White House calls decision – that could have major implications for web use – ‘victory for the American people’ Google violated antitrust laws as it built an internet search empire, a federal judge ruled on Monday in a decision that could have major implications for the way people interact with the internet. Judge Amit Mehta found that Google violated section 2 of the Sherman Act, a US antitrust law. His decision states that Google maintained a monopoly over search services and advertising. Continue reading...

Their shares have fallen 11.8% from last month’s peak but more AI breakthroughs may reassure investors It has been tough week for the magnificent seven, the group of technology stocks that has played a dominant role in the US stock market, buoyed by investor excitement about breakthroughs in artificial intelligence. Last year Microsoft, Amazon, Apple, the chipmaker Nvidia, Google’s parent, Alphabet, Facebook’s owner, Meta, and Elon Musk’s Tesla accounted for half the gains in the S&P 500 share index. But doubts about the return on AI investment, along with a mixed set of quarterly results, investors shifting their focus to other sectors and weak US economic data have hit the group over the past month. Continue reading...

In this week’s newsletter: We’ve become so used to digitally downloading games now that it’s easy to forget how novel it once was, thanks to places like Xbox 360’s Marketplace • Don’t get Pushing Buttons delivered to your inbox? Sign up here The Xbox 360 digital store is the latest to go offline, following the Wii U and 3DS store shutdown in March. It shut down on Monday, taking about 220 games with it, according to analysis by Video Games Chronicle. Preservation activists at the Video Game History Foundation even made a funeral cake. Microsoft is definitely the best of the major companies when it comes to backwards compatibility and game preservation – despite those 220 lost games, a huge percentage of the Xbox 360’s back catalogue can still legally be played on later consoles. And it is remarkable that the Xbox 360 Marketplace lasted almost 20 years (the console was released in late 2005). It wasn’t the first digital store on a console, but it was the first one I ever used, and I assume the same was true for a lot of British players – the Xbox 360 was the most popular console of its generation in this country. In retrospect, the Marketplace was astonishingly ahead of its time. Continue reading...

Firm’s earnings were up 15% year-on-year, but Azure’s lower returns resulted in share prices falling by as much as 7% Microsoft outperformed analyst predictions in its latest quarterly earnings report, revealing on Tuesday that its revenue was up 15% year-over-year. But growth of the company’s closely watched Azure cloud computing services failed to meet expectations and shares in Microsoft fell as much as 7% in after-hours trading. The company was expected to report steady growth in its fourth quarter earnings report, mostly on the back of its cloud services. Revenue from those services grew 29%, lower than the 30% to 31% that analysts predicted, resulting in a sell-off that exacerbates big tech’s recent market woes. Continue reading...

Prototype, initially launching with select publishers and users, set to challenge Google’s dominance of online search OpenAI is testing a new search engine that uses generative artificial intelligence to produce results, raising the prospect of a significant challenge to Google’s dominance of the online search market. SearchGPT will launch with a small group of users and publishers before a potential wider rollout, the company announced on Thursday. OpenAI ultimately intends to incorporate the search features into ChatGPT, rather offer a standalone product. Continue reading...

$10 UberEats vouchers sent to people who helped after global IT outage are flagged as potential fraud An attempt by the cybersecurity firm CrowdStrike to thank workers who tackled the recent global IT outage with a $10 UberEats voucher hit a stumbling block after Uber flagged the gesture as potential fraud. CrowdStrike confirmed that it sent the $10 voucher to “teammates and partners” who helped customers affected by a faulty software update it issued. Continue reading...

Banking and healthcare firms, major airlines expected to suffer most losses, according to insurer Parametrix The global technology outage sparked by CrowdStrike’s faulty update will cost US Fortune 500 companies $5.4bn, insurers estimated, as the cybersecurity firm vowed to make changes to prevent it from happening again. The projected financial losses exclude Microsoft, the tech giant whose systems suffered widespread failures in the crash. Continue reading...

Countless theories for the cybersecurity firm’s outage are flying around, but whatever the reason, this sort of thing is likely to happen again • Don’t get TechScape delivered to your inbox? Sign up for the full article here “Where did CrowdStrike go wrong” is, if anything, a slightly overdetermined question. We can work backwards. Pushing an update to every single computer on your network at the same time means that by the time you discover a problem, it’s too late to limit the fallout. The alternative – a staged rollout – would see the update pushed to users in small groups, usually accelerating over time. If you begin by updating 50 systems at once, and then immediately lose all contact with every single one of them, hopefully you spot it before you update the next 50m. Continue reading...

But experts says full recovery from Friday’s IT failure could take weeks A “significant” number of the 8.5m devices affected by last week’s global IT outage are back online, according to the cybersecurity company at the centre of the incident. CrowdStrike said it was also testing a technique to reboot systems more rapidly, amid warnings from experts that a full recovery from Friday’s IT failure could take weeks. Continue reading...

CEO Sarah Franklin got such intense pushback on her company’s plans that she suspended them after three days One thing seems for sure: people are not ready for “digital workers” just yet. That’s the lesson learned by Sarah Franklin, the CEO of Lattice, a human resources and performance management platform that offers performance coaching, talent reviews, onboarding automation, compensation management and a host of other HR tools to more than 5,000 organizations around the world. Continue reading...