An anonymous reader quotes a report from Reuters: Delta Air Lines on Friday sued cybersecurity firm CrowdStrike in a Georgia state court after a global outage in July caused mass flight cancellations, disrupted travel plans of 1.3 million customers and cost the carrier more than $500 million. Delta's lawsuit filed in Fulton County Superior Court called the faulty software update from CrowdStrike "catastrophic" and said the firm "forced untested and faulty updates to its customers, causing more than 8.5 million Microsoft Windows-based computers around the world to crash." [...]

Delta, which has purchased CrowdStrike products since 2022, said the outage forced it to cancel 7,000 flights, impacting 1.3 million passengers over five days. "If CrowdStrike had tested the faulty update on even one computer before deployment, the computer would have crashed," Delta's lawsuit says. "Because the faulty update could not be removed remotely, CrowdStrike crippled Delta's business and created immense delays for Delta customers." Delta said that as part of its IT-planning and infrastructure, it has invested billions of dollars "in licensing and building some of the best technology solutions in the airline industry."

Former Nvidia engineer Luke Durant, working with the Great Internet Mersenne Prime Search (GIMPS), recently discovered the largest known prime number: (2^136,279,841)-1 or M136279841 (where the number following the letter M represents the exponent). The achievement was detailed on Mersenne.org. Tom's Hardware reports: This is the largest prime number we've seen so far, with the last one, M82589933, being discovered six years prior. What makes this discovery particularly fascinating is that this is the first GIMPS discovery that used the power of data center GPUs. Mihai Preda was the first one to harness GPU muscle in 2017, says the GIMPS website, when he "wrote the GpuOwl program to test Mersenne numbers for primarilty, making his software available to all GIMPS users." When Luke joined GIMPS in 2023, they built the infrastructure needed to deploy Preda's software across several GPU servers available in the cloud.

While it took a year of testing, Luke's efforts finally bore fruit when an A100 GPU in Dublin, Ireland gave the M136279841 result last October 11. This was then corroborated by an Nvidia H100 located in San Antonio, Texas, which confirmed its primality with the Lucas-Lehmer test.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from InfoWorld: Select developers now are getting free access to JetBrains' WebStorm and Rider IDEs. The company on October 24 announced it has launched non-commercial licenses for its WebStorm JavaScript and TypeScript IDE and the Rider cross-platform .NET and game development IDE. As of now, developers using these IDEs for non-commercial purposes, such as open source project development or content creation, can use them for free. JetBrains views the move as expanding the availability of these IDEs to a broader swath of developer roles. More than two-thirds of developers code outside of work as a hobby and nearly 40% code for educational and learning purposes outside of work, the company said."Previously this year, JetBrains released other products under the same terms for non-commercial use, including RustRover, an IDE for Rust development, and Aqua, an IDE designed for test automation," notes InfoWorld. "JetBrains also provides community editions of IntelliJ and PyCharm, IDEs for Java and Python, respectively, which can be used to build proprietary and commercial software."

JetBrains has an FAQ section with additional details about the change.

The Librarian of Congress has granted a DMCA exemption allowing independent repair of soft-serve machines, addressing the persistent issue of restricted repairs on McDonald's frequently malfunctioning machines. ExtremeTech reports: Section 1201 of the DMCA makes it illegal to bypass a digital lock protecting copyrighted work. That can be the DRM on a video file you download from iTunes, the carrier locks that prevent you from using a phone on other networks, or even the software running a McDonald's soft serve machine that refuses to accept third-party repairs. By locking down a product with DRM, companies can dictate when and how items are repaired under threat of legal consequences. This is an ongoing issue for people who want to fix all those busted ice cream machines.

Earlier this year, iFixit and Public Knowledge submitted their request for an exemption that would have covered a wide swath of industrial equipment. The request included everything from building management software to the aforementioned ice cream machines. Unfortunately, the Copyright Office was unconvinced on some of these points. However, the Librarian of Congress must be just as sick as the rest of us to hear the ice cream machine is broken. The office granted an exception for "retail-level food preparation equipment."

That means restaurant owners and independent repair professionals will be able to bypass the software locks that keep kitchen machinery offline until the "right" repair services get involved. This should lower prices and speed up repairs in such situations. Public Knowledge and iFixit express disappointment that the wider expansion was not granted, but they're still celebrating with some delicious puns (and probably ice cream). "There's nothing vanilla about this victory; an exemption for retail-level commercial food preparation equipment will spark a flurry of third-party repair activity and enable businesses to better serve their customers," said Meredith Rose, Senior Policy Counsel at Public Knowledge.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: Earlier this year, we reported on the video game archivists asking for a legal DMCA exemption to share Internet-accessible emulated versions of their physical game collections with researchers. Today, the US Copyright Office announced once again that it was denying that request, forcing researchers to travel to far-flung collections for access to the often-rare physical copies of the games they're seeking.

In announcing its decision, the Register of Copyrights for the Library of Congress sided with the Entertainment Software Association and others who argued that the proposed remote access could serve as a legal loophole for a free-to-access "online arcade" that could harm the market for classic gaming re-releases. This argument resonated with the Copyright Office despite a VGHF study that found 87 percent of those older game titles are currently out of print. "While proponents are correct that some older games will not have a reissue market, they concede there is a 'healthy' market for other reissued games and that the industry has been making 'greater concerted efforts' to reissue games," the Register writes in her decision. "Further, while the Register appreciates that proponents have suggested broad safeguards that could deter recreational uses of video games in some cases, she believes that such requirements are not specific enough to conclude that they would prevent market harms."

A DMCA exemption for remote sharing already exists for non-video-game computer software that is merely "functional," as the Register notes. But the same fair use arguments that allow for that sharing don't apply to video games because they are "often highly expressive in nature," the Register writes. In an odd footnote, the Register also notes that emulation of classic game consoles, while not infringing in its own right, has been "historically associated with piracy," thus "rais[ing] a potential concern" for any emulated remote access to library game catalogs. That footnote paradoxically cites Video Game History Foundation (VGHF) founder and director Frank Cifaldi's 2016 Game Developers Conference talk on the demonization of emulation and its importance to video game preservation. "The moment I became the Joker is when someone in charge of copyright law watched my GDC talk about how it's wrong to associate emulation with piracy and their takeaway was 'emulation is associated with piracy,'" Cifaldi quipped in a social media post.

The top U.S. consumer finance watchdog warned businesses about potential legal problems they could face from using new technology such as artificial intelligence or algorithmic scores to snoop on and evaluate their employees. From a report: The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau on Thursday said "invasive" new tools to monitor workers are governed by a law designed to ensure fairness in credit reporting, giving employees specific rights. Employees have the right to consent to the collection of personal information, to receive detailed information and to dispute inaccurate information, the CFPB said in the newly released guidance.

"Workers shouldn't be subject to unchecked surveillance or have their careers determined by opaque third-party reports without basic protections," CFPB Director Rohit Chopra said. More companies are leaning on AI and other powerful tools throughout the employment process, using software that can, for example, interview candidates and surveillance tools that can look for unsafe behavior. Americans have expressed concerns about Big Brother-style surveillance while they are on the job.

An anonymous reader shares a report: Drivers passing through San Francisco have a new roadside distraction to consider: billboards calling out businesses that don't cough up for the open source code that they use. The signs are the work of the Open Source Pledge -- a group that launched earlier this month. It asks businesses that make use of open source code to pledge $2,000 per developer to support projects that develop the code. So far, 25 companies have signed up -- but project co-founder Chad Whitacre wants bigger firms to pay their dues, too.

Whitacre, whose day job is head of open source at app-monitoring biz Sentry, told The Register his employer has for three years operated a scheme to pay developers who maintain and upgrade open source code. "We do dollars per developer, the thinking being it's the developers and software engineers on the staff at a company who benefit the most from open source, who become more productive because of open source," he said. "I had one conversation with a representative from a larger firm and he's like: 'Chad, you're asking me to spend ten million on maintainers.'" Whitacre affirmed that request, and pointed out the firm "spends ten million on something anyway."

An anonymous reader shares a report: Members of Congress are raising the alarm about new technology at supermarkets: They say Kroger and other major grocery stores are implementing digital price tags that could allow for dynamic pricing, meaning the sticker price on items like eggs and milk could change regularly. They also claim data from facial recognition technology at Kroger could be considered in pricing decisions.

Kroger denied the claims, saying it has no plans to implement dynamic pricing or use facial recognition software. Walmart also said it had no plans for dynamic pricing, and that facial recognition was not being used to affect pricing, but the company did not specify whether the tool was being used for other purposes. Both Walmart, which has 4,606 U.S. stores, and Kroger, which has nearly 2,800 U.S. stores, also suggested that the effects of digital price tags are being exaggerated, and economic experts say that most grocery bills won't be higher as a result of the tags. Still, data privacy experts have concerns about new technology being implemented at grocery stores broadly.

schwit1 shares a report from Nature: Which scientific publishers and journals are worst affected by fraudulent or dubious research papers -- and which have done least to clean up their portfolio? A technology start-up founded to help publishers spot potentially problematic papers says that it has some answers, and has shared its early findings with Nature. The science-integrity website Argos, which was launched in September by Scitility, a technology firm headquartered in Sparks, Nevada, gives papers a risk score on the basis of their authors' publication records, and on whether the paper heavily cites already-retracted research. A paper categorized as 'high risk' might have multiple authors whose other studies have been retracted for reasons related to misconduct, for example. Having a high score doesn't prove that a paper is low quality, but suggests that it is worth investigating.

Argos is one of a growing number of research-integrity tools that look for red flags in papers. These include the Papermill Alarm, made by Clear Skies, and Signals, by Research Signals, both London-based firms. Because creators of such software sell their manuscript-screening tools to publishers, they are generally reluctant to name affected journals. But Argos, which is offering free accounts to individuals and fuller access to science-integrity sleuths and journalists, is the first to show public insights. "We wanted to build a piece of technology that was able to see hidden patterns and bring transparency to the industry," says Scitility co-founder Erik de Boer, who is based in Roosendaal, the Netherlands. By early October, Argos had flagged more than 40,000 high-risk and 180,000 medium-risk papers. It has also indexed more than 50,000 retracted papers.

Adobe's Fresco painting app is now free for everyone, in an attempt to lure illustrators to join its creative software suite. The Verge reports: Fresco is essentially Adobe's answer to apps like Procreate and Clip Studio Paint, which all provide a variety of tools for both digital art and simulating real-world materials like sketching pencils and watercolor paints. Adobe Fresco is designed for touch and stylus-supported devices, and is available on iPad, iPhone, and Windows PCs. The app already had a free-to-use tier, but premium features like access to the full Adobe Fonts library, a much wider brush selection, and the ability to import custom brushes previously required a $9.99 annual subscription. That's pretty affordable for an Adobe subscription, but still couldn't compete with Procreate's $12.99 one-time purchase model.

Starting today, all of Fresco's premium features are no longer locked behind a paywall. The app first launched in 2019 and isn't particularly well-known compared to more established Adobe apps like Photoshop and Illustrator that feature more complex, professional design tools. Fresco still has some interesting features of its own, like reflective and rotation symmetry (which mirror artwork as you draw) and the ability to quickly animate drawings with motion presets like "bounce" and "breathe."

A judge has allowed Saudi dissident Yahya Assiri to sue the kingdom for allegedly targeting his devices with Pegasus spyware and other Israeli-made surveillance tools. Reuters reports: Yahya Assiri, a founder of the opposition National Assembly Party (NAAS) who lives in exile in Britain, alleges his electronic devices were targeted with surveillance software between 2018 and 2020. He is suing Saudi Arabia at London's High Court, saying the country used Pegasus - made by Israeli company NSO Group and sold only to nation states - and other spyware made by lesser-known Israeli firm QuaDream because of his work with dissidents.

Earlier this month, Roger Eastman, a judge in the High Court, gave Assiri permission to serve his lawsuit on the Saudi government, a step that required the court to find Assiri has an arguable case. The decision announced on Monday to allow the case to be served on Saudi Arabia in Riyadh was made on Oct. 11. Assiri said in a statement: "I am fully aware that the authorities will want to target me. However, it is outrageous for them also to target individuals such as the victims of rights abuses and their families in Saudi Arabia simply because these people have been in contact with me."

San Francisco's Municipal Transportation Agency approved a $212 million contract with Hitachi Rail to modernize the Muni Metro system's outdated train control system, which currently uses floppy disks and wire loops. Government Technology reports: The software that runs the system is stored on floppy disks that are loaded each morning and an outdated type of communication using wire loops that are easily disrupted. It was expected to last for 20 to 25 years, according to Muni officials. It moves data more slowly than a wireless modem, they said. By late 2027 and into 2028, a new communications-based system, which employs Wi-Fi and cell signals to precisely track the locations of trains, will be installed by Hitachi, which will provide support services for 20 years under the agreement.

While the current train control system operates only on the Market Street subway and Central Subway, the new system will control Metro light rail trains on the system's surface lines as well. The Hitachi system is said to be five generations ahead of the current system, said Muni Director of Transit Julie Kirschbaum, who described it as the best train control system on the market.

OpenAI and Microsoft will give grants of up to $10 million to bring more AI tools into the newsroom. The grants will go to Chicago Public Media, the Minnesota Star Tribune, Newsday (in Long Island, NY), The Philadelphia Inquirer and The Seattle Times. "Each of the publications will hire a two-year AI fellow to develop projects for implementing the technology and improving business sustainability," reports Engadget. "Three more outlets are expected to receive fellowship grants in a second round." From the report: OpenAI and Microsoft are each contributing $2.5 million in direct funding as well as $2.5 million in software and enterprise credits. The Lenfest Institute of Journalism is collaborating with OpenAI and Microsoft on the project, and announced the news today.

Session, a small but increasingly popular encrypted messaging app, is moving its operations outside of Australia after the country's federal law enforcement agency visited an employee's residence and asked them questions about the app and a particular user. 404 Media reports: Now Session will be maintained by an entity in Switzerland. The move signals the increasing pressure on maintainers of encrypted messaging apps, both when it comes to governments seeking more data on app users, as well as targeting messaging app companies themselves, like the arrest of Telegram's CEO in August. "Ultimately, we were given the choice between remaining in Australia or relocating to a more privacy-friendly jurisdiction, such as Switzerland. For the project to continue, it could not be centred in Australia," Alex Linton, president of the newly formed Session Technology Foundation (STF) which will publish the Session app, told 404 Media in a statement. The app will still function in Australia, Linton added. Linton said that last year the Australian Federal Police (AFP) visited a Session employee at their home in the country. "There was no warrant used or meeting organised, they just went into their apartment complex and knocked on their front door," Linton said.

The AFP asked about the Session app and company, and the employee's history on the project, Linton added. The officers also asked about an ongoing investigation related to a specific Session user, he added. Linton showed 404 Media an email sent by Session's legal representatives to the AFP which reflected that series of events. Part of Session's frustration around the incident came from the AFP deciding to "visit an employee at home rather than arranging a meeting through our proper (publicly available) channels," Linton said.

WordPress sites are being compromised through malicious plugins that display fake software updates and error messages, leading to the installation of information-stealing malware. BleepingComputer reports: Since 2023, a malicious campaign called ClearFake has been used to display fake web browser update banners on compromised websites that distribute information-stealing malware. In 2024, a new campaign called ClickFix was introduced that shares many similarities with ClearFake but instead pretends to be software error messages with included fixes. However, these "fixes" are PowerShell scripts that, when executed, will download and install information-stealing malware.

Last week, GoDaddy reported that the ClearFake/ClickFix threat actors have breached over 6,000 WordPress sites to install malicious plugins that display the fake alerts associated with these campaigns. "The GoDaddy Security team is tracking a new variant of ClickFix (also known as ClearFake) fake browser update malware that is distributed via bogus WordPress plugins," explains GoDaddy security researcher Denis Sinegubko. "These seemingly legitimate plugins are designed to appear harmless to website administrators but contain embedded malicious scripts that deliver fake browser update prompts to end-users."

The malicious plugins utilize names similar to legitimate plugins, such as Wordfense Security and LiteSpeed Cache, while others use generic, made-up names. Website security firm Sucuri also noted that a fake plugin named "Universal Popup Plugin" is also part of this campaign. When installed, the malicious plugin will hook various WordPress actions depending on the variant to inject a malicious JavaScript script into the HTML of the site. When loaded, this script will attempt to load a further malicious JavaScript file stored in a Binance Smart Chain (BSC) smart contract, which then loads the ClearFake or ClickFix script to display the fake banners. From web server access logs analyzed by Sinegubko, the threat actors appear to be utilizing stolen admin credentials to log into the WordPress site and install the plugin in an automated manner.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: 37Signals is not a company that makes its policy or management decisions quietly. The productivity software company was an avowedly Mac-centric shop until Apple's move to kill home screen web apps (or Progressive Web Apps, or PWAs) led the firm and its very-public-facing co-founder, David Heinemeier Hansson, to declare a "Return to Windows," followed by a stew of Windows/Mac/Linux. The company waged a public battle with Apple over its App Store subscription policies, and the resulting outcry helped nudge Apple a bit. 37Signals has maintained an active blog for years, its co-founders and employees have written numerous business advice books, and its blog and social media posts regularly hit the front pages of Hacker News.

So when 37Signals decided to pull its seven cloud-based apps off Amazon Web Services in the fall of 2022, it didn't do so quietly or without details. Back then, Hansson described his firm as paying "an at times almost absurd premium" for defense against "wild swings or towering peaks in usage." In early 2023, Hansson wrote that 37Signals expected to save $7 million over five years by buying more than $600,000 worth of Dell server gear and hosting its own apps.

Late last week, Hansson had an update: it's more like $10 million (and, he told the BBC, more like $800,000 in gear). By squeezing more hardware into existing racks and power allowances, estimating seven years' life for that hardware, and eventually transferring its 10 petabytes of S3 storage into a dual-DC Pure Storage flash array, 37Signals expects to save money, run faster, and have more storage available. "The motto of the 2010s and early 2020s -- all-cloud, everything, all the time -- seems to finally have peaked," Hansson writes. "And thank heavens for that!" He adds the caveat that companies with "enormous fluctuations in load," and those in early or uncertain stages, still have a place in the cloud.

Intuit, the maker of TurboTax software, asked technology news outlet The Verge to delete part of a podcast interview with CEO Sasan Goodarzi, The Verge reported on Monday. The request came after Goodarzi was questioned about Intuit's lobbying efforts against free government tax filing options, a topic that has drawn scrutiny from regulators and lawmakers.

The Verge said it declined to remove the segment, instead choosing to highlight the exchange by playing it at the beginning of the episode. In the interview, Goodarzi disputed claims that Intuit lobbies against free tax filing, stating the company spends "a couple of million dollars fighting for simplified taxes." However, The Verge's editor Nilay Patel pressed Goodarzi on reports of Intuit's lobbying against government-provided tax returns. Patel adds: I got a note from Rick Heineman, the chief communications officer at Intuit, who called the line of questioning and my tone "inappropriate," "egregious," and "disappointing" and demanded that we delete that entire section of the recording. I mean, literally -- he wrote a long email that ended with "at the very least the end portion of your interview should be deleted."

Though Sam Altman once called OpenAI's partnership with Microsoft "the best bromance in tech," now "ties between the companies have started to fray" reports the New York Times — citing interviews with 19 people "familiar with the relationship". [Alternate URL here.]

Among other things, Satya Nadella "has said privately that Altman's firing in November shocked and concerned him, according to five people with knowledge of his comments. Since then, Microsoft has started to hedge its bet on OpenAI," and reconsidered new investments beyond its initial $13 billion — even as OpenAI expects to lose $5 billion this year That tension demonstrates a key challenge for AI startups: They are dependent on the world's tech giants for money and computing power because those big companies control the massive cloud computing systems the small outfits need to develop AI... Over the past year, OpenAI has been trying to renegotiate the deal to help it secure more computing power and reduce crushing expenses while Microsoft executives have grown concerned that their AI work is too dependent on OpenAI... [I]n March, Microsoft paid at least $650 million to hire most of the staff from Inflection, an OpenAI competitor...

In June, Microsoft agreed to an exception in [OpenAI's] contract, six people with knowledge of the change said. That allowed OpenAI to sign a roughly $10 billion computing deal with Oracle for additional computing resources, according to two people familiar with the deal. Oracle is providing computers packed with chips suited to building AI, while Microsoft provides the software that drives the hardware... While it was looking for computer power alternatives, OpenAI also raced to broaden its investors, according to two people familiar with the company's plan. Part of the plan was to secure strategic investments from organizations that could bolster OpenAI's prospects in ways beyond throwing around money. Those organizations included Apple, chipmaker Nvidia, and MGX, a tech investment firm controlled by the United Arab Emirates... Earlier this month, OpenAI closed a $6.6 billion funding round led by Thrive Capital, with additional participation from Nvidia, MGX and others. Apple did not invest, but Microsoft also participated in the funding round.

OpenAI expected to spend at least $5.4 billion in computing costs through the end of 2024, according to documents reviewed by The New York Times. That amount was expected to skyrocket over the next five years as OpenAI expanded, soaring to an estimated $37.5 billion in annual computing costs by 2029, the documents showed... Still, OpenAI employees complain that Microsoft is not providing enough computing power, according to three people familiar with the relationship. And some have complained that if another company beat it to the creation of AI that matches the human brain, Microsoft will be to blame because it hasn't given OpenAI the computing power it needs, according to two people familiar with the complaints.

Oddly, that could be the key to getting out from under its contract with Microsoft. The contract contains a clause that says that if OpenAI builds artificial general intelligence, or AGI — roughly speaking, a machine that matches the power of the human brain — Microsoft loses access to OpenAI's technologies.

A principal security software engineer at Microsoft described how they use their Azure cloud platform "to hunt phishers at scale," in a talk at the information security conference BSides Exeter.

Calling himself Microsoft's "Head of Deception." Ross Bevington described how they'd created a "hybrid high interaction honeypot" on the now retired code.microsoft.com "to collect threat intelligence on actors ranging from both less skilled cybercriminals to nation state groups targeting Microsoft infrastructure," according to a report by BleepingComputer: With the collected data, Microsoft can map malicious infrastructure, gain a deeper understanding of sophisticated phishing operations, disrupt campaigns at scale, identify cybercriminals, and significantly slow down their activity... Bevington and his team fight phishing by leveraging deception techniques using entire Microsoft tenant environments as honeypots with custom domain names, thousands of user accounts, and activity like internal communications and file-sharing...

In his BSides Exeter presentation, the researcher says that the active approach consists in visiting active phishing sites identified by Defender and typing in the credentials from the honeypot tenants. Since the credentials are not protected by two-factor authentication and the tenants are populated with realistic-looking information, attackers have an easy way in and start wasting time looking for signs of a trap. Microsoft says it monitors roughly 25,000 phishing sites every day, feeding about 20% of them with the honeypot credentials; the rest are blocked by CAPTCHA or other anti-bot mechanisms.

Once the attackers log into the fake tenants, which happens in 5% of the cases, it turns on detailed logging to track every action they take, thus learning the threat actors' tactics, techniques, and procedures. Intelligence collected includes IP addresses, browsers, location, behavioral patterns, whether they use VPNs or VPSs, and what phishing kits they rely on... The deception technology currently wastes an attacker 30 days before they realize they breached a fake environment. All along, Microsoft collects actionable data that can be used by other security teams to create more complex profiles and better defenses.

"Who asked for any of this in the first place?" wonders a New York Times consumer-tech writer. (Alternate URL here.) "Judging from the feedback I get from readers, lots of people outside the tech industry remain uninterested in AI — and are increasingly frustrated with how difficult it has become to ignore." The companies rely on user activity to train and improve their AI systems, so they are testing this tech inside products we use every day. Typing a question such as "Is Jay-Z left-handed?" in Google will produce an AI-generated summary of the answer on top of the search results. And whenever you use the search tool inside Instagram, you may now be interacting with Meta's chatbot, Meta AI. In addition, when Apple's suite of AI tools, Apple Intelligence, arrives on iPhones and other Apple products through software updates this month, the tech will appear inside the buttons we use to edit text and photos.

The proliferation of AI in consumer technology has significant implications for our data privacy, because companies are interested in stitching together and analyzing our digital activities, including details inside our photos, messages and web searches, to improve AI systems. For users, the tools can simply be an annoyance when they don't work well. "There's a genuine distrust in this stuff, but other than that, it's a design problem," said Thorin Klosowski, a privacy and security analyst at the Electronic Frontier Foundation, a digital rights nonprofit, and a former editor at Wirecutter, the reviews site owned by The New York Times. "It's just ugly and in the way."

It helps to know how to opt out. After I contacted Microsoft, Meta, Apple and Google, they offered steps to turn off their AI tools or data collection, where possible. I'll walk you through the steps.
The article suggests logged-in Google users can toggle settings at myactivity.google.com. (Some browsers also have extensions that force Google's search results to stop inserting an AI summary at the top.) And you can also tell Edge to remove Copilot from its sidebar at edge://settings.

But "There is no way for users to turn off Meta AI, Meta said. Only in regions with stronger data protection laws, including the EU and Britain, can people deny Meta access to their personal information to build and train Meta's AI." On Instagram, for instance, people living in those places can click on "settings," then "about" and "privacy policy," which will lead to opt-out instructions. Everyone else, including users in the United States, can visit the Help Center on Facebook to ask Meta only to delete data used by third parties to develop its AI.
By comparison, when Apple releases new AI services this month, users will have to opt in, according to the article. "If you change your mind and no longer want to use Apple Intelligence, you can go back into the settings and toggle the Apple Intelligence switch off, which makes the tools go away."