news

Tech News Today Big Tech

A handful of giant companies shape much of the technology people use every day. This section follows daily news about Big Tech, including Google, Apple, Microsoft, Amazon, Meta, and Nvidia.

Typical stories include product launches and redesigns, AI strategies, earnings, acquisitions, antitrust cases, privacy controversies, and decisions that affect developers and businesses building on their platforms.

When Big Tech changes direction, entire industries follow. Investors, developers, competitors, and everyday users follow this coverage to understand how these companies use their power.

2026-05-30

2026-05-30

354

In 2026, Microsoft will remotely degrade perpetually-licensed versions of Office 2019 and 2021 for Mac into a view-only mode. This scheduled update will strip editing capabilities from older one-time purchase versions of the software. As a result, affected macOS users will need to upgrade to newer releases or transition to a Microsoft 365 subscription to continue editing documents.

Comments
171

Jef Raskin, Apple's 31st employee and a former music professor, founded the original Macintosh project that popularized the graphical user interface. He departed the team in 1981 after Steve Jobs took over, but his foundational vision laid the essential groundwork for the Apple Mac. His pioneering contributions remain a defining milestone in the evolution of personal computing.

Comments

2026-05-29

331

Apple's MacBook Neo has disrupted the budget laptop market by delivering exceptional value at a remarkably low price point. Consequently, this highly competitive offering makes it difficult to justify purchasing the competing Framework 12 for cost-conscious consumers.

Comments
140

TV Explorer is a new browser-based platform that provides access to over 10,000 free live TV channels from around the world. The privacy-focused service features an advanced interface for filtering content by language, country, and category without requiring any sign-ups, app downloads, or user tracking.

Comments
80

Kog AI has launched a tech preview of its Kog Inference Engine, achieving real-time inference speeds of up to 3,000 output tokens per second on AMD MI300X GPU clusters and 2,100 on NVIDIA H200 systems. The current preview runs a 2B model, with support for larger third-party mixture-of-experts models planned for the near future at similar speeds.

Comments

2026-05-28

140

A Google employee has been charged with insider trading after allegedly using confidential information to place a $1 million bet on the prediction market Polymarket regarding a specific search term. The complaint from the Southern District of New York marks the second recent insider trading case involving the platform in just over a month.

Comments

2026-05-27

375

Following Google's announcement that users embrace its new AI search mode, privacy-focused rival DuckDuckGo experienced a 28% increase in website visits. This traffic surge suggests that many internet users are actively seeking alternative platforms to avoid AI-heavy search results. Ultimately, the trend highlights a strong consumer demand for choice and control over their digital experience.

Comments
321

Major tech companies are transforming email and notifications from simple delivery systems into active intermediaries. Providers like Apple and Google now parse, rank, and summarize messages, increasingly even responding on behalf of the user instead of just passing along brand communications.

Comments
91

The author shares their latest obsession with a quirky horse-racing board game that accommodates two to twelve players. This unique game stands out by relying on pure luck rather than strategy to determine the outcome.

Comments

2026-05-26

301

A software developer bypassed proprietary publishing silos by building a sustainable, Git-tracked book production pipeline. The workflow leverages LibreOffice, Standard Ebooks, and LaTeX to streamline the creation, formatting, and version control of digital books.

Comments
224

The Wikimedia Foundation is facing severe backlash after laying off the popular Community Tech team and firing a prominent original developer, both of whom were involved in unionization activities. The sudden loss of the team's essential custom tooling prompted English Wikipedia editors to launch a strike, highlighting a deepening rift between the community and the organization's leadership. Despite the community's frustration, the foundation maintains that it must shift its resources away from the declining English site to prioritize growth and infrastructure in emerging global markets.

Comments
145

Motorola smartphones have started hijacking the Amazon app to secretly inject affiliate tracking codes into user shopping links. This bizarre software behavior intercepts normal app usage, raising concerns about unauthorized manipulation and undisclosed revenue generation.

Comments

2026-05-25

114

Google is implementing a major redesign that heavily integrates the AI overview feature into its search interface. Users dissatisfied with this new AI-first direction are increasingly exploring alternative search engines.

Comments
23

Microsoft Copilot Cowork is vulnerable to file exfiltration attacks via indirect prompt injection. The security flaw stems from the system's insecure automatic approvals for sending emails and Teams messages, which attackers can exploit to steal data.

Comments

2026-05-24

382

Microsoft has open-sourced the earliest discovered DOS source code, which dates back to the original 86-DOS system. This historic release provides a rare look at the foundational operating system code from the era before Microsoft acquired it.

Comments
351

Scammers are exploiting a loophole to send spam links from a trusted internal Microsoft email address normally used for official account alerts. This vulnerability makes the phishing emails appear highly legitimate, significantly increasing the risk of users falling for the deceptive campaigns.

Comments
217

A new study explores the practical implementation of the Perceptual Image Codec, an AI-driven image compression method that prioritizes human visual perception over traditional pixel-level metrics. Researchers analyze the critical factors and computational trade-offs necessary to deploy these learned compression models efficiently in real-world applications. This work highlights the key requirements for bridging the gap between theoretical machine learning advancements and practical image compression standards.

Comments
95

An Amazon Web Services employee is expressing relief after being let go from the company, concluding a four-year tenure marked by frustration over recent organizational shifts. The departure follows the staffer's growing dissatisfaction with the company's accelerated pivot to generative AI, which they felt negatively impacted their work with open source communities.

Comments

2026-05-23

341

Amazon's decision to completely cut off support for older Kindle e-readers has frustrated loyal customers who view the devices as long-lasting appliances rather than disposable technology. While software maintainers see dropping legacy systems as a necessary relief, users argue that Amazon is disregarding their needs by failing to offer a suitable replacement device with physical buttons. This backlash highlights the ongoing tension in the tech industry between corporate desires to streamline software lifecycles and consumer expectations for durable, accessible hardware.

Comments
234

A revived 2022 article on deep learning performance highlights NVIDIA's sustained exponential hardware growth and the massive computational gap between modern GPUs and interpreted software. Readers heavily debated the author's comparison of raw GPU processing power to Python's execution speed, arguing over whether this accurately illustrates framework overhead or constitutes a flawed category error.

Comments
19

.NET 11 will introduce a preview of redesigned memory safety features for C# where the unsafe keyword marks caller-facing contracts instead of just syntax. This change ensures that safety obligations between callers and callees are fully visible and reviewable. The new model is primarily motivated by the rapid rise of AI-assisted code generation.

Comments

2026-05-22

345

Google Antigravity 2.0 has claimed the top position in the practical OpenSCAD Architectural 3D LLM benchmark. The evaluation tested the 3D coding capabilities of major AI models, including Codex 5.5 High, Cursor Composer, and multiple Claude versions, by challenging them to generate a detailed 3D model of the Pantheon.

Comments
249

Microsoft is canceling Claude Code licenses for thousands of its internal developers in a shift toward in-house AI tools. The affected employees will be transitioned to use GitHub Copilot CLI as their primary coding assistant.

Comments
177

During a recent commencement speech at Grand Valley State University, Apple cofounder Steve Wozniak playfully redefined artificial intelligence as actual intelligence. He told the graduating students that they themselves possess true intelligence, a witty remark that earned him cheers and applause from the audience.

Comments
54

Apple's latest corecrypto release includes quantum-secure ML-KEM and ML-DSA algorithm implementations along with mathematical proofs verifying their compliance with FIPS 203 and FIPS 204 standards. Additionally, the company has published the formal verification libraries and tools utilized to achieve these unprecedented correctness guarantees for production-grade cryptographic software.

Comments

2026-05-21

358

Google is testing new advertising formats in Search powered by its Gemini AI model. The company is also expanding its Direct Offers pilot program to enhance the online shopping experience for users.

Comments
315

Google is facing user backlash after abruptly pivoting its specialized Antigravity IDE into a general agentic tool, effectively resetting the product and breaking established workflows. The controversial update, which also sunsets the Gemini CLI, has been criticized for missing key features like Windows WSL support and causing significant local storage bloat. Although some users found the new standalone command-line interface works as a basic drop-in replacement, the transition highlights a frustrating pattern of abrupt product changes and rapid AI tool churn.

Comments
177

A developer reverse-engineered Apple's dynamic video wallpaper feature to create Phosphene, an open-source tool for macOS. The project enables users to apply any custom video as a desktop or lock screen background directly through the native System Settings menu.

Comments

2026-05-20

357

Meta has blocked human rights organizations, including the Saudi-focused ALQST, from reaching audiences in Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates. The social media company's restrictions prevent these independent grassroots groups from promoting and protecting human rights in the region. This action has raised significant concerns about digital censorship and the suppression of independent advocacy on major tech platforms.

Comments
307

A BBC investigation recently revealed that AI chatbots can be easily manipulated to generate misinformation through simple prompts. Google and other major AI companies are now actively working to patch these vulnerabilities and secure their models.

Comments
2026-05-30