A federal judge has ruled that Google is a monopolist in online advertising. Engadget.com reports that US District Judge Leonie Brinkema from the Eastern District of Virginia found that the company broke the law to maintain its ad tech dominance. “In addition to depriving rivals of the ability to compete, this exclusionary conduct substantially harmed Google’s publisher customers, the competitive process, and, ultimately, consumers of information on the open web,” the judge said. The case flows form a lawsuit brought by the Department of Justice and eight states in January 2023. They accused Google of illegally monopolizing the ad market and using that power to charge more and take a higher portion of sales. The government says Google holds an 87% market share in ad-selling tech. It doesn’t take a judge or a rocket scientist to understand that 87% is the definition of a monopoly! A previous federal court in the District of Columbia made the same finding last year. Stay tuned to see if the courts go hard and try to make Google sell parts of its ad tech business. 

We just reported yesterday on the very high energy use at server farms which came from so many people using AI to make action figure pictures of themselves. Now, according to TechCrunch.com, there is yet another viral trend…people using ChatGPT to figure out a location shown in pictures. OpenAI just pushed out its latest AI models this week…o3 and o4-mini. Both are said to be able to ‘reason’ through uploaded images. The models can crop, rotate, and zoom on photos…even blurry and distorted ones as they analyze them. Combining this with a web crawl, it turns out the new models are quite good as a location-finding tool. This was possible with the older models, but apparently the new ones are much more quick to respond and more accurate. We are still dealing with far from perfect, though. Version o3 got stuck in a loop in tests a number of times, or gave the wrong location a fair amount of the time. It’s a cute parlor trick, but as has been common for AI, breezes past any privacy or safety concerns. I hope it doesn’t take something awful happening to one of them for the politicians to wake up and pass some guardrails on this tech. 

We’ve noted here before that Apple has been building iPhones outside of China…including in India, Vietnam, and South America. Now here is a little update. Bgr.com says Foxconn’s factor in Sao Paulo, Brazil has begun producing iPhone 16e models there. It was previously disclosed that they were making them in India. The Brazil Foxconn factory hasn’t grown in the last decade, but with the Trump tariffs, it is likely that Apple will be expanding production in Brazil as well as India. Apple is even looking at making all US iPhones outside of China due to the outrageous tariffs decreed by Donald Trump.

A California lawsuit claims that Tesla cars are falsely exaggerating odometer readings to make warranties expire prematurely. Arstechnica.com reports that the suit comes after Reuters found that Tesla EVs exaggerated their efficiency. For the odometers, the lead plaintiff bought a used Model Y with less than 37,000 miles showing. In 6 months, it had gone past the 50,000 mile mark, putting the owner out of warranty. The Model Y showed he had driven 13,228 miles. His 3 prior vehicles had only registered 6,086 miles for the exact same commute over 6 months. The suit alleges that Tesla “employs an odometer system that utilizes predictive algorithms, energy consumption metrics, and driver behavior multipliers that manipulate and misrepresent the actual mileage traveled by Tesla Vehicles” and that his car “consistently exhibited accelerated mileage accumulations of varying percentages ranging from 15 percent to 117 percent higher than plaintiff’s other vehicles and his driving history.” Other owners had shared similar experiences on Reddit. The class action suit applies to all California Tesla customers. The success of the suit is far from guaranteed as a US district court found that individual owners must take part in arbitration with Tesla and can’t form a class. **I later spoke to someone who opined that this may not just be to avoid warranty payouts. It also serves to pad the miles driven with the so-called ‘Full Self-Driving’ package…so it’s a double cheat!

I’m Clark Reid and you’re ‘Technified’ for now.