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The big technology companies that drove U.S. office demand for years as they expanded their empires are now canceling leases and flooding business districts with office space as they downsize. Facebook owner Meta Platforms Inc., Lyft Inc., Salesforce. com Inc. and other tech companies are shedding millions of square feet of office space in San Francisco, Silicon Valley, New York, Austin, Texas, and elsewhere. Amazon.com…

WASHINGTON—Forty state attorneys general on Monday announced a $391.5 million settlement with Google over its location tracking practices for mobile and other devices.The attorneys general found that Alphabet Inc.’s GOOG -0.73% Google violated state consumer protection laws by misleading consumers about its location-data practices, tracking consumers even when their location history setting was turned off. Location data has become an important part of the digital…

Amazon.com Inc. AMZN 4.31% Chief Executive Andy Jassy is leading a cost-cutting review of the tech giant and paring back on businesses at the company that haven’t been profitable, according to people familiar with the matter.As part of the monthslong cost-cutting review, Amazon’s leadership is closely evaluating its Alexa business, according to some of the people. The business has more than 10,000 employees and is a major recipient of…

Tech leaders who spent years eagerly adding to their staffs are now lining up to deliver a different message: Sorry, we grew too fast. Mark Zuckerberg on Wednesday joined the ranks of tech executives offering a mea culpa, when the chief executive of Facebook parent Meta Platforms Inc. said the company would cut 11,000 workers, or 13% of its staff. Mr. Zuckerberg told employees that he had believed the sharp shift online after the onset of Covid-19 would be…

Amazon. AMZN 12.60% com Inc. Chief Executive Andy Jassy is leading a cost-cutting review of the tech giant and paring back on businesses at the company that haven’t been profitable, according to people familiar with the matter.The Seattle-based company, whose stock is down about 45% year to date, has been experiencing a slowdown in its core retail business as it tries to manage costs from its logistics network. Other technology companies…

A recently discovered inscription on an ancient ivory comb is claimed to be the earliest example of a sentence written using an alphabet that would eventually evolve into the set of 26 letters you're translating into words right now.The fine-toothed instrument was unearthed several years ago in Tel Lachish, an old Canaanite city in the foothills of central Israel, but scientists only recently noticed the implement was engraved with 17 tiny letters.Together, the barely discernible markings form seven separate words, "ytš…

During a Zoom call, Davé pulled up a black-and-white video of the chaos that ensues at feeding time, when salmon compete to gobble up the food dropped into the pen. It’s impossible for the naked eye to draw much meaning from the scene. But the computer vision software tags each fish with tiny colored boxes as it identifies individuals swimming through the frame, or captures them opening their mouths to feed. Davé says fish farms can use that data in real time, even in an automated way. For instance, they might stop…

Canaanite lettering on an ancient ivory comb found in Israel.Photo: Dafna Gazit, Israel Antiquities AuthorityArchaeologists in Israel say they have found the first-known written sentence in Canaanite, an alphabet used by the long-ago inhabitants of the region and until now lost to time.The sentence—comprising 17 Canaanite characters, totaling seven words—was incised on an ivory comb carved from an elephant tusk. It says: “May this tusk root out the lice of the hair and the beard.”The comb was found on the site of Tel…

Photo: David Odisho (Getty Images) One of the nearly 4,000 Twitter employees laid off in the company‘s tumultuous post-Elon Musk acquisition says the company illegally targeted him for trying to help fellow employees save documents prior to their abrupt removal from the company.Former Twitter engineer Emmanuel “Manu” Cornet reportedly filed a complaint with the National Labor Relations Board on Monday accusing them of retaliatory actions days after Musk took the helm as CEO. That firing, according to the complaint, came…

Telecom operators are pushing the European Union to implement new laws that would make Big Tech pay for network costs, following Australia's example, according to four sources close to the matter.Europe's telecoms operators have lobbied for a financial contribution from US tech firms such as Alphabet's Google, Meta's Facebook and Netflix, saying that they use a huge part of the region's internet traffic.The latest proposal, which hasn't been reported, is being discussed within the telecoms lobby group GSMA, an association…