European Commission says Paramount Skydance’s decision to end Universal venture addresses merger concerns
Paramount Skydance’s £80bn takeover of Warner Brothers took a step closer to being realised after it won conditional approval from the European Union.
The European Commission said Paramount’s offer to end a film distribution joint venture with Universal Pictures addressed its concerns over the potential merger. As part of its commitments in the EU, Paramount has 13 months from the date of closing the deal to pull out from the venture.
Continue reading...Richard Boardman was criticised by the managing judge
Players want ‘firm with resources and specialist expertise’
Hundreds of former rugby league and rugby union players taking legal action against the game’s governing bodies are now “staring into the precipice”, according to the barrister representing the claimants, Susan Rodway KC.
Richard Boardman, the solicitor who has been the organising force behind the litigation, has requested formally to come off the record after his handling of the case was criticised by the managing judge, Senior Master Cook. The case may now be taken over by Leigh Day, who have been working on it as consultants since February.
Continue reading...Too engrossed with the World Cup drama to keep up with goings-on in the transfer market? We’ve got you covered
Announced just before England’s soul-sucking semi-final defeat against Argentina, it would have been easy to miss Trossard’s £15.3m move to Istanbul. While, after three and a half seasons and at the age of 31, it feels like his time at Arsenal has come to a natural conclusion, he will be remembered as a player who scored in clutch moments and, ultimately, played a crucial role in the club’s first league title in 22 years. Trossard departs after 174 appearances and 36 goals, a significant portion of which came from the bench in times of desperate need. He will be missed and deserves to be revered as one of the cult heroes of the Mikel Arteta era. Will Magee
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At a Galaxy Unpacked event in London today, Samsung unveiled a new foldable smartphone designed to compete with the still-unannounced iPhone Fold. Called the Galaxy Z Fold 8, it features a wider 4:3 form factor with a 7.6-inch inner AMOLED display, Snapdragon 8 Elite Gen 5 for Galaxy chip, up to 16GB of RAM and 1TB of storage. "The inner display has enough extra real estate for multi-tasking and entertainment," reports Mashable, which got a chance to try the new foldable ahead of the event. "And if you're worried about a crease in the middle of the display, don't be. We got up close with the device, and the crease fully disappears when the display is activated." From the report: As stated above, the main distinguishing factor of the new Z Fold 8 is its wider 4:3 proportions compared to the Z Fold 8 Ultra. If the latter is a book-style foldable, the former can almost be called a tablet-style foldable, instead. We think the wide screen will serve even better for reading books or multi-tasking with several apps open at once.
Also, at 201g, Samsung is really emphasizing how light the device is. The company is calling it the "world's lightest fold ever." And while the device may be light, its no lightweight. Samsung's newest foldable features Flex Titanium technology, which makes the Galaxy Z Fold 8 more durable. Speaking of durability, it also boasts Samsung's advantage hinge technology, Armor Flexhinge.
The Z Fold 8 feels like a solid middle point between the premium Z Fold 8 Ultra and the comparatively affordable Z Flip 8. All three phones use the same chip, but the Z Fold 8's 4,800mAh battery is smaller than that of the Z Fold 8 Ultra. However, the Z Fold 8 does have an option for 16GB RAM and 1TB of storage, similar to the Ultra.
Also, at 201g, Samsung is really emphasizing how light the device is. The company is calling it the "world's lightest fold ever." And while the device may be light, its no lightweight. Samsung's newest foldable features Flex Titanium technology, which makes the Galaxy Z Fold 8 more durable. Speaking of durability, it also boasts Samsung's advantage hinge technology, Armor Flexhinge.
The Z Fold 8 feels like a solid middle point between the premium Z Fold 8 Ultra and the comparatively affordable Z Flip 8. All three phones use the same chip, but the Z Fold 8's 4,800mAh battery is smaller than that of the Z Fold 8 Ultra. However, the Z Fold 8 does have an option for 16GB RAM and 1TB of storage, similar to the Ultra.
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
After cutting over 4,000 jobs due to AI, fintech biz Block is back with Buzz, a shared workspace where humans and bots can collaborate in ways that are more auditable, sovereign, and secure than what you can do in chat tools such as Slack. Block's human-bot co-op is built upon a turducken of tech jargon: The platform is free and open source. It's based on the decentralized Nostr protocol, so there's cryptographic identity. It's "sovereign," a naively optimistic term readers of Neal Stephenson's Snow Crash should recognize, which in this context means self-hostable. And it's intended as a replacement for Slack, GitHub, and various other communication and collaboration tools. If "Buzz" sounds familiar, that's because Google used that name in a social media faceplant more than 15 years ago. For those who missed the first go-around, Google Buzz, a failed social media service, gave rise to Google+, also a failed social media service. Block appears to believe that a decade and a half is sufficient for a brand cleanse. The project's GitHub repo offers a more apologetic assessment: "Yes, it's another AI-adjacent developer tool. We're sorry. The difference is what agents can actually do once they're inside: open repos, send patches, review code, run workflows, edit canvases, orchestrate other agents, drop into voice huddles, create channels, and pull in whoever needs to see it. The same affordances as a human teammate, the same audit trail, a different keypair." You can already sic software agents on collaborative workspaces. Block's main insight is that it would be useful to link AI agents with cryptographic identities. Others have already arrived at that conclusion. Hence OWASP's Agent Name Service, DNS for AI Discovery, Estonia's digital IDs for agents, and so on. But Buzz's badging of humans and bots with cryptographic key pairs is bound to tick governance boxes. "Every company is going to need a place where humans and agents work together," said Bradley Axen, head of AI capabilities at Block, in a statement. "The question is whether that place is proprietary or open. We built Buzz because we believe it should be open." Moat-seeking tech incumbents would probably disagree about the need for openness, even though they're fond of using the word without applying it. We note that OpenAI sells closed AI. And Anthropic's decision to disallow third-party tools from using Claude subscriptions highlights the seemingly inevitable path from openness to barriers when revenue is at stake. What's more, it's not obvious that every company will need people and bots in the same space. There's a strong case for keeping humans and agents apart because they work at different speeds. Git at least was built for handling many distributed code edits, pull requests, and merges. It's hard to see how people and bots can share a text-based communication space unless the bots are rate-limited or just talk among themselves. "The bet is that one community can do what teams currently fake with chat, forges, bots, CI dashboards, release tools, search indexes, and a pile of glue code," Block's Buzz developers state. "Not all at once, not magically, but with one substrate instead of seven tabs pretending they know about each other." If tools for these sorts of things didn't already exist, and no large tech companies had designs on this space, Buzz might face less daunting odds. But it's worth a shot. ®
