IT News

Meta is reshuffling how it builds artificial intelligence once more, and this round the pitch is openness. The company says its large language models will now center on open weights, and it paired that message with something concrete: a freely available model named Muse Glimmer, plus a promise to publish the weights for its stronger system, Muse Spark 1.2, over the coming weeks. Chief executive Mark Zuckerberg wrapped the shift in an essay that runs past 6,000 words, setting out how he believes AI systems should be built and governed from here. Part of the piece reads as a jab at rivals. OpenAI and Anthropic keep their models proprietary, and both have lobbied Washington for cover against two things they treat as threats: large-scale distillation, in which one model trains another, and the open-weight systems pouring out of Chinese labs. Meta is choosing the other side of that line. ...

For the first time, more than 55 million people open KakaoTalk in a given month. Figures Kakao released on the 10th put the app's monthly active users at 55.346 million in the second quarter. It first crossed the 50-million line back in the first quarter of 2018, which means stacking the next five million on top took nearly eight years. What draws the eye isn't the milestone itself but where the extra users came from. Domestic numbers kept climbing, yet this quarter carried a new factor from beyond the border: overseas, in Russia especially, KakaoTalk got tapped as a stand-in for Telegram. ...

Pull an old Game Boy off the shelf and the first thing it demands is batteries — a lot of them. The handhelds that ruled portable play in the late '80s and '90s were designed around disposable cells, and they empty them fast. The good news is that the fix isn't exotic. Modern rechargeables have quietly taken most of the pain out of it. The advice here centers on the era's best-known battery-powered handhelds, the ones sold from the late 1980s into the first years of the 2000s. That covers Nintendo's Game Boy in its original, Color, Pocket and Advance versions, along with the Game Gear from Sega and the Lynx from Atari. Every one of them shipped before rechargeable cells became the habit most people keep now, which is exactly why they feel so thirsty today. ...

A trader who piled 2.2 billion won into semiconductor stocks, much of it on borrowed money, says a sharp drop wiped the whole account out. What was left afterward wasn't the shares, which got sold off against their will, but the loan they still had to repay. It started with a post that went up on the 7th on Blind, the anonymous app for verified employees. ETNews IT carried the story. The writer's profile there tagged them as a worker at NH Nonghyup, in their 30s. Using margin loans and a stock-backed loan, they wrote, they had loaded roughly 2.2 billion won into chip names before the holdings were liquidated by force. ...

An appeals court has cleared away the order keeping Perplexity's shopping assistant off Amazon. The tool sits inside Comet, the company's AI browser, and a lower court had walled it off from the retailer's site. That wall is now down, according to Bloomberg. The reasoning is where it gets interesting. Amazon had argued the browser broke the CFAA, the federal statute aimed at unauthorized computer access. The Ninth Circuit wasn't persuaded. As it saw things, that argument would crumble under real scrutiny and never should have earned a court order at all. ...

Domino's Pizza is thinning out its store count in the United States, yet it keeps spending on the one place where orders actually land: the screen. To get a freshly redesigned website and app into customers' hands, the chain is handing out a $5 discount coupon (about 7,159 won) on qualifying orders. The promotion, reported by The Sun and relayed by ZDNet Korea, runs from the 3rd, local time, through August 30. Order under the right conditions and $5 comes back to you — not as cash, but as a coupon good on an online order the following week. Members of the rewards program find it credited to their account; everyone else receives it at the email address entered while ordering. ...

Somewhere in most homes sits a drawer, or a shoebox, packed with cables and little plastic adapters held onto "just in case." The honest question is which of them still earn that space. Fewer than you'd think — and the survivors all obey one rule: an adapter is worth keeping only when it bridges to hardware you genuinely still use. USB never made good on the "universal" in its name. That gap is why the box of adapters exists at all; getting one device to speak to another has always needed some kind of translator. But the useful set has shrunk, and sorting the keepers from the junk comes down to reading where the gear around you has settled. ...

What lifted Korea's travel market through the first half of the year was K-pop, up on stage. The trouble is the second half, when that stage sits empty. How travel platforms and hotels hold up through the months with no big concert like BTS on the books has become the industry's next test. Through the first half, the numbers were plainly good. By the culture ministry's count, 10.71 million foreigners visited Korea in the first six months, 21.3 percent more than a year earlier. What they charged to their cards came to 10.04 trillion won, up 50.8 percent from the same stretch last year. As arrivals rose, so did the revenue of the platforms and lodgings that serve them. ...

A company that scrapes the web tried to get a Reddit lawsuit killed early, and mostly struck out. On Friday, a federal judge, Paul Engelmayer, largely rejected SerpApi's bid to have the case dismissed. Reddit accuses that firm of joining Perplexity AI in a scheme to lift copyrighted Reddit posts straight out of Google's search results, without anyone's permission. At this point in a lawsuit, a plaintiff doesn't have to prove its story — only make it believable. Engelmayer decided Reddit had done that much. As he laid things out, Reddit's conspiracy claim hangs together: SerpApi built a tool that slips past Google's access controls, and Perplexity AI paid to run it. ...

American forces in the Middle East are weighing whether to collect their own soldiers' smartphones. The reason is oddly simple. A single short clip that a service member films and posts can hand Iran a clue about where its last missile actually came down. The picture emerged from an internal letter that Reuters obtained on July 29. Its author is Gen. Brad Cooper, who leads U.S. Central Command (CENTCOM) and runs operations across the region. A day earlier, on the 28th, he sent a message to the troops under him and put his finger on the problem. ...