Employees at Cisco revealed to WIRED the challenges they’ve encountered while petitioning for the cancellation of contracts with Israel and greater recognition of the humanitarian crisis in Gaza.

Employees at Cisco revealed to WIRED the challenges they’ve encountered while petitioning for the cancellation of contracts with Israel and greater recognition of the humanitarian crisis in Gaza.

Archaeologists have revealed an ancient lost Mayan city using advanced laser mapping technology, unearthing monumental structures such as pyramids and plazas. Named Valeriana, the city is believed to have been founded before 150 AD.

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Many animals, including humans, have developed a taste for alcohol in some form, but excessive consumption often leads to adverse health effects. One exception is the Oriental hornet. According to a new paper published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, these hornets can guzzle seemingly unlimited amounts of ethanol regularly and at very high concentrations with no ill effects—not even intoxication. They pretty much drank honeybees used in the same experiments under the table.

“To the best of our knowledge, Oriental hornets are the only animal in nature adapted to consuming alcohol as a metabolic fuel," said co-author Eran Levin of Tel Aviv University. "They show no signs of intoxication or illness, even after chronically consuming huge amounts of alcohol, and they eliminate it from their bodies very quickly."

Per Levin et al., there's a "drunken monkey" theory that predicts that certain animals well-adapted to low concentrations of ethanol in their diets nonetheless have adverse reactions at higher concentrations. Studies have shown that tree shrews, for example, can handle concentrations of up to 3.8 percent, but in laboratory conditions, when they consumed ethanol in concentrations of 10 percent or higher, they were prone to liver damage.

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The large language model-based coding assistant GitHub Copilot will switch from exclusively using OpenAI's GPT models to a multi-model approach over the coming weeks, GitHub CEO Thomas Dohmke announced in a post on GitHub's blog.

First, Anthropic's Claude 3.5 Sonnet will roll out to Copilot Chat's web and VS Code interfaces over the next few weeks. Google's Gemini 1.5 Pro will come a bit later.

Additionally, GitHub will soon add support for a wider range of OpenAI models, including GPT o1-preview and o1-mini, which are intended to be stronger at advanced reasoning than GPT-4, which Copilot has used until now. Developers will be able to switch between the models (even mid-conversation) to tailor the model to fit their needs—and organizations will be able to choose which models will be usable by team members.

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Readers of those other sites may not care much about font size and column widths. "40-character line lengths? In 18-point Comic Sans? I love it!" they say. But not you, because you are an Ars reader. And Ars readers are discerning. They have feelings about concepts like "information density." And we want those feelings to be soft and cuddly ones.

That's why we're today rolling out version 9.0.2 of the Ars Technica site redesign, based on your continued feedback, with a special emphasis on text control. (You can read about the changes in 9.0.1 here.) That's right—we're talking about options! Font size selection, colored hyperlink text, even a wide column layout for subscribers who plonk down a mere $25/year (possible because we don't need to accommodate ads for subs).

Here's a quick visual look at some of the main changes:

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Within hours of being freed from a low-security prison where he’d been serving time on contempt charges, the MAGA architect was rallying his troops on a Rumble stream.

Our Q3 results were led by great performance in Search, Cloud and YouTube.Our Q3 results were led by great performance in Search, Cloud and YouTube.