Tech

The company has agreed to pay $4 million following a class-action complaint, reports Ars Technica. The second amended 2022 complaint, saved here by Ars, said that “to sell more products and maximize its profits, HP displays misleading strikethrough prices on its website and advertises fictitious savings based on those prices.”

Star Wars: Beyond Victory - A Mixed Reality Playset is a new podracing-focused experience for Meta’s Quest headsets that will be shown at Star Wars Celebration 2025.

That’s according to Semafor’s White House correspondent Shelby Talcott. The TikTok turmoil is just going to go on forever, huh?

The bot, identified as “Sam,” invented a policy that said Cursor’s AI code editor tool could only be used by “one device per subscription,” causing users to say they were canceling their subscriptions, as reported by Ars Technica.

The glasses do seem useful, and you should read my colleague Victoria Song’s experience with the glasses, too. But remember that this is a tightly-controlled demo and it may not represent reality.

The glasses-free 3D display company has gone small, and it’s gone as big as a 65-inch TV. Now, the company also has its first monitor-sized 27-inch model, with 16 inches of perceivable depth according to the company.

The Onion will probably be making up new fake iOS services until the end of time, and I’ll chuckle at every one.

Meta and the FTC point to different parts of Google’s filings to international regulators to reinforce their views of the market. In an Australian filing where Google was attempting to avoid a social media probe, it stated that even though digital products can have overlapping audiences, “there are a number of use cases that only social media platforms such as Facebook can satisfy.” It earlier told European regulators that it competes with social networks for users.

C.C. Wei, the CEO of the Taiwanese chipmaker, said during an earnings call that Phoenix will become the site of an “independent leading-edge semiconductor manufacturing cluster.” TSMC has invested $100 billion in US chipmaking and aims to start producing 2nm or “even more advanced process technology” at its Phoenix plants by the end of this decade.

In its article about the criticisms, TechCrunch also pointed out that Google hasn’t released a report for its recently-announced Gemini 2.5 Flash model, but the company says the report is “coming soon.”

The FTC presents Filner with a post-mortem document about YouTube’s 2014-2019 experiment with adding social features, such as in-app messaging. “We learned that taking a page from social apps and bluntly asking for contact access in the YouTube app would likely lead to user backlash and rejection,” the document reads. “Users who probably hadn’t batted an eyelash about providing their contacts to Snapchat didn’t see YouTube as a relevant app to share contacts with.”

The Washington Post has a good article about Cook’s recent work with the Trump administration, including a conversation last week with the commerce secretary about how tariffs could impact iPhone prices.

Filner is currently a senior director of product management at YouTube. The FTC appears to be attempting to demonstrate that YouTube serves a distinct market from Meta’s apps and is not a direct competitor in the “personal social networking” market it has defined for this case.

Literally! Some have magnetic sleeves, some have power meters up the sleeves, and some have excellent charging and data speeds. But five different cables... can someone please make the one to rule them all?

Goetz says the $19 billion deal was reasonable because, like other companies that get acquired early on, “it looks like a high price, but with the benefit of time, it’s very clear that these young private companies had the potential to emerge into independent public companies.” The FTC has contended that Meta was willing to pay what it did because it was trying to get a potential competitor off the market.

Goetz is supporting Zuckerberg’s earlier characterization of the WhatsApp founders’ “disdain” for advertising and adding social features. He says that, before WhatsApp was acquired, Sequoia partners suggested launching a new app with social media features as a potential business model, but the founders wouldn’t have it. “We were quickly shot down and dismissed,” Goetz recalls. “They were very clear.”

Koum forwarded Goetz a message he got from Zuckerberg in 2013, asking if he’d consider selling for a higher price. “Clear to us that you could get tencent, facebook and google into a bidding war (with microsoft and yahoo trailing). Suggest you avoid the lunch and continue with your craftiness on any reply,” Goetz counseled. He testifies that he wanted Koum to recognize that they had lots of options and could fetch a higher price by playing bidders off each other.

That’s what WhatsApp founder Jan Koum told his investor, Jim Goetz, in a 2012 email. Koum referred to it as a “rumor” Zuckerberg heard, and that he worried Tencent would use the messaging app to compete with Facebook outside of China. “I told him I’ll let him know if we ever do get an offer we would ever consider,” Koum wrote about his interaction with Zuckerberg. “That made him feel better.”

The data-mining company recently did a three-week sprint to build a tool that will help Trump execute his mass deportations. It includes a “self-deportation tracking” project and a database of “actionable leads” of people who can be deported.

The marketplace runs on small businesses all over the world — but Donald Trump’s tariffs are causing uncertainty. In a blog post today, Etsy CEO Josh Silverman said the company will add features like shopping pages surfacing domestic sellers, which could be useful for shoppers who want to avoid tariffs.

A 2013 Sequoia internal memo notes that, “Multiple companies with a combined market cap in excess of $750B have reached out to WhatsApp at various points in time including Facebook, Microsoft, Yahoo, Google, Twitter, Tencent and NHN. Strategic interest is likely due to the company’s unique positioning as a large, global, independent and growing mobile-only asset.”

Judge Boasberg asks Goetz why he prefers that his portfolio companies go public. Goetz responded that it’s much better for his firm’s returns when promising companies go public, citing YouTube as an example of a company that was acquired and is now a highly valuable asset within the larger Google conglomerate. “They’re typically category leaders, they developed something that is unique, and in most cases, those companies compound 10x in the public markets,” he says.

In a 2012 document, Sequoia noted that Apple had entered the messaging market with the launch of iMessage but that “penetration has been modest and we know of no multi-platform ambitions in Cupertino.” On the other hand, the investor warned, “Facebook is the most significant threat given their user base, exceptional user engagement and willingness to support all the major mobile platforms.”

We’ve moved on to Sequoia Capital’s Jim Goetz, an investor in WhatsApp. The FTC is trying to show that WhatsApp had plenty of resources and investment to make a go of it on its own, or with another company, even if Meta hadn’t scooped it up.

Following the uproar over the 2018 data scandal revelation, Meta’s board considered giving users the option to opt out of advertising and pay for a subscription instead. The slide described the proposed product as a “paid monthly subscription offering that allows users to experience Facebook (and potentially our other apps) without ads.” The goal, it said, was to “address the meme: ‘if you are not paying for a service, you are the product.’”