Robotics

ZDNETIf you’re tired of seeing misinformation online, here’s your chance to be part of the fight against it.Also: How to delete Facebook, Messenger, or InstagramLast month, Meta announced that it was ditching its third-party fact checkers in favor of X-style community notes on its social media platforms: Facebook, Instagram, and Threads. Meta will officially roll out the feature in a few months, but you can join the waitlist now to be among the first community notes editors.  How to sign up and what the role entailsIf you’re not familiar, Meta will soon add community notes to posts with misleading information or missing context. A group of community editors will decide what notes a post will get. When editors see a misleading post, Meta says, they can “write a note with background info, a tip, or an insight people might find useful.” If the note is rated helpful by enough editors, Meta will add it to the post. Meta says it will not decide which posts get community notes. All community notes must follow Meta’s Community Standards. Notes must be under 500 characters and include a link. Also: How to protect your privacy from Facebook – and what doesn’t workThe general idea is that a group of individuals with different beliefs will provide better fact-checking than individuals. “Just like they do on X,” Meta explained, “Community Notes will require agreement between people with a range of perspectives to help prevent biased ratings.” For a community note to be published on a post, users who would normally disagree (based on how they’ve rated notes in the past) will have to agree that a note is helpful. Community notes will not be available for ads. To sign up, visit Meta’s community notes page. You’ll see a brief explanation of the program along with options to sign up for each individual platform. More

ZDNETThose of you who use Google Gemini for free can now take advantage of a feature formerly limited to paid subscribers. On Thursday, the Google Gemini account on X announced that the document upload capability is now available to all Gemini users.How it worksUsing this option, free users can upload a variety of file types to Gemini for analysis. These include PDFs, text files, Word documents, PowerPoint presentations, and Google Docs files. After Gemini processes your uploaded file, you can request an AI-generated summary and ask questions about the content in the file. Also: How to use Gemini’s Deep Research to browse the web faster and betterThe new feature comes courtesy of Gemini 2.0 Flash, which aims to be faster and more robust than previous models. To use this feature, head to the Gemini website or launch the iOS or Android app. Click or tap the plus sign at the prompt. To upload a file from your PC or device, select Files. To upload a file from Google Drive, select Drive. Choose the file you want analyzed. Back at the prompt, you can start by asking Gemini to summarize the file. Beyond that, submit any question you want about the content to see how the AI responds. More

ZDNETAnother day. Another cloud service changing the rules on stuff we already bought and paid for.This time, Amazon is removing a feature that’s been part of the Kindle experience for more than a decade: downloading files to your computer. Also: The best Kindles of 2025: Expert tested and reviewedI’m not going to bury the lede: You have until Feb. 26, 2025, to download copies of your Kindle books to your computer. After that, Amazon will remove the ability to download books to files you can control yourself. I’m a little disappointed that Amazon doesn’t say anything about this in its main Digital Content management interface. More

Getty Images / Andrii Dodonov Applying for jobs is hard work, but, before you get to that stage, you must figure out what roles to apply to. For many, this is challenging due to factors such as pivoting careers, returning to the workforce after years off, or unfamiliarity with the job-search process. Google has launched […] More

“Today, I don’t know anybody who can say they know what artificial intelligence is going to bring us in five years, let alone one year or two years,” says Henry Samueli, a pioneer in digital modem technology and recipient of the IEEE’s 2025 Medal of Honor. Tiernan Ray/ZDNETIn the early days of the consumer internet, most access was via a dial-up modem, a device hooked up to a phone line that transmitted requests for web pages via squeaks and squawks like someone yelling into the line.Also: Microsoft’s quantum chip Majarona 1 is a few qubits shortThat primitive connectivity was dramatically altered by the advent of the digital broadband cable modem, a device that helped turn chip-maker Broadcom into a huge public company. Equivalent to a lifetime achievement awardOn Thursday in New York, Henry Samueli, 70, was honored with the equivalent of a lifetime achievement award in computing for having developed those innovations and founding Broadcom in 1991 with partner Henry T. Nicholas III.The $2 million prize was awarded by the IEEE, the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers, a public charity founded in 1884 that is the largest professional society for engineers globally, with half a million members.The IEEE’s CEO, Kathleen Kramer, introduced Samueli, saying his “vision and technological innovations spurred the development of communications products used by nearly every person.” (The formal award celebrates Samueli’s “advances in developing and commercializing analog and mixed-signal communications systems circuits.”) Also: OpenAI’s o3 isn’t AGI yet but it just did something no other AI has done”Fasten your seat belts because the world is changing at a pace now that we have never seen before,” said Samueli in a fireside chat with Kramer on Thursday, as well as past IEEE CEO Ray Liu and IEEE COO Sophia Muirhead. “When I finished my college career and was entering the engineering profession as a researcher in semiconductors and communications,” recalled Samueli, “we had so-called Moore’s Law … every two years, the capability of chips would double. At least it was predictable.”Today, I don’t know anybody who can say they know what artificial intelligence is going to bring us in five years, let alone one year or two years.” More

<!–> ZDNET’s key takeaways The DT Research tablet is built as rugged as it gets, with IP65, MIL-STD-810H, and MIL-STD-461G certifications. The choice of Intel Core i5 and i7 processors offers flexibility when buying the system. The tablet is big and rather chunky, far larger than a traditional iPad. –> Let’s face it: Your average […] More

<!–> ZDNET’s key takeaways I tested a 20-in-1 gadget cleaning tool, which is available from Amazon for $13. The kit is compact, the components are all quality items that can be reused many times, and the kit contains a variety of brushes and cleaners. A larger container for lens cleaning fluid would have been useful. […] More

CFOTO/Contributor/Getty Images Chinese startup DeepSeek AI and its open-source language models took over the news cycle this week. Besides being comparable to models like Anthropic’s Claude and OpenAI’s o1, the models have raised several concerns about data privacy, security, and Chinese-government-enforced censorship within their training.  AI search platform Perplexity and AI assistant You.com have found […] More