Technology - Kalakshar US

Amazon’s latest round of layoffs will affect 16,000 workers

Amazon has confirmed that it’s letting go of 16,000 workers and employees across its organization. In an announcement by company SVP Beth Galetti, she explained that Amazon was going through organizational changes to reduce layers and remove bureaucracy. Affected employees in the US will be given 90 days to look for another internal role and will receive severance pay if they do not find any. Galetti also said that Amazon doesn’t have plans to announce “broad reductions every few months” but admitted that the company could “make adjustments as appropriate.”

News about the layoffs was leaked in an email mistakenly sent out early to workers, along with a calendar invitation for a meeting dubbed internally as “Project Dawn.” In the email seen by Bloomberg and the BBC, Amazon Web Services Senior Vice President Colleen Aubrey told workers that their “impacted colleagues” from the US, Canada and Costa Rica had already been notified. “Changes like this are hard on everyone. These decisions are difficult and made thoughtfully as we position our organization and AWS for future success,” Aubrey reportedly wrote in the email.

Amazon eliminated 14,000 roles back in October 2025 across its games, logistics, payment and cloud computing divisions, with the availability of AI technologies being one of the main reasons for the layoffs. “This generation of AI is the most transformative technology we’ve seen since the Internet, and it’s enabling companies to innovate much faster than ever before,” Amazon said in its announcement back then. This new round of layoffs is just a continuation of the previous one, as Amazon was reportedly looking to let 30,000 people go from the start.

The announcement comes shortly after Amazon revealed that it was shutting down its remaining Amazon Go and Amazon Fresh physical stores and will focus on grocery deliveries instead. To note, Amazon’s year-over-year net sales grew by 13 percent in the third quarter of 2025 alone. Its net income increased to $21.2 billion compared to the $15.3 billion it posted in the third quarter of 2024.

This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/big-tech/amazons-latest-round-of-layoffs-will-affect-16000-workers-120000702.html?src=rss

Mark Zuckerberg was initially opposed to parental controls for AI chatbots, according to legal filing

Meta has faced some serious questions about how it allows its underage users to interact with AI-powered chatbots. Most recently, internal communications obtained by the New Mexico Attorney General’s Office revealed that although Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg was opposed to the chatbots having “explicit” conversations with minors, he also rejected the idea of placing parental controls on the feature.

Reuters reported that in an exchange between two unnamed Meta employees, one wrote that we “pushed hard for parental controls to turn GenAI off – but GenAI leadership pushed back stating Mark decision.” New Mexico is suing Meta on charges that the company “failed to stem the tide of damaging sexual material and sexual propositions delivered to children;” the case is scheduled to go to trial in February. We’ve reached out to Meta for comment and will update with any response.

Despite only being available for a brief time, Meta’s chatbots have already accumulated quite a history of behavior that veers into offensive if not outright illegal. In April 2025, The Wall Street Journal released an investigation that found Meta’s chatbots could engage in fantasy sex conversations with minors, or could be directed to mimic a minor and engage in sexual conversation. The report claimed that Zuckerberg had wanted looser guards implemented around Meta’s chatbots, but a spokesperson denied that the company had overlooked protections for children and teens.

Internal review documents revealed in August 2025 detailed several hypothetical situations of what chatbot behaviors would be permitted, and the lines between sensual and sexual seemed pretty hazy. The document also permitted the chatbots to argue racist concepts. At the time, a representative told Engadget that the offending passages were hypotheticals rather than actual policy, which doesn’t really seem like much of an improvement, and that they were removed from the document.

Despite the multiple instances of questionable use of the chatbots, Meta only decided to suspend teen accounts’ access to them last week. The company said it is temporarily removing access while it develops the parental controls that Zuckerberg had allegedly rejected using.

New Mexico filed this lawsuit against Meta in December 2023 on claims that the company’s platforms failed to protect minors from harassment by adults. Internal documents revealed early on in that complaint revealed that 100,000 child users were harassed daily on Meta’s services.

Update, January 27, 2025, 6:15PM ET: Corrected misstated timeline of the New Mexico lawsuit, which was filed in December 2023, not December 2024.

This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/social-media/mark-zuckerberg-was-initially-opposed-to-parental-controls-for-ai-chatbots-according-to-legal-filing-230110214.html?src=rss

Meta blocks links to ICE List, a Wiki that names agents

Meta has started blocking links to ICE List, a website that compiles information about incidents involving Immigrations and Customs Enforcement (ICE) and Border Patrol agents, and lists thousands of their employees’ names. It seems that the latter detail is what caused Meta to take action in a move that was first reported by Wired.

ICE List is a crowdsourced Wiki that describes itself as “an independently maintained public documentation project focused on immigration-enforcement activity” in the US. “Its purpose is to record, organize, and preserve verifiable information about enforcement actions, agents, facilities, vehicles, and related incidents that would otherwise remain fragmented, difficult to access, or undocumented,” its website states.

Along with notable incidents, the website also lists the names of individual agents associated with ICE, CBP and other DHS agencies. According to Wired, the website’s creators said much of that information had come from a “leak,” though it appears to be based largely on public LinkedIn profiles. As Wired notes:

The site went viral earlier this month when it claimed to have uploaded a leaked list of 4,500 DHS employees to its site, but a WIRED analysis found that the list relied heavily on information the employees shared publicly about themselves on sites such as LinkedIn.

Links to ICE List have been spreading widely for several weeks, including on Meta’s platforms. There are numerous links to the website on Threads, some of which go back several weeks. Now though, clicking on previously-shared links instead results in a message that the link can’t be opened. Users who try to share new links on Threads or Facebook also see error messages. “Posts that look like spam according to our Community Guidelines are blocked on Facebook and can’t be edited,” the notice says.

When reached for comment, a Meta spokesperson pointed to the company’s privacy policy barring the disclosure of personally identifiable information (PII). The company didn’t address why it chose to start blocking the website after several weeks, or whether it considers public LinkedIn profiles to be in violation of its rules against doxxing.

It is, however, not the first time Meta has opted to remove users’ posts tracking information about ICE actions. The social network previously took down a Facebook group that tracked ICE sightings in Chicago after pressure from the Justice Department.

Have a tip for Karissa? You can reach her by email, on X, Bluesky, Threads, or send a message to @karissabe.51 to chat confidentially on Signal.

This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/social-media/meta-blocks-links-to-ice-list-a-wiki-that-names-agents-231410653.html?src=rss

Adobe Photoshop upgrades its Firefly-powered generative-AI editing tools

Adobe Photoshop introduced some new features that are rolling out for creators today. As you’d expect from any service operator in this day and age, there’s some AI involved. Adobe has improved the tools for Generative Fill, Generative Expand and Remove that are powered by its Firefly generative AI platform. Using these tools for image editing should now produce results in 2K resolution with fewer artifacts and increased detail all while delivering better matches for the provided prompts. The Reference Image option for Generative Fill has also been upgraded to deliver “geometry-aware results that better match the scene.”

One of the other new updates is a beta version of Dynamic Text, which should allow simpler transformation of a text layer into a curved shape. Photoshop has also added new adjustment layers: Clarity, Dehaze and Grain. These allow non-destructive image editing on layers.

This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/apps/adobe-photoshop-upgrades-its-firefly-powered-generative-ai-editing-tools-213737915.html?src=rss

Astronomers discover over 800 cosmic anomalies using a new AI tool

Here’s a use of AI that appears to do more good than harm. A pair of astronomers at the European Space Agency (ESA) developed a neural network that searches through space images for anomalies. The results were far beyond what human experts could have done. In two and a half days, it sifted through nearly 100 million image cutouts, discovering 1,400 anomalous objects.

The creators of the AI model, David O’Ryan and Pablo Gómez, call it AnomalyMatch. The pair trained it on (and applied it to) the Hubble Legacy Archive, which houses tens of thousands of datasets from Hubble’s 35-year history. “While trained scientists excel at spotting cosmic anomalies, there’s simply too much Hubble data for experts to sort through at the necessary level of fine detail by hand,” the ESA wrote in its press release.

After less than three days of scanning, AnomalyMatch returned a list of likely anomalies. It still requires human eyes at the end: Gómez and O’Ryan reviewed the candidates to confirm which were truly abnormal. Among the 1,400 anomalous objects the pair confirmed, more than 800 were previously undocumented.

Most of the results showed galaxies merging or interacting, which can lead to odd shapes or long tails of stars and gas. Others were gravitational lenses. (That’s where the gravity of a foreground galaxy bends spacetime so that the light from a background galaxy is warped into a circle or arc.) Other discoveries included planet-forming disks viewed edge-on, galaxies with huge clumps of stars and jellyfish galaxies. Adding a bit of mystery, there were even “several dozen objects that defied classification altogether.”

“This is a fantastic use of AI to maximize the scientific output of the Hubble archive,” Gómez is quoted as saying in the ESA’s announcement. “Finding so many anomalous objects in Hubble data, where you might expect many to have already been found, is a great result. It also shows how useful this tool will be for other large datasets.”

This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/ai/astronomers-discover-over-800-cosmic-anomalies-using-a-new-ai-tool-205135155.html?src=rss

Pornhub will become unavailable for many UK users as of February 2

Pornhub will stop offering full access to new users in the UK on February 2, its parent company Aylo said Tuesday, citing the nation’s Online Safety Act and its age-verification requirements. The company said users who already verified their ages before the cutoff will still be able to access the adult site through existing accounts.

The move follows the Online Safety Act’s Protection of Children Codes, which took effect last summer and require adult sites to use “highly effective” methods of age verification. Aylo claims the system is backfiring and shifting both adults and minors to noncompliant porn sites that don’t verify age or moderate content according to Politico. Aylo’s lawyers argued that only device-based age verification methods sufficiently protect user data.

Alexzandra Kekesi, VP of Brand and Community at Aylo, said “anyone who has not gone through that process prior to February 2 will no longer be able to access [the sites] and they’re going to be met with a wall,” according to 404 Media. The adult site was similarly made unavailable in various US states after the passage of age-verification laws that Pornhub claimed put users’ privacy at risk. “These people did not stop looking for porn,” Aylo said at the time. “They just migrated to darker corners of the internet that don’t ask users to verify age, that don’t follow the law, that don’t take user safety seriously, and that often don’t even moderate content.”

Users who wish to get around these sorts of bans typically use VPNs to mask the origin of their internet traffic, though the UK is reportedly considering a ban on VPNs for children. The nation has also been considering a social media ban for users under 16 years of age, similar to the one enacted in Australia.

This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/entertainment/pornhub-will-become-unavailable-for-many-uk-users-as-of-february-2-194622124.html?src=rss

Sennheiser debuts new models of wired headphones and earbuds

Wireless audio has become the industry standard, but there are still options out there for people who prefer a wired connection. Two new choices joining the market come from Sennheiser, which has released the CX 80U wired earbuds and HD 400U wired over-ear headphones. These new takes on the company’s previous models for wired listening have replaced the 3.5mm audio jack connector with a USB-C cable. Both sets support 24-bit, 96 kHz digital audio playback. They’re compatible with a broad array of devices, including iOS, iPadOS, Android, ChromeOS, MacOS, Windows and SteamOS.

Both of these items are priced at an entry level for a brand that might charge up to $500 for its higher-end headphones. The CX 80U earbuds cost $40 and the HD 400U headphones retail for $100. Both products are available starting today.

This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/audio/headphones/sennheiser-debuts-new-models-of-wired-headphones-and-earbuds-201245058.html?src=rss

TikTok settles to avoid major social media addiction lawsuit

TikTok has reached a settlement in a closely-watched lawsuit over social media addiction, narrowly avoiding a trial that’s scheduled to begin jury selection Tuesday. Terms of the deal, which was reported by The New York Times, weren’t disclosed.

TikTok’s settlement comes about one week after Snap reached a settlement in the same case. The trial is expected to move forward in Los Angeles with Meta and YouTube as the only defendants. Mark Lanier, a lawyer for the plaintiff, said in a statement to NYT that they were “pleased” with the settlement and that it was “a good resolution.” TikTok didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment.

The trial stems from a 2023 lawsuit brought by a California woman known in court documents as “K.G.M.” She sued Meta, Snap, TikTok and YouTube and alleged that their platforms were addictive and had harmed her as a child. The judge in the case previously ordered the companies’ executives, including Mark Zuckerberg and Adam Mosseri, to testify. YouTube’s top exec, Neal Mohan, is also likely to testify, according to The New York Times.

The lawsuit is the first among several high-profile cases against social media companies to go to trial this year. Meta is expected to head to court in New Mexico in early February in a case brought by the state’s attorney general, who has alleged that Facebook and Instagram have facilitated harm to children. TikTok and Snap are collectively facing more than a dozen other trials in California courts this year.

This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/social-media/tiktok-settles-to-avoid-major-social-media-addiction-lawsuit-183943927.html?src=rss

Sonos introduces Amp Multi for complicated residential installs

Sonos has unveiled its first new product of 2026, the Amp Multi. This amplifier is a niche option for the owners of very large or complicated spaces, and it’s being billed as professional grade option for residential audio installations. The Amp Multi has eight 125W outputs and four configurable zones, and each channel can support up to three Sonos Architectural speakers. In other words, that’s a lot more audio than the average home needs. Even the Sonos Amp would probably be overkill for those of you living the apartment life.

The Amp Multi will be available “in the coming months,” according to the company’s press release, and there’s no pricing information yet for the product listing on its website. But given the high-end customers this is targeting, expect the Amp Multi to cost a fair bit more than the $800 Sonos Amp.

Sonos has mostly been keeping its proverbial head down on the product side as it continues to address fallout from a bungled app redesign in 2024 that soured customers and put the company in dire straits. First there were layoffs, then the CEO left. Sonos’ temporary chief exec, Tom Conrad, got the position permanently last summer. Once the business’ position does stabilize at last, we will hopefully be hearing more positive updates from Sonos in the future.

This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/audio/sonos-introduces-amp-multi-for-complicated-residential-installs-191000421.html?src=rss

The French government is ditching Zoom and Microsoft Teams for a home-grown alternative

The French government is saying au revoir to Microsoft Teams and Zoom as it embraces a home-grown alternative. By next year, civil servants across all departments will have switched to French videoconference platform Visio, as EuroNews reports.

As with Teams and Zoom, Visio has an AI-powered transcription tool. Visio runs on a French company’s cloud infrastructure as well. The platform has around 40,000 users and it’s been in testing for the last year. The government expects the switch to help reduce costs by as much as €1 million ($1.2 million) each year for every 100,000 users.

The decision to ditch Microsoft Teams and Zoom is part of a broader effort to rely less on foreign software services — particularly US ones. Under the Suite Numérique project, France also plans to jettison the likes of Gmail and Slack for government use.

“The aim is to end the use of non-European solutions and guarantee the security and confidentiality of public electronic communications by relying on a powerful and sovereign tool,” David Amiel, minister for the civil service and state reform, said. “This strategy highlights France’s commitment to digital sovereignty amid rising geopolitical tensions and fears of foreign surveillance or service disruptions.”

This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/apps/the-french-government-is-ditching-zoom-and-microsoft-teams-for-a-home-grown-alternative-184747010.html?src=rss