An anonymous reader quotes Reuters:
Google appears to have misused its dominant position in India and reduced the ability of device manufacturers to opt for alternate versions of its Android mobile operating system, Indian officials found before ordering a wider probe in an antitrust case. A 14-page order from the Competition Commission of India (CCI), reviewed by Reuters this week, found Google’s restrictions on manufacturers seemed to amount to imposition of “unfair conditions” under India’s competition law….

The Indian case is similar to one Google faced in Europe, where regulators imposed a $5 billion fine on the company for forcing manufacturers to pre-install its apps on Android devices. Google has appealed against the verdict.

By making pre-installation of Google’s proprietary apps conditional, Google “reduced the ability and incentive of device manufacturers to develop and sell devices operated on alternate versions of Android”, the CCI said in the order. “It amounts to prima facie leveraging of Google’s dominance”.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Source: Slashdot – India Widens Antitrust Probe Into Google’s Android Dominance

The Brave web browser “claims to have delivered a ’69x average improvement’ in its ad-blocking technology using Rust in place of C++” reports ZDNet.
They cite a blog post by Brave performance researcher Dr. Andrius Aucinas and Brave’s chief scientist Dr. Ben Livshits:
The improvements can be experienced in its experimental developer and nightly channel releases… “We implemented the new engine in Rust as a memory-safe, performant language compilable down to native code and suitable to run within the native browser core as well as being packaged in a standalone Node.js module,” the two Brave scientists said. The new engine means the Chromium-based browser can cut the average request classification time down to 5.6 microseconds, a unit of time that’s equal to a millionth of one second.

Aucinas and Livshits argue that the micro-improvements in browser performance might not seem significant to end users but do translate to good things for a computer’s main processor. “Although most users are unlikely to notice much of a difference in cutting the ad-blocker overheads, the 69x reduction in overheads means the device CPU has so much more time to perform other functions,” the pair explain.

Their blog post notes that loading a web page today can be incredibly complex. “Since loading an average website involves 75 requests that need to be checked against tens of thousands of rules, it must also be efficient.”

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Source: Slashdot – Brave Browser Claims 69x Better Performance For Its Ad-Blocker After Switching From C++ To Rust

“Robotics-as-a-service (RaaS) is about to eat the world of work” argues Hooman Radfar, a partner at the startup studio Expa who’s been “actively investing in and looking for new companies” catalyzing the change.”
Companies buy massive robots and software solutions that are customized — at great cost — to their specific needs. The massive conglomerates that sell these robots have dominated the field for decades, but that is about to change. One major factor driving this change is how dramatically globalization has reduced hardware production costs and capabilities. At the same time, cheap and powerful computing and cloud infrastructure are now also readily available and easy to spin up. As a result, vertical-specific, robotic-powered, solutions can today be offered as variable cost services versus being sold at a fixed cost. Just as cable companies include the costs of set-top boxes in their monthly bill, robots and their associated software will be bundled together and sold in a subscription package. This change to the robotics business model will have profound implications, radically transforming markets and at the same time changing the future of work.

With a new variable cost model in place as a result of subscription packages, it’s simple to calculate when a market is about to tip to favor RaaS. A market has hit its automation tipping point when an RaaS solution is introduced with a unit cost that is less than or equal to the unit cost for humans-in-the-loop to conduct the same task… One market that has already reached its automation tipping point is the enterprise building security market… Crop dusting ($70 billion), industrial cleaning ($78 billion), warehouse management ($21 billion), and many more service markets are tipping. When these sectors hit their automation tipping point, we will see the same level of industry disruption currently taking place in the building security market.

The changes taking place in the enterprise will also deeply impact consumer markets, and ultimately society, in profound and potentially challenging ways. We are at the start of a massive shift in how work gets done.
One study predicted the worldwide RaaSS market would be $34.7 within three years, according to the article, which also explores how the building security market is already being disrupted. “Instead of manning a building with three to four people, you can have one human managing a few remote robots” — at a cost that’s 30% cheaper.

“Moreover, all the data and insights collected via these robots is organized and made available for building and security optimization. It isn’t just cheaper, it’s better. There’s no turning back — this market has hit its automation tipping point.”

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Source: Slashdot – An Automation Tipping Point? The Rise of ‘Robotics as a Service’