U.S. District Judge Charles Breyer ruled that Musk’s lawsuit was retaliatory in nature.

X issued a statement indicating its intention to appeal the decision.

Imran Ahmed, CEO of CCDH, welcomed the judge’s decision as an affirmation of his organization’s efforts to hold social media companies accountable for their actions.

Roberta Kaplan, a lawyer representing CCDH, said the ruling underscores Musk’s inability to manipulate legal processes to his advantage.

Musk’s statements on social media have also drawn criticism, including his endorsement of an anti-Semitic post on X in November 2023.

The judge’s decision is a blow to the world’s third-richest man, who has long portrayed himself as a defender of free speech.

Since acquiring Twitter, Musk has faced plenty of criticism for firing employees who monitored for misinformation, as well as from civil rights groups for allowing posts with harmful and offensive content on the platform.

Princeton University

Samsung Research America (SRA) has joined Princeton University‘s new NextG Corporate Affiliates program, reports Telecoms News. The program brings together industry and academia for the sake of research in 6G wireless networks and related technologies.

“The best academic research to help realise the promise of future wireless networks is informed by close interactions between faculty and industry technology leaders. Our NextG program aims to foster those deep collaborations around wireless technology, as well as policy, that are required to drive meaningful innovation and global leadership in an era of rapid change”, said Andrea Goldsmith, Dean of Princeton’s School of Engineering and Applied Science.

The NextG initiative was launched last year at Princeton’s School of Engineering and Applied Science and aims to increasingly advance innovation in networking, sensing and other key areas that will be the foundation of next-generation data infrastructure.

“We encourage Princeton’s researchers to continue innovating and develop potentially disruptive 6G technologies,” said Dr Charlie Zhang, SVP at SRA.

With SRA chairing key 6G standardization groups, the company is now in a position to quickly translate Princeton’s insights into broader ecosystem developments.

With the new partnership, Samsung aims to take wireless networks into a new era in which 6G promises significantly higher speeds, lower latency and expanded opportunities for new mobile applications.

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The tech giant said it would lay off hundreds of employees in its voice assistant unit, and eliminate hundreds of positions from the hardware team responsible for Pixel, Nest and Fitbit. The augmented reality (AR) team is also affected, with the majority of people in it to be laid off.

The company has come out with the opinion that such extreme actions are necessary and are part of the organizational changes.

“To best position us for these opportunities, throughout the second half of 2023, a number of our teams made changes to become more efficient and work better, and to align their resources to their biggest product priorities. Some teams are continuing to make these kinds of organizational changes, which include some role eliminations globally,” a Google spokesperson said in a statement.

Alphabet’s employee union said in an X that the layoffs were “unnecessary” and that the company could not “continue to fire colleagues” while making billions.

Google has recently downsized its AR hardware team and opted for collaboration with other original equipment manufacturers (OEMs), according to an initial report from 9to5Google. Additionally, there is a shift towards consolidating Google’s hardware engineering efforts into a unified core team, streamlining operations previously spread across Pixel, Fitbit, and Nest.

Fitbit co-founders James Park and Eric Friedman are confirmed to be departing, as acknowledged by Google to TechCrunch. Notably, James Park played a crucial role in the introduction of the new Pixel Watch series of smartwatches within Google’s hardware portfolio.

In 2019, Google announced the acquisition of Fitbit for $2.1 billion, a process that underwent a two-year regulatory approval before finalizing in 2021. Since then, Google has integrated Fitbit products into its own offerings, exemplified by prompting Fitbit users to transition to Google accounts last year.

Simultaneously, the company made changes in its workforce, including personnel from the Google Assistant team, as reported by Semafor.

This latest company-wide layoff follows a larger workforce reduction of approximately 12,000 roles, or 6% of its employees, in January 2023.

In a parallel development, hedge fund Blackwells Capital, aligning with CEO Robert Iger’s initiatives, is advocating for three candidates to join Disney’s board. These candidates aim to reinforce Iger’s strategy and provide an alternative perspective to Trian Fund Management.

The combined endorsements from ValueAct and Blackwells intensify the pressure on Trian Fund Management, urging them to present a more compelling alternative vision for the company’s future.

Since returning to his position in late 2022, CEO Robert Iger has faced persistent challenges from Trian. During that period, Disney, led by Iger’s successor Bob Chapek, incurred significant losses in its streaming services and released a series of underwhelming films. Consequently, 8,000 employees were laid off, with the primary objective being a cost-saving measure of approximately $7.5 billion.

Trian Fund Management, holding around $3 billion in Disney stock, equating to 1.8% of outstanding shares, remains a key player in these strategic discussions.

Morfit said Wednesday that Disney has the best intellectual property, sports brand and theme park assets, and can lead the media industry forward as legacy technologies transition to digital platforms. Iger said the company has had “very constructive” conversations with ValueAct over the past year.

Disney’s shares, which have seen a modest 2% increase in the past year, remained relatively stable at $90.46 in New York on Wednesday morning.

For the upcoming shareholder meeting, typically held in spring, Blackwells is putting forth three nominees: Jessica Schell, a former Warner Bros. executive specializing in content distribution; Craig Hatkoff, co-founder of the Tribeca Film Festival; and Leah Solivan, the founder of TaskRabbit Inc.

Blackwells Onshore I LLC, with a beneficial ownership of 9,850 shares, and Jason Aintabi, Blackwells’ chief investment officer holding 56,600 shares, along with Blackwells Capital LLC’s ownership of 56,600 shares, are integral to these nominations.

Disney has stated its intention to review Blackwells’ nominees and provide a recommendation to the board. Meanwhile, Disney’s nominations for board additions include Morgan Stanley Chairman James Gorman and seasoned media executive Jeremy Darroch.

Trian, expressing openness to other shareholders aiding in the company’s improvement, emphasizes the need for Nelson Peltz and Matthew Rasulo as independent voices and catalysts for essential changes, believing they can benefit long-suffering Disney shareholders.

CopadoGPT acts as a comprehensive intelligence layer across platforms, offering guidance and suggestions for optimal Salesforce DevOps practices. It accelerates test generation, enhances user stories, and generates release notes.

“Copado is an AI-first company with a focus on maximizing the customer experience. The expansion of CopadoGPT’s beta access marks a significant milestone in our journey to embed AI deeply into the fabric of Salesforce DevOps. This AI DevOps advisor is not just a tool; it’s a partner that enhances our customers’ capabilities to innovate rapidly and with confidence,” said Federico Larsen, chief technology officer at Copado.

The platform was developed by the company to improve time to value, increase customer satisfaction and accelerate digital transformation efforts.

“Copado’s approach of combining deep DevOps domain knowledge with the power of GenAI will enable SaaS development teams to significantly make their development and deployment processes much more productive”, said Diego Lo Giudice, vice president principal analyst at Forrester.

In a recent post, the company emphasized that CopadoGPT underscores Copado’s commitment to an AI-first approach and will persistently drive the development of new product capabilities to propel digital transformation forward.

This will give Python developers the ability to work on their applications through the ngrok network without a lot of setup.

The SDK aims to create a persistent connection to the ngrok ingress-as-a-service platform, and ngrok will pass the application configuration information to the nearest point of presence.

“Instead of focusing on core business logic, developers often invest substantial time and effort in adding non-functional capabilities such as authentication, authorization, observability, and high availability that are outside their area of expertise,” Bob Hagemann, principal engineer at ngrok, wrote in a blog post.

According to ngrok, the inspiration to create ngrok-python was to enable developers to ignore the complexities of the network stack.

This follows President Joe Biden’s executive order on artificial intelligence last month.

“In last month’s Executive Order, the President called on DHS to promote the adoption of AI safety standards globally and help ensure the safe, secure, and responsible use and development of AI,” said Alejandro N. Mayorkas, Secretary of Homeland Security.

“CISA’s roadmap lays out the steps that the agency will take as part of our Department’s broader efforts to both leverage AI and mitigate its risks to our critical infrastructure and cyber defenses”, he added.

Initially, the organization will conscientiously employ AI to fortify cyber defense in adherence to relevant laws and policies, encompassing those governing federal procurement, privacy, civil rights, and civil liberties.

Subsequently, there will be an evaluation of AI systems to ensure they are inherently secure. This initiative aims to promote the adoption of safe AI practices across federal civilian government agencies, private sector entities, and state, local, tribal, and territorial (SLTT) governments. CISA will pioneer the development of best practices for secure AI deployment and formulate recommendations for red-teaming generative AI.

Thirdly, the organization will actively engage with companies to safeguard critical infrastructure against malicious AI applications. Collaboration will revolve around identifying and addressing threats, vulnerabilities, and effective mitigations.

Furthermore, it will establish collaborative channels with other agencies, international partners, and the public to devise policy approaches concerning the intersection of security and AI.

“Our Roadmap for AI, focused at the nexus of AI, cyber defense, and critical infrastructure, sets forth an agency-wide plan to promote the beneficial uses of AI to enhance cybersecurity capabilities; ensure AI systems are protected from cyber-based threats; and deter the malicious use of AI capabilities to threaten the critical infrastructure Americans rely on every day”, said Jen Easterly, director of CISA.

And lastly, a key focus will be on expanding the pool of qualified AI professionals within its workforce. This will be achieved through educational initiatives covering AI systems and techniques, coupled with strategic recruitment of individuals possessing the requisite expertise. The internal training program will not only encompass the technical dimensions of AI but will also address the legal, ethical, and policy considerations.

Specifically, the HPSF will provide developers with resources for continuous integration, architectural support and regression testing, and performance benchmarking.

According to the Linux Foundation, HPC has taken off due to the increasing adoption of scientific computing and artificial intelligence. By providing a neutral space for HPC projects, the organization hopes that industry, academia and governments will be able to collaborate.

HPSF already benefits from strong support across the HPC landscape, including leading companies and organizations like Amazon Web Services, Argonne National Laboratory, CEA, CIQ, Hewlett Packard Enterprise, Intel, Kitware, Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, Los Alamos National Laboratory, NVIDIA, Oak Ridge National Laboratory, Sandia National Laboratory, and the University of Oregon. Drawing from supporting organizations and members of the community, HPSF will set up a technical advisory committee (TAC) to manage working groups tackling a variety of HPC topics, and will follow a governance model based on the Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF).

The HPSF is launching with the following initial open source technical projects:

• Spack: the HPC package manager
• Kokkos: a performance-portable programming model for writing modern C++ applications in a hardware-agnostic way.
• AMReX: a performance-portable software framework designed to accelerate solving partial differential equations on block-structured, adaptively refined meshes.
• WarpX: a performance-portable Particle-in-Cell code with advanced algorithms that won the 2022 Gordon Bell Prize
• Trilinos: a collection of reusable scientific software libraries, known in particular for linear, non-linear, and transient solvers, as well as optimization and uncertainty quantification.
• Apptainer: a container system and image format specifically designed for secure high-performance computing.
• VTK-m: a toolkit of scientific visualization algorithms for accelerator architectures.
• HPCToolkit: performance measurement and analysis tools for computers ranging from laptops to the world’s largest GPU-accelerated supercomputers.
• E4S: the Extreme-scale Scientific Software Stack
• Charliecloud: HPC-tailored, lightweight, fully unprivileged container implementation.

HPSF aims to make life easier for high performance software developers through a number of focused initiatives, including:

• Continuous Integration resources tailored for HPC projects
• Continuously built, turnkey software stacks
• Architecture support
• Performance regression testing and benchmarking

The Alexa division will undergo a restructuring that will result in job cuts. The move is part of Amazon’s strategy to streamline operations and focus on key growth areas. Although no specific details on the number of cuts have been revealed, it is understood that they will affect a significant portion of the workforce.

In addition to this, the cloud gaming division will also make cuts. That division, focused on cloud gaming services, has faced challenges competing with industry giants like Google and Microsoft. The layoffs indicate a reassessment of Amazon’s approach to the cloud gaming market and a reallocation of resources to other initiatives.

These developments are further evidence of Amazon adapting to changing market dynamics and prioritizing areas with the greatest growth potential. With its latest actions, the company aims to better position itself in the highly competitive technology industry.

While layoffs can be troubling for employees, they can also have their upside. The layoffs signal the company’s efforts to optimize its resources and align its workforce with its strategic goals.

Amazon is expected to make further adjustments to its organizational structure and initiatives.

In a May interview with Kinda Funny, Ferguson said that people shouldn’t spend time looking for a secret level that doesn’t exist.

“We’ve had some fun, but we wanted to make sure it felt authentic to the gothic, dark themes we had. And because of that, there’s no secret level in Diablo 4 that people might be looking for, as per previous games.”

Said Rod Fergusson.

Players, however, don’t believe the general manager and have still been searching for a secret level in Diablo 4 since the game’s release.

In the first part of Diablo, a rumor was released that there was a secret cow level. And if you click on a specific cow and a specific number of times, you will open a portal to a mysterious level known as the Secret Cow Level. It turned out that no such mystery existed in the first game, but players left their doubts about the rest of Diablo.

So far, there’s no sign of a secret level in Diablo 4 – despite some slight references to cows throughout the game.

As reported by PC Gamer, a thread on reddit includes some interesting evidence that fans think might be a hint of its existence after all.

There’s also more conclusive evidence. Both a “Bloody Wooden Shard” item with a W carved into the side and a “Mustic Dome” can be found in the game, likely referencing the wooden leg of Virth and the city portal dome that were needed to access the Mu Mu farm in Diablo 2.

Will Diablo 4’s secret level turn out to be real, or will all players’ efforts to figure it out prove futile?

If you’re a fan of the game, share your thoughts by emailing us at [email protected], and we’ll be happy to share your comments with our readers.