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Tech News
Apple has filed a lawsuit against former employee Chang Liu, accusing him of copying confidential circuit schematics and other proprietary files from his company-issued MacBook before leaving to join OpenAI. Apple claims forensic evidence shows Liu used an AI agent to run simulations on the sensitive designs and then attempted to delete traces of his activity.
Waymo has launched public robotaxi rides in Denver, San Diego and Tampa, expanding its US footprint to 14 cities. The company says tens of thousands of people in each city have already signed up and will be granted access gradually ahead of a wider rollout.
Sony has added three models to its ULT Power Sound lineup: the flagship ULT Tower Max at $1,500, plus the ULT Tower 7 and ULT Tower 5, both priced at $650. The Tower Max weighs 121 pounds and packs three woofers, four tweeters and midrange drivers, while all three units feature redesigned drivers, built-in handles, and XLR, RCA and USB-C ports for DJ or karaoke use.
GoPro has agreed to be acquired by Starman Optical for $285 million, with shareholders receiving $1.14 per share and retaining roughly 10% of the combined company. The deal, expected to close by year-end, will eliminate GoPro's $92 million in debt and keep the company publicly traded. It follows earlier signals that GoPro was exploring a shift toward defense technology, and comes just after YouTuber Markiplier disclosed an 8.5% stake in the company.
Best Buy's Labor Day sale is offering unlocked iPhone Air models at $150 off, with open-box units discounted up to $359. Meanwhile, Amazon has cut iPhone 17 Pro prices by up to $285, and Apple's refurb store is briefly offering a 16GB/1TB M5 MacBook Air configuration for $240 off before stock likely runs out.
A multi-day outage tied to Microsoft's Exchange Online authentication system continues to disrupt Outlook and other Microsoft 365 services into Tuesday, even after Monday's mitigation efforts. Microsoft says the root cause was a misconfiguration preventing authentication components from deploying properly across parts of its infrastructure, affecting SharePoint, Teams, Copilot, Defender XDR, Purview, the admin center, and Universal Print alongside Outlook.
Strategy, the company led by Michael Saylor that holds large bitcoin reserves on its balance sheet, has recovered financially after facing warnings this summer that it was heading toward a crisis. Analysts had raised concerns about a potential downward spiral tied to its bitcoin-heavy strategy, but the company has since returned to positive territory.
Ubisoft announced that For Honor will stop working on SteamOS and Linux systems, including Steam Deck, starting September 10. The publisher says it is disabling Easy Anti-Cheat support for Linux because it cannot adequately guarantee protection against cheaters on that platform, though it left open the possibility of restoring access later.
Perplexity has launched a hybrid compute feature for its Computer agentic platform that splits AI tasks between cloud-based frontier models and smaller open-weight models running locally on Apple silicon Macs. Sensitive data is automatically routed to the on-device model via a locally-run 'Privacy Gate' classifier that detects personal information before anything reaches the cloud, without interrupting the task or losing context. The feature launches today for opted-in enterprise customers plus Pro and Max subscribers on Macs running macOS 15 or later.
A new NBER working paper examines how New York City's congestion relief zone, launched January 5, 2025, affected emergency medical service response near the toll boundary at 60th Street. Using half a million EMS dispatch records and traffic camera data, researchers found hospital transport times fell by 54-59 seconds and total EMS travel time dropped by roughly 63-70 seconds within a 5-kilometer band around the zone's edge.
Waymo has opened its self-driving ride service to the public in three new cities, bringing its commercial footprint to 14 U.S. metros. The rollout, which will expand gradually, pushes Waymo's fleet of Jaguar I-Pace vehicles and its new Ojai minivan past 4,000 cars.
Apple has asked a court for expedited discovery in its lawsuit against OpenAI, claiming the company delayed handing over a former employee's MacBook and that messages show discussion of restoring devices to erase forensic traces. Apple says an inspection of the laptop, turned over in August, revealed a former Apple engineer named Chang Liu had downloaded a confidential circuit schematic and used it while working at OpenAI.