Good morning. It’s Apple Event Eve, which means things are a bit slower in the tech world today, but let’s get you caught up.
1. Evie extends partnership with Dan Murphy’s
Evie Networks, a company that installs public EV chargers around the country, has announced an expansion of its partnership with Dan Murphy’s. The new arrangement will install more charging stations at Dan Murphy’s store locations. Five charging stations have already been installed at Dan Murphy’s stores across Australia, with a sixth now set for Broadmeadows, Victoria.
2. Twitter reportedly shadowbans the New York Times (which advertises on the platform)
X, the platform formerly known as Twitter, has apparently shadowbanned The New York Times, preventing users from seeing tweets that link to the newspaper’s coverage. The move smacks of a particular irony, given that the Times is one of X’s major advertisers and is currently running campaigns to promote its new sports site, The Athletic. That’s according to a new report in Semafor, which compared engagement on tweets with links to the New York Times’ website to tweets that link to competing news services, including the BBC, CNN, Politico, the Wall Street Journal, and the Washington Post. Engagement on tweets about the Times dropped dramatically in late July, and continued to fall throughout August. During the same period, engagement on posts about other news sites rose or stayed about the same.
3. Meta has ChatGPT in its sights
Meta is reportedly building an advanced AI model equating to the efficiency of OpenAI’s language model, GPT-4. The AI tool will reportedly produce text and analysis that will target businesses, in the the company’s latest bid to compete with the flood of new AI models, according to The Wall Street Journal, citing unnamed sources. The AI model is aimed to assist businesses with services including building sophisticated text, and analyses, as well as assisting with additional output, sources told The Journal, with the company working to acquire advanced Nvidia chips.
4. The Internet Archive appeals its ebook library lawsuit loss
As reported by The Verge, the Internet Archive has announced that it will be appealing its loss in an ebook copyright case. The appeal follows a settlement that resulted in the Archive limiting access to some of its books. The original ruling found that the Internet Archive’s scanning of books wasn’t covered by U.S. fair use law. In August, the website was required to remove public access to commercially available books that were protected under copyright.
5. James Webb Space Telescope identifies a potentially habitable exoplanet
As reported by CNET, the exoplanet K2-18b, which was first discovered in 2015, has been identified as potentially habitable, and could be perfect for trying to find life elsewhere in the universe. The planet is supposedly covered in a liquid water ocean, with it expected that it’s also home to methane, carbon dioxide, and dimethyl sulphide. The planet is a whopping 8.6 times larger than Earth, and there’s nothing quite like it within our own solar system.
BONUS ITEM: I feel confident in confirming that the iPhone 15 will be able to do this.
iPhone 15 will be able to make phone calls pic.twitter.com/8IOTtrOctA
— legit apple leaks (@leaks_legit) September 10, 2023
Have a lovely day, and remember to leave fresh iPod Shuffles out for Tim Cook before you go to bed – he might just drop another U2 album onto your phone.
Image credit: NASA