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| 9d

Google's lawsuit history: The biggest legal cases against the search giant, including antitrust and class-action suits

In recent years, Google has faced numerous high-profile legal battles, including antitrust cases and class-action lawsuits. The US government has filed two major antitrust cases against the company, one related to its monopoly in the search engine industry and the other concerning its online advertising strategies. Google is currently awaiting the verdict for the first case and is set to go to trial for the second in 2024. The outcomes of these cases could have significant consequences for competition in the industry. Google has also settled class-action lawsuits related to privacy issues and monopoly tactics in the Google Play Store. Additionally, the company has dealt with legal challenges regarding the "right to be forgotten" ruling in the European Court of Justice, which allows individuals to request the removal of their personal information from search engine results.

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Business Insider

| 10d

Jack Dorsey defends Musk's Twitter leadership, saying the billionaire slashed the 'critical sin' of its business model

Twitter co-founder, Jack Dorsey, defended Elon Musk's approach to Twitter, stating that his job cuts and reduction of advertisers were necessary for a shift towards free speech. Dorsey said Twitter's dependence on advertising as its main source of income hindered the platform's ability to maintain its moderation standards. Musk's rebranding of Twitter to X and his endorsement of an antisemitic post caused a significant exodus of advertisers, but Dorsey believes that Musk made the right choice by prioritizing a censorship-free platform and exploring new revenue streams such as subscriptions and commerce. Dorsey also supported Musk's decision to implement mass layoffs, stating that the majority of those affected were in sales.

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| 10d

Baidu's PR boss, who threatened to destroy workers' careers, has reportedly left the company

The public relations lead at Baidu has reportedly left the Chinese internet giant, according to state media, just days after posting videos online ripping into staff who disagreed with her extreme work expectations.Qu Jing, a senior executive at the Beijing-based firm, recently posted a number of videos to Douyin, China's version of TikTok, in which she set out the brutally tough working conditions that she expected of her staff.In one video, reported by the FT, the Baidu PR executive said she expected employees to be prepared to travel for 50 consecutive days of business with her. She also suggested she had no regard for their wellbeing, claiming that she was not their mother. "I only care about results," she said.Qu's message to those who disagreed with her position was more threatening: "I can make you jobless in this industry," the FT reported. The posts triggered a flurry of criticism on Chinese social media, and brought fresh scrutiny to the country's work culture having gained notoriety in recent years for allowing difficult — and often illegal practices — to take hold.One user on Weibo, China's version of Twitter, wrote that "employees will never feel at home at a company that doesn't have even a little bit of warmth," according to the FT.In a post on WeChat, Baidu PR lead Qu acknowledged the criticism leveled at her, writing: "I deeply reflect on and humbly accept them."The saga has proven to be detrimental for Qu, after it emerged on Thursday that she had left the company, according to a report by Chinese publication the Economic Review, first cited by CNN.Baidu did not immediately respond to Business Insider's request for comment.Work-life balance has been a contentious issue in China in recent years, with the "996" system — once endorsed by Alibaba founder Jack Ma — facing a regulatory clampdown in 2021. The system expected workers to put in toil from 9 a.m. to 9 p.m., six days a week.Elon Musk, who advocated for "hardcore" work following his takeover of Twitter, has recently been reported to have built close ties with Baidu through his electric vehicle company, Tesla.

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| 15d

Sam Altman wants to make AI like a 'super-competent colleague that knows absolutely everything' about your life

In Sam Altman's vision of the future, AI is a little intimidating."What you really want," the OpenAI CEO told the MIT Technology Review, is a "super-competent colleague that knows absolutely everything about my whole life, every email, every conversation I've ever had, but doesn't feel like an extension."And they're self-starters that don't need constant direction. They'll tackle some tasks, presumably simpler ones, instantly, Altman said. They'll make a first pass at more complex tasks, and come back to the user if they have questions.The bottom line is that Altman wants AI to function as more than just a chatbot. It should help people accomplish things in the real world, he said.That would be a massive step up from what OpenAI offers right now. Altman reportedly referred to ChatGPT as "incredibly dumb" even though workers are already using it to accelerate their workflows, develop code, write emails, and more. So, there's no telling how much more productive we'll get once Altman's magical model colleague hits the market.Altman didn't specify when this tool will be available and how advanced AI must be to support it. The company's other offerings, like the video generator, Sora, and image generator, DALL-E, still require considerable guidance to complete tasks. They also aren't designed to perceive information from the environment and use it to achieve specific goals.But OpenAI's forthcoming language model, GPT-5, might be a step in that direction.A source who's seen it previously told BI it was "materially better" than existing models. The source also said that OpenAI is developing a service where users could call an AI agent to perform tasks autonomously.Sources have said GPT-5 might be out mid-year. Altman, however, isn't saying much."Yes," he simply told reporters this week at an event in Cambridge, Massachusetts, where he was asked when OpenAI would release GPT-5.

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Business Insider

| 17d

A food delivery driver who bit off a customer's thumb has been seen delivering food again

A Deliveroo driver who had bitten off a customer's thumb has been seen working as a delivery driver again, according to the BBC. Jennifer Rocha, who had pleaded guilty to causing grievous bodily harm without intent, was reportedly delivering food for Deliveroo when the incident occurred. Deliveroo stated that they immediately cancelled Rocha's account after the attack, but she was seen collecting food for delivery on her moped after her court appearance. The incident raises concerns about the safety and verification of substitute drivers for delivery companies. Deliveroo stated that they have implemented stronger processes and identity verification technology for substitute riders.

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| 21d

Chinese scientists want to use lasers to power ultrafast, stealthy submarines. A laser expert says there's a major flaw in their plan.

Submarines have long been known as the silent hunters of the deep, lurking undetected under the surface.But as sonar systems have improved, minimizing sound on all on board components has become crucial to avoiding detection — not least the mechanical noises of propellers, generators, and nuclear reactor coolant systems that help propel submarines forward.A team of engineers at China's Harbin University claim to have taken a step forward in developing technology that could make submarines almost silent and ultrafast, the South China Morning Post reported.Rather than relying on nuclear or battery power, the scientists say they have found a way to use lasers to propel submarines — known as underwater laser propulsion.Theoretically, submarines could be coated in a web of minuscule optical fibers that emit laser pulses, the scientists wrote in the journal Acta Optica Sinica.The small laser pulses emitted by the fibers would vaporize seawater and generate plasma, the substance created when gas is heated.In turn, the plasma would expand, creating a detonation wave that would act as an opposite force to the submarine, propelling it forward.A large number of high-powered laser beams positioned around the submarine at various angles could produce nearly 70,000 newtons of thrust and would drive it forward at speeds almost as fast as a commercial jet, according to SCMP.Ge Yang, the leading researcher on the project, said the technology could also be used on underwater missiles or torpedoes, "significantly increasing the underwater range," the outlet reported.The team of scientists say this process would deliver not just speed but enhanced stealth as well.Using lasers may also induce a process known as "supercavitation" — a coating of bubbles forms around an object in water, reducing drag resistance and making it travel faster.This technology has already been used in Russian Shkval torpedoes since the 1970s, using rocket exhaust rather than laser power.But Professor Andrew Higgins, who leads a team at McGill University developing laser propulsion technology for space travel, doesn't believe that lasers could be powerful enough to induce this "bubble" effect around torpedos, let alone submarines."Cavitation can be induced on the front of the torpedo by a spike or forward-facing rocket exhaust. I am doubtful a torpedo can carry enough of a power supply to power a laser that would continuously perform this operation," he told Business Insider.And for a laser to produce enough thrust to propel an entire submarine?"I am even more skeptical," Higgins said. "The average overall thrust is low and the jet power cannot exceed the power supply of the laser.""Even with the high efficiencies of today's lasers, this approach would never be as efficient as a propeller, so there is no net propulsive gain."As the SCMP notes, Japanese researchers first proposed this sort of laser propulsion methodology 20 years ago, but for decades the technology has only been able to produce thrust powers of one-millionth of a newton thrust.Controlling the direction of the plasma detonation wave to steer the submarine is another issue.The Chinese researchers say the unique design of the microcavities in the optical fibers has increased the efficiency of thrust and channels the direction of force, according to SCMP.However, they admit there are many challenges to overcome before the technology can be applied to submarines.Higgins says they also avoid a key issue in their claim that the technology would reduce noise — cavitation is an "acoustic dead giveaway.""It would not be feasible or desirable to propel a nuclear submarine in this way.""For nuclear submarines, acoustic stealth is the entire purpose, and great effort is expended in avoiding cavitation."While laser propulsion technologies for submarines remain in the theoretical stage for now, the US is locked in a race with China to develop advanced military capabilities.Harbin University, where the researchers are based, is a hub of Chinese military development and is listed as "very high risk/top secret" in Australia's China Defense Universities Tracker.According to the tracker, 52% of the university's total research budget was spent on defense research in 2018.China currently operates 60 submarines, compared to the 67 operated by the US. But while US numbers are stagnating, China's submarine count is expected to rise to 80 by 2035.China's navy is numerically the largest in the world, but analysts say it is not as technologically advanced and lacks experience compared to the US.

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Medial Quiz

Which company was acquired by Salesforce for $27.7 billion, making it the largest acquisition in the history of the enterprise software industry?

•   MuleSoft•   Tableau•   ExactTarget•   Slack
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Business Insider

Business Insider

| 28d

Making friends and dating as billionaire Steve Ballmer's son

This as-told-to essay is based on a transcribed conversation with 29-year-old Pete Ballmer, a standup comedian living in San Francisco and one of the sons of billionaire and former Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer. It has been edited for length and clarity.When I meet people, they usually don't know that my dad is Steve Ballmer.It's a funny thing — my dad's at a very interesting level of famous where some people immediately make the connection while most people have no idea. I have some friends for whom it took a really long time — like many months — before they realized the link.I don't think there was an exact moment when I realized just how rich we were, but at some point as a kid, I went from knowing that we were rich to realizing that it was something people brought up when they met me and knew about ahead of time.There were a couple of kids who were actively mean to me about who my dad was. I was on a field trip once, and my mom packed my lunch in a to-go bag from an Italian restaurant. And this kid was like, "You got Pallino Pastaria for lunch??" I responded, "No, it's just a sandwich. It's just in the bag." It's not even an especially fancy restaurant, but he was looking to give me grief. Some kids tried to "get" me on stuff like that, like, "Oh, you're so spoiled."When I was a kid, no one was nicer to me because of who my dad was. But in college, I noticed that some people were definitely nicer; they were more intently focused on me when I talked, and there was just a certain air of people treating me like we were better friends than we actually were.Sometimes it was explicit; I remember this guy in my dorm (whom I didn't know very well) telling me, "It's pretty cool — I tell my family back home that I get to party with Steve Ballmer's son at school." I was thinking, what's the point of telling me this? The interaction made me uncomfortable and felt weird.I didn't like that people would know about my family and how much money we had before meeting me, or how they would bring it up to me in a way that made my own identity seem secondary to what they saw me as: a kid from a wealthy family.During Family Weekend my freshman year, my three suitemates and I had our dads come in and play beer pong with us and some of our other friends. Stanford used to have an unofficial "open-door policy" allowing students to drink freely as long as we left our doors open. So we set up a beer pong table in our dorm room and had a father-son game going on.I was just having fun, but then I noticed people in the dorm coming up one at a time, just to peek in to look at my dad playing beer pong. That was kind of annoying, but I get it — it's a spectacle, whatever.I can tell when some people consider me only as an asset, someone it'd be good to stay connected with.A couple of people text me about the Clippers, which my dad owns, and those are the only text messages I receive from them. Those aren't the kinds of people I'm interested in being friends with at all.There was this guy I used to be friends with who went out of his way to talk to me. I liked him at first and held off on assuming anything too soon, but his actions over time showed that he clearly just saw me as an asset.I've made an active effort to kind of cut him out, although he still texts me sometimes. He's a venture capital douchebag — for lack of a better description — so I know he's thinking about how he can leverage his relationship with me because he wants to be close to tech money. He wants to have me be on display so that his friends can see that I'm a connection of his, and that sucks.Of course, it feels weird to assume that someone has impure motives. But I feel like there have been enough times where it's like a sixth sense by now. I don't actively avoid people, but I'm mindful to keep at arm's length those who I think may have some kind of ulterior motive for being connected to me.I think having good friendships is important, and I trust my read on the people I've gotten to know and become close with — I feel extremely lucky about my friends in general. I have a close-knit group here in San Francisco, and we have a lot of fun together. I'm also very fortunate to have a tight college friend group and close friends from high school. My comedy friends are also awesome, and my newest group of friends, my girlfriend's friends, are really cool.You see articles about how people have fewer friends than they used to and that friendships are on the decline, but that's not been my experience at all (although I'm generally pretty gregarious and easy to get along with, which helps when you're trying to make friends!).Over the course of my closest friendships, my dad's identity has faded into the background. It's not something to really talk about on a day-to-day basis, in the same way that most people don't talk a ton about their parents with their friends.Everybody thinks that my family background would have a massive impact on my dating life, but it really didn't. From an anonymity standpoint, dating apps were honestly pretty great because profiles only included a first name and sometimes a last initial.I wouldn't talk about my dad or my financial situation during my dates, but at a certain point, it felt like I was lying by omission if I didn't bring it up.I would only have the conversation once I felt like I had a sense of the person and a decent idea that I wanted to spend more time with them — usually on the second or third date. By that point, I felt like I knew they already liked me, so I wouldn't see a complete shift in how they approached me.I actually never had the experience of someone trying to date me for my money or anything. I feel like it's kind of a two-way street. If someone is looking to date someone with a lot of money, they're most likely looking for someone who spends a lot of it. Since I'm not a big spender, I don't think anybody eyed me and thought, "I can probably get a ton of money out of him."For me, I never focused on the other person's job or financial background. I had the privilege of not needing to consider someone's financial situation in either direction because I knew that I would be fine, and I don't think that a person's work defines them.I was mainly concerned with how I felt hanging out with this person — do I feel comfortable? Am I having a nice time? Do I like talking to them?I think that how someone approaches money is a byproduct of their general life philosophy. If you encounter someone who's very pragmatic, reasonable, grounded, and down-to-earth, it's unlikely that they'd randomly have a completely different approach to money than how they approach everything else.So that's what I looked for: someone with a life philosophy that jived with mine and, usually, that extended to finances. For my girlfriend, it certainly did. We've been together for almost two years, and I feel very lucky we're aligned in our approach to money.We live together in an apartment that's perfect for our purposes. It's a two bed, one bath — no bigger than it has to be. We're both pretty practical — we will occasionally do the late-night UberEats order even if we have food at home, but neither of us spends excessively.My girlfriend has worked hard in her career — she has a good job in tech — and worked hard on being responsible with money and wants to be financially independent.While we're quite confident that we'll remain together indefinitely, neither of us wants to merge financially yet. One day, though, my money will become our shared money.For now, we approach our finances pretty independently; house expenses, groceries, and everything else we share are evenly split. We never considered splitting bills and expenses proportionally. If I were dating someone who proposed proportional spending, I would feel a little miffed and feel that perhaps they saw part of the deal with dating me as a benefit to their lifestyle.As much as I've been cognizant of some people wanting something from me over the years, that has been a very small percentage of my experiences.I'm still pretty open when meeting new people. I used to be concerned that once I left school, I'd be met with less empathy or grace because of all of the (rightful) negative rhetoric around rich kids. I understand why some people are pissed that people like me exist in this economic system, and I agree that there's a tragedy to that fact.But while some people have questions, I've found the overwhelming majority of people don't seem to treat me differently than they do anyone else.When you hang out with people, your presuppositions fall into the background pretty quickly, and instead, you just experience how it feels to spend time with them.I've learned that my identity doesn't define me. I thought that I would have to work through more bias against the type of person I am or people's presuppositions about me to earn their favor, but at the end of the day, most people just want to get along with other people.

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Medial Quiz

Which company was acquired by Twitter for $1 billion, but was later shut down due to lack of growth and engagement?

•   Medium•   Tweet Deck•   Vine•   Periscope
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