February 2022 - Page 9 of 9

YouTube Ad Revenue Tops $8.6 Billion, Beating Netflix In the Quarter

YouTube topped Netflix in terms of quarterly revenue, with the Google-owned video platform delivering $8.6 billion in advertising revenue in Q4, the company said Tuesday. The Hollywood Reporter reports: For fiscal 2021, YouTube delivered $28.8 billion in advertising revenue. In the same quarter a year earlier, YouTube delivered $6.9 billion in advertising revenue, underscoring the continued explosive growth of the platform. For comparison, Netflix delivered $7.7 billion in revenue in Q4 in 2021, compared to $6.6 billion a year earlier. Overall, Alphabet, Google’s parent company, reported $75.3 billion in revenue for the quarter, and $257.6 billion for the year, with Google search advertising still making up the lions share of revenue.

With regard to YouTube, the executives cited commerce as a potential growth area for YouTube, with CEO Sundar Pichai calling it “a whole other layer of opportunity.” “Podcasts, gaming, learning, sports, across all of these areas we will take a vertical specific look and find out how we can support creators better,” he said. “While pretty early, there is a lot of pilots under way,” he added, noting that they were “super early” into testing how shopping could be baked into YouTube Shorts, its TikTok-esque shorts platform, which Pichai said now has more than 5 trillion views. The executives also called out YouTube’s connected TV opportunity.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

02 Feb

Cruise To Offer Free Robo-Taxi Rides In San Francisco For the Public — Without Back-Up Drivers

Cruise, the driverless spin-off from General Motors, said on Tuesday that it’s about to offer public robot-taxi rides in its San Francisco hometown soon — “within weeks, not months.” In a first for San Francisco, Cruise’s public rides will be fully driverless, with no back-up driver behind the wheel. The San Francisco Chronicle reports: It has been giving rides to its own employees sans backup driver since November, and has been test-driving truly driverless cars here since December 2020. Waymo, the self-driving unit of Google parent Alphabet, has been providing rides to some San Franciscans since August. […] Cruise is now accepting applications from members of the public who want to hop into Poppy, Tostada or another of its self-driving Chevy Bolts. The company said it will pick names from the wait list in “weeks not months.” Meanwhile it is already giving rides to some locals who were nominated by Cruise employees.

Cruise’s rides for the public will run from 11 p.m. to 5 a.m. and will be in the city’s northwest quadrant — including Nob Hill, the Fillmore, the Panhandle, the Sunset and the Richmond. For now, the rides from both services are free. Neither Cruise nor any other robot car company has permission from the California Public Utilities Commission to charge for rides, although Cruise applied for it in November.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

01 Feb

World’s Fastest Gaming Monitor Hits 500 Hz Refresh Rate

According to Chinese news outlet Sina, BOE has made breakthroughs in monitor technology and has built the world’s first 500 Hz gaming monitor. Tom’s Hardware reports: The monitor features a 27-inch, Full HD panel equipped with a high-mobility oxide backplane which is how BOE achieved the blisteringly high refresh rate, with a response time of just 1ms. BOE has ample experience with oxide semiconductor display technology. For example, the company’s 500 Hz monitor is significantly faster than the fastest gaming monitors on the market today, from the likes of Asus, Alienware, and Acer, which “only” top out at 360 Hz. Other attributes include accurate 8-bit output and support for an 8-lane eDP signal. Remember that BOE’s monitor is a prototype designed for demonstration purposes only. BOE has not stated if it will be making a 500 Hz gaming panel for the mass market anytime soon, so we could be waiting a long until an official monitor arrives in the hands of gamers.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

01 Feb

Website Fined By German Court For Leaking Visitor’s IP Address Via Google Fonts

Earlier this month, a German court fined an unidentified website $110 for violating EU privacy law by importing a Google-hosted web font. The Register reports: The decision, by Landgericht Munchen’s third civil chamber in Munich, found that the website, by including Google-Fonts-hosted font on its pages, passed the unidentified plaintiff’s IP address to Google without authorization and without a legitimate reason for doing so. And that violates Europe’s General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR). That is to say, when the plaintiff visited the website, the page made the user’s browser fetch a font from Google Fonts to use for some text, and this disclosed the netizen’s IP address to the US internet giant. This kind of hot-linking is normal with Google Fonts; the issue here is that the visitor apparently didn’t give permission for their IP address to be shared. The website could have avoided this drama by self-hosting the font, if possible.

The decision says IP addresses represent personal data because it’s theoretically possible to identify the person associated with an IP address, and that it’s irrelevant whether the website or Google has actually done so. The ruling directs the website to stop providing IP addresses to Google and threatens the site operator with a fine of 250,000 euros for each violation, or up to six months in prison, for continued improper use of Google Fonts. Google Fonts is widely deployed — the Google Fonts API is used by about 50m websites. The API allows websites to style text with Google Fonts stored on remote servers — Google’s or a CDN’s — that get fetched as the page loads. Google Fonts can be self-hosted to avoid running afoul of EU rules and the ruling explicitly cites this possibility to assert that relying on Google-hosted Google Fonts is not defensible under the law.