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Enlarge / The Google Gemini logo. (credit: Google) One of Google's most lucrative businesses consists of packaging its free consumer apps with a few custom features and extra security and then selling them to companies. That's usually called "Google Workspace," and today it offers email, calendar, docs, storage, and video chat. Soon, it sounds like Google is gearing up to offer an AI chatbot for businesses. Google's latest chatbot is called "Gemini" (it used to be "Bard"), and the latest early patch notes spotted by Dylan Roussei of 9to5Google and TestingCatalog.eth show descriptions for new "Gemini Business" and "Gemini Enterprise" products. The patch notes say that Workspace customers will get "enterprise-grade data protections" and Gemini settings in the Google Workspace Admin console and that Workspace users can "use Gemini confidently at work" while "trusting that your conversations aren't used to train Gemini models." These "early patch notes" for Bard/Gemini have been a thing for a while now. Apparently, some people have ways of making the site spit out early patch notes, and in this case, they were independently confirmed by two different people. I'm not sure the date (scheduled for February 21) is trustworthy, though. Read 3 remaining paragraphs | Comments View the full article

In 2019, the musician tweeted wondering: "What's fortnight?" She followed up on the post today, correcting her own spelling and announcing her upcoming virtual collaboration View the full article

Last month, the North Carolina folk duo Magic Tuber Stringband announced a new album, Needlefall (their first for Thrill Jockey), and shared its lead single “Days Of Longing.” Today, they’re back with another song from the album, “Twelfth House.” “I wrote Twelfth House for fiddle,” Courtney Werner, one-half of the group, explained. “I tried to take a fingerstyle guitar composition approach for fiddle and write the primary part. For me that meant repeating phrases, rhythmic bowing across strings, double stops and chorded shapes.” Listen below. View the full article

It’s been a long while since we’ve heard from angelic milk, who we named a Band To Watch back in 2015 and whose debut full-length DIVINE BIKER LOVE was our Album Of The Week in 2019. But today angelic milk, who have since relocated from St. Petersburg to Berlin, has a new single out in the world, “Diana Ross,” a dreamy one about what it feels like to be stuck in a crush. “Every night I feel like the little mermaid singing, ‘If I don’t see the Prince I’ll die,'” Sarah Persophona sings on it. “But every morning I wake up and somehow I am still alive.” The chorus goes on to reference Ross and the Supremes’ “Someday We’ll Be Together.” Check out “Diana Ross” below. View the full article

Next month, Barely Civil are releasing their third full-length album, I’d Say I’m Not Fine. They’ve shared “Coasting, Mostly” and “Better Now” from it so far, and today they’re back with the album’s quasi-title track, “Not Fine,” a strummer that turns into a scorcher and back again. “I’m learning to speak in tongues again. I’m burning the candle at both ends,” Connor Erickson sings on it. “I swear I can hear it in the whispers in town, ‘That building was purged, now it’s coming down.'” Listen below. View the full article

Enlarge / Wyze's Cam V3 Pro indoor/outdoor smart camera. (credit: Wyze) Wyze cameras experienced a glitch on Friday that gave 13,000 customers access to images and, in some cases, video, from Wyze cameras that didn't belong to them. The company claims 99.75 percent of accounts weren't affected, but for some, that revelation doesn't eradicate feelings of "disgust" and concern. Wyze claims that an outage on Friday left customers unable to view camera footage for hours. Wyze has blamed the outage on a problem with an undisclosed Amazon Web Services (AWS) partner but hasn't provided details. Monday morning, Wyze sent emails to customers, including those Wyze says weren't affected, informing them that the outage led to 13,000 people being able to access data from strangers' cameras, as reported by The Verge. Read 11 remaining paragraphs | Comments View the full article

Enlarge / The indoor/outdoor, battery-powered (or wired) Google Nest Cam with battery. Google's "Nest Aware" camera subscription is going through another round of price increases. This time it's for international users. There's no big announcement or anything, just a smattering of email screenshots from various countries on the Nest subreddit. 9to5Google was nice enough to hunt down a pile of the announcements. Nest Aware is a monthly subscription fee for Google's Nest cameras. Nest cameras exclusively store all their video in the cloud, and without the subscription, you aren't allowed to record video 24/7. There are two sets of subscriptions to keep track of: the current generation subscription for modern cameras and the "first generation Nest Aware" subscription for older cameras. To give you an idea of what we're dealing with, in the US, the current free tier only gets you three hours of "event" video—meaning video triggered by motion detection. Even the basic $8-a-month subscription doesn't get you 24/7 recording—that's still only 30 days of event video. The "Nest Aware Plus" subscription, at $15 a month in the US, gets you 10 days of 24/7 video recording. The "first-generation" Nest Aware subscription, which is tied to earlier cameras and isn't available for new customers anymore, is doubling in price in Canada. The basic tier of five days of 24/7 video is going from a yearly fee of CA$50 to CA$110 (the first-generation sub has 24/7 video on every tier). Ten days of video is jumping from CA$80 to CA$160, and 30 days is going from CA$110 to CA$220. These are the prices for a single camera; the first-generation subscription will have additional charges for additional cameras. The current Nest Aware subscription for modern cameras is getting jumps that look similar to the US, with Nest Aware Plus, the mid-tier, going from CA$16 to CA $20 per month, and presumably similar raises across the board. Read 2 remaining paragraphs | Comments View the full article

Enlarge / A photo of Galactic Compass running on an iPhone. (credit: Matt Webb / Getty Images) On Thursday, designer Matt Webb unveiled a new iPhone app called Galactic Compass, which always points to the center of the Milky Way galaxy—no matter where Earth is positioned on our journey through the stars. The app is free and available now on the App Store. While using Galactic Compass, you set your iPhone on a level surface, and a big green arrow on the screen points the way to the Galactic Center, which is the rotational core of the spiral galaxy all of us live in. In that center is a supermassive black hole known as Sagittarius A*, a celestial body from which no matter or light can escape. (So, in a way, the app is telling us what we should avoid.) But truthfully, the location of the galactic core at any given time isn't exactly useful, practical knowledge—at least for people who aren't James Tiberius Kirk in Star Trek V. But it may inspire a sense of awe about our place in the cosmos. Read 9 remaining paragraphs | Comments View the full article

Enlarge (credit: Microsoft) Microsoft has fixed a problem that resulted in tabs from Google Chrome being imported to Microsoft Edge without user consent, as spotted by The Verge. Microsoft has kept mum on the situation, making the issued update the first time Microsoft has identified this as a problem, rather than typical behavior for the world’s third-most-popular browser. In late January, The Verge Senior Editor Tom Warren reported experiencing the puzzling Edge issue. After updating his computer, Edge launched with the tabs that Warren most recently used in Chrome. He eventually realized that Edge has a feature you can toggle, reading: “Always have access to your recent browsing data each time you browse on Microsoft Edge.” The setting is reachable in Edge by typing “edge://settings/profiles/importBrowsingData.” Interestingly, it allows Edge to import browsing data from Chrome every time you open Edge, but data from Firefox can only be imported manually. However, Edge was seizing Chrome tabs without this setting enabled. Others reported having this problem via Microsoft's support forum and social media, as well. The Edge setting as seen on a Windows 11 23H2 system running Edge 122. You can have data continuously imported from Chrome or on demand from Firefox, but other browsers don't appear. (credit: Andrew Cunningham) Microsoft didn’t respond to The Verge’s initial request for comment, but this week it released an Edge update that seems to address matters. Microsoft's release notes from February 15 say: Read 5 remaining paragraphs | Comments View the full article

Enlarge (credit: Getty Images) Wyze cameras have been unreliable for many users for more than nine hours today, with cameras disappearing from the Wyze app or simply reporting errors when owners try to view them. Users started reporting issues on Down Detector just before 4 am Eastern time, and the company issued a service advisory at 9:30 am. As of 1 pm, the company stated that its "metrics show that devices are starting to recover," and later that there was "continued improvement," but it was still investigating history viewing issues. At 1:15 pm, an Ars writer was able to view his Wyze v3 camera feed and update its firmware. A Wyze employee updated the service advisory at 2:28 p.m. Eastern to note "continued improvement for device connection recovery." They added that the Event tab in the Wyze app, where one can see prior recordings activated by motion or other detections, is disabled, "to investigate a possible security issue," and it will be back soon. Read 3 remaining paragraphs | Comments View the full article

Enlarge / The Android 15 logo. This is "Android V," if you can't tell from the logo. (credit: Google) It's that time of year again. Android is going to start its ~8-month-long beta process with the release of a new major OS version. The Android 15 Developer Preview is out today for the Pixel 6, 7, and 8, Pixel Fold, and Pixel Tablet. This release should mark the end of major OS support for the Pixel 5 and 5a series. So what's new? It's hard to know too much with only the simple text descriptions we're getting, but we have a few bullet points. "Partial screen sharing" will let users share or record individual app windows instead of the entire screen. Phones don't have much of a difference between an app window and a full screen, but it would be nice if this blocked incoming notifications from showing up on your screen share. It would also be nice for tablets. Android is surfacing an API that supports the Linux kernel's fs-verity feature. This will let you store a read-only file on a read-write file system and cryptographically sign it to ensure it hasn't been maliciously tampered with. Google apparently wants app developers to use this, saying, "This leads to enhanced security, protecting against potential malware or unauthorized file modifications that could compromise your app's functionality or data." Read 3 remaining paragraphs | Comments View the full article

Enlarge (credit: Getty Images) A core developer of Nginx, currently the world's most popular web server, has quit the project, stating that he no longer sees it as "a free and open source project… for the public good." His fork, freenginx, is "going to be run by developers, and not corporate entities," writes Maxim Dounin, and will be "free from arbitrary corporate actions." Dounin is one of the earliest and still most active coders on the open source Nginx project and one of the first employees of Nginx, Inc., a company created in 2011 to commercially support the steadily growing web server. Nginx is now used on roughly one-third of the world's web servers, ahead of Apache. A tricky history of creation and ownership Nginx Inc. was acquired by Seattle-based networking firm F5 in 2019. Later that year, two of Nginx's leaders, Maxim Konovalov and Igor Sysoev, were detained and interrogated in their homes by armed Russian state agents. Sysoev's former employer, Internet firm Rambler, claimed that it owned the rights to Nginx's source code, as it was developed during Sysoev's tenure at Rambler (where Dounin also worked). While the criminal charges and rights do not appear to have materialized, the implications of a Russian company's intrusion into a popular open source piece of the web's infrastructure caused some alarm. Read 11 remaining paragraphs | Comments View the full article

Enlarge (credit: Getty Images) Nvidia used to be a gaming GPU company, but the company's value has absolutely skyrocketed thanks to the AI craze and a GPU's value in accelerating AI workloads. A few purpose-built chips later, like the H100 Tensor Core GPU (with a price of $25,000-$40,000!) and A100, and Nvidia's stock is up 50 percent this year. At press time, Nvidia's market cap is now $1.8 trillion, beating Amazon ($1.76 trillion) and Google's parent company, Alphabet ($1.77 trillion), to become the world's fourth most valuable company. How much further can Nvidia's blazing stock rally go? Next up on the 'highest market cap' list is Saudi Aramco, the national oil company of Saudi Arabia, at $2.0 trillion; then Apple, at $2.8 trillion; and another company riding the AI wave, Microsoft, at $3 trillion. Nvidia's next earnings report is February 21. The last one was for Q3 2023, showing that the company is basically selling every AI chip it can make. Revenue was up 206 percent from the same quarter last year, and of the company's $18.12 billion in revenue, $14.51 billion was generated by its AI/data center division. Q4 will probably be another record-setting quarter for the company, and coming up in Q2 2024, Nvidia will launch its next-gen AI chip, the HGX H200 Tensor Core GPU. A TrendForce estimate puts Nvidia's AI server market share at 60–70 percent. Read 3 remaining paragraphs | Comments View the full article

Singer-songwriter worked on the record from New York City's Electric City Studops with collaborators Daniel Tashian and Ian FitchukView the full article

Kacey Musgraves teased a new album on Grammy night, and today she’s ready to announce it for real. Deeper Well, her first LP since 2021’s star-crossed, is out next month. View the full article

Don Van Vliet was born to be a cult artist. Van Vliet, better known to most of us as PJ Harvey, pioneered an unhinged, experimental form of rock ‘n’ roll. He never made much commercial impact, but he inspired generations of artists. One of those artists was young Polly Jean Harvey, who grew up listening to Beefheart because her parents were fans. Apparently, Van Vliet was also inspired by PJ Harvey — or, at least, by PJ Harvey’s cat. View the full article

Trio will play concert during solar eclipse to coincide with April record releaseView the full article

Last year, This Is The Kit released a new album, Careful Of Your Keepers, and it was produced by Super Furry Animals’ Gruff Rhys. Today, they’re sharing a cover of Rhys’ “Sensations In The Dark,” which appears on his 2011 album Hotel Shampoo. View the full article

Last month, Jlin announced a new album, Akoma, which boasts some heavy-hitting guest spots from Björk, Philip Glass, and Kronos Quartet. Its lead single was “The Precision Of Infinity” (the one that features Glass), and it landed on our best songs of the week list. Today, Jlin has shared another track from it, the dark and shapeshifting “Auset.” Check it out below. View the full article

In 2023, less than a year before his death, the outlaw legend looked back on a lifetime of starting shit and burning bridgesView the full article

Usher will headline this weekend’s Super Bowl halftime show, Post Malone will sing “America The Beautiful,” and Tiesto will be the game’s official in-show DJ. You’ll also probably see Taylor Swift cheering along for the Chiefs if she can figure out her flight. But those aren’t the only artists you’ll be seeing during Super Bowl LVIII. View the full article

Vampire Weekend have officially announced their fifth album, which is called Only God Was Above Us and will be out on April 5. The band’s follow-up to 2019’s Father Of The Bride was “inspired and haunted by 20th century New York City,” per a press release, and recording locations include Manhattan, Los Angeles, London, and Tokyo. It was produced by Ezra Koenig and Ariel Rechtshaid, mixed by Dave Fridmann, and mastered by Emily Lazar. View the full article

The singer-songwriter gave the recital a London art gallery that's showing the late art rocker's paintingsView the full article

Over the past few years, IDLES have strung together a succession of fiery, theatrical performances on American late-night shows. The band probably owes a pretty good chunk of their reputation to moments like those. IDLES might come off gimmicky on record, but they can also summon serious intensity in unforgiving TV-studio environs. Last night, they added another big performance to their resume. View the full article