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“The tech industry is a global industry, and as we saw during Trump’s first term, if you place restrictions on any part of the value chain, you impact the entire value chain in one way or another. Between Trump’s threats and [Xi Jinping,  China’s president] threats [referring to the restriction of rare earth materials], the tech industry could be in for a very rough ride, not to mention the US and global economies,” said Jim…

ZDNET It happens like clockwork, around the first of each month. Sites that focus on technology churn out nearly identical articles, all based on a chart like this one, prepared by the good folks at Statcounter Global Stats.   You’re going to see that chart a lot this week, embedded in posts that include detailed explanations of what the author thinks the underlying data points mean. Sometimes they even convince an industry analyst to share their…

MR.Cole_Photographer/Getty Images Open-source AI is changing everything people thought they knew about artificial intelligence. Just look at DeepSeek, the Chinese open-source program that blew the financial doors off the AI industry. Red Hat, the world’s leading Linux company, understands the power of open source and AI better than most. Red Hat’s pragmatic approach to open-source AI reflects its decades-long commitment to open-source principles while grappling with the unique complexities of modern AI systems. Instead of chasing artificial general…

Jada Jones/ZDNET EssilorLuxottica, the holding company behind eyewear brands like Ray-Ban, Oakley, and Foster Grant, showcased its latest innovation at CES 2025–the Nuance Audio hearing glasses. These glasses sport six built-in microphones and are officially cleared by the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) to be classified as over-the-counter (OTC) hearing aids. The hearing glasses, which also support prescription eye lenses, will be available to purchase in the US beginning in Q1 of 2025, according…

OpenAI What’s better than an AI chatbot that can assist you with tasks? One that can do them for you. OpenAI continues to build out its AI agents in ChatGPT with the launch of Deep Research.  Deep Research On Sunday, OpenAI unveiled Deep Research, an AI agent that can conduct multi-step research for you by pulling a robust amount of information from the web and synthesizing those sources for you in a comprehensive report. Once…

ZDNET’s key takeaways Samsung’s 2023 Galaxy tablets come in two sizes: the 10.9-inch Tab S9 FE on sale for $449 and the 12.4-inch Tab S9 FE+ for $579. If you want a big tablet for entertainment and multitasking on the go but don’t want to break the bank, the Tab S9 FE+ is a solid choice. You may experience the usual Android tablet quirks, such as outstretched apps and the occasional slowdown. What’s the deal?…

L3AF helps to solve traffic management and security concerns Walmart has been using L3AF for holiday sales traffic management, which is a mission-critical task for the company. A key part of traffic management in the modern era is also helping to protect against malicious traffic floods, including distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks. Haiby noted that the L3AF platform provides full lifecycle management to defend against DDoS attacks. He explained that L3AF offers deep visibility into network…

ZDNET’s key takeaways At $12, this is the cheapest quality USB meter I’ve tested. It’s as accurate as meters that cost ten times as much. The display is on the small side, but it’s still completely readable. This $12 USB-C Power Meter has quickly become one of my absolute must-have tools. These little dongles are used to measure voltage, current, power capacity, and other metrics. I use them for all kinds of tasks; everything from…

ZDNET I’ve been around Linux long enough to have experienced nearly every package manager (GUI or not) ever created. I remember, in 2001, when a particular GUI frontend for the apt package manager was first released. I had become so accustomed to installing software from the command line that a GUI tool seemed like crazy talk. But I decided to give this new kid on the block a try and see how it fared. I…