SAN FRANCISCO (KGO) -- Wednesday marks exactly 22 years since Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg created Facebook. The platform has evolved from its original goal of connecting college students in 2004 when it launched, to a dominant platform for AI-driven discovery and commerce in 2026. Feeds that used to prioritize chronological updates from friends now use AI to pick up on interests and behavioral signals in deciding what to serve up its users.
In a February 2 notification sent to relevant customers, the cloud giant says it is updating its Service Terms to specify it does not have "defense or payment obligations for third-party patent claims against you related to use of these services for audio/video encoding, decoding, or transcoding." The services in question are AWS Elemental MediaLive, AWS Elemental MediaConvert, Amazon Interactive Video Service, Chime SDK, Amazon GameLift Streams, and Amazon Kinesis Video Services.
Amazon has announced that its generative AI-powered digital assistant Alexa Plus is now available to all Prime members in the US via any Alexa-enabled device, Alexa.com, and the Alexa mobile app. If you don't have Prime, you can access the assistant on a new free tier on the web and app, or pay $20 a month for unlimited access to Alexa Plus, without Prime.
It's a goal that Musk suggested in his announcement of the deal could become easier to reach with a combined company. "In the long term, space-based AI is obviously the only way to scale," Musk wrote on SpaceX's website Monday, then added in reference to solar power, "It's always sunny in space!" Musk said in his announcement he estimates "that within 2 to 3 years, the lowest cost way to generate AI compute will be in space."
PayPal Holdings (NASDAQ:PYPL) just did something nearly unheard of in Silicon Valley: it poached a sitting CEO from another public company. Enrique Lores, who led HP Inc () through six consecutive quarters of revenue growth, is now PayPal's new chief executive as of February 3, 2026. This wasn't a quiet retirement transition or a graceful succession plan. This was a raid.
The documents suggest that Google will wash its hands of ChromeOS once the current support window closes. Google promises 10 years of Chromebook support, but that's not counted from the date of purchase-Chromebooks are based on a handful of hardware platforms dictated by Google, with the most recent launching in 2023. That means Google has to support the newest devices through 2033. The "timeline to phase out ChromeOS is 2034," says the filing.
The American arm of the social media biz says it running normally following a significant outage caused by Winter Storm Fern. In an update on X, TikTok's US owners said the bad weather led to a power outage that caused network and storage issues at an Oracle datacenter site, which affected "tens of thousands of servers" that keep TikTok running in the US. While the storm was described as unusually large and severe, we note that Oracle founder and CTO Larry Ellison previously boasted to analysts in 2022 that "our cloud is very secure and extremely reliable,"
In 2024, Oracle launched its Database 23ai, dropping the "c" suffix it established for cloud in 2013. But the release never arrived as a general on-premises option beyond Oracle's own engineered systems, and the company later pushed back the Premier Support cutoff for 19c to December 31, 2029, with Extended Support running through December 31, 2032. Premier support was originally slated to end in 2024.
The Xeon 600 lineup spans the gamut between 12 and 86 performance cores (no cut-down efficiency cores here), with support for between four and eight channels of DDR5 and 80 to 128 lanes of PCIe 5.0 connectivity. Compared to its aging W-3500-series chips, Intel is claiming a 9 percent uplift in single threaded workloads and up to 61 percent higher performance in multithreaded jobs, thanks in no small part to an additional 22 processor cores this generation.
But are things getting worse? According to Register readers, and the company's own release health dashboard, the answer has to be yes. It isn't just you. The frequency of emergency out-of-band releases for the company's operating systems has been rapidly increasing to the point where, for every Patch Tuesday update, there'll likely be at least one out-of-band patch to fix whatever got broken.
NMSurf is one of the largest fixed wireless providers in New Mexico, serving the central and northern area of the state. La Bajada was previously served by a 3-Gig microwave middle-mile connection. But, Catanach said, the bandwidth was becoming insufficient. New microwave licenses are hard to come by in New Mexico, he added, because the state itself claims many licenses for radio communications.
In videos circulating on social media, IRON can be seen walking human-like to the center of the stage before turning to face the crowd. As it lifted its arm, the robot appeared to lose balance. Staff rushed forward to intervene, but the robot fell face-first onto the ground. The fall drew audible gasps from the audience. The event's host attempted to reassure the crowd, saying that robots, like humans, must "overcome setbacks on the way to a better future."
When an ETF pays weekly distributions sometimes exceeding 1% of its share price while claiming a 35% yield, you have to look closer and understand what's going on. Roundhill QDTE ETF ( NASDAQ:QDTE) launched in March 2024 with a simple promise: sell daily options on tech stocks, collect the premium, distribute it weekly. Nearly two years in, the fund has attracted $913 million in assets and a devoted following of income seekers.
For customers, this potentially represents a massive supplier shake-up, with sources claiming that hundreds of CSPs across Europe are affected. The news may not come as a shock to Reg readers because the direction of travel was indicated when Broadcom shuttered VMware's reseller/solution provider schemes in early 2024 and moved to the invite-only Broadcom Advantage Partner Program. Broadcom has also started to license new bundles, including products previously sold as standalone, and altered support for perpetual license holders.
