Google comes out on top as years-long Mexico antitrust case closed

MEXICO CITY, June 13 (Reuters) - Mexico's antitrust watchdog said on Friday it had closed a case against Google, clearing the tech giant from any potential fines, after a multi-year investigation determined it did not engage in monopolistic practices in the country.
The investigation by Mexico's Federal Economic Competition Commission (Cofece), which began in 2020, focused on Google's digital advertising services via its search page as well as third-party websites.

Try Our AI Features

Explore what Daily8 AI can do for you:

Learn with AIFact CheckingText to SpeechAI Summary

Related Articles

BreakingNews.ie

2 hours ago

• BreakingNews.ie

Mike Lynch's superyacht seen on the surface for the first time since it sank

Water is being pumped from Mike Lynch's superyacht as it was seen upright on the surface for the first time since it sank off the coast of Sicily. Seven people died when the Bayesian sank off the Italian island on August 19th last year, including billionaire Mr Lynch (59) and his daughter Hannah (18). Advertisement The 56-metre yacht was seen being held in an upright position by one of Europe's most powerful sea cranes near the fishing town of Porticello on Saturday morning. Hannah and Mike Lynch A project insider told the PA news agency: 'The vessel is on surface, but not clear of the sea as yet. 'Pumping out of water will continue, and it will be lunchtime – following a series of lifting and resting procedures – before she will finally be fully and finally out of the water.' Salvage workers could be seen on the vessel, which is covered in mud and algae, while the canopy and guard rails are mangled. Advertisement Investigators in the UK and Italy say raising the vessel is crucial to fully understanding what happened. Balloon-like kit will be used to lift the Bayesian's mast, the project insider said. The yacht's 72-metre mast was cut off on Tuesday using a remote-controlled tool and rested on the seabed. Tech tycoon Mike Lynch's superyacht the Bayesian is lifted to the surface. Photo: Peter Byrne/PA He told PA: 'Lifting bags will be used on the mast, but this will not start until Tuesday or Wednesday. Advertisement 'In the interim, the salvors on-site not accompanying Bayesian to port will be conducting a full sweep of the seabed site for any potential debris.' Meanwhile, Michele Maltese, of the Italian Coastguard, told reporters on Saturday that thermal cameras are being used to check for any potential fuel leaks. A local law investigator is also at the scene, he said. Over the last few days, salvage teams have worked to ease the hull into an upright position and give access to the yacht's right side, which had previously been lying flat on the seabed 50 metres below the surface. Advertisement The vessel is expected to be brought to Termini Imerese – where Italian prosecutors investigating the sinking are based, and on Monday it will be lifted on to a specially made steel cradle on the quayside. It was originally expected to be raised last month, but salvage efforts were delayed after a diver died during underwater work on May 9, prompting greater use of remote-controlled equipment. About 70 specialist personnel had been mobilised to Porticello from across Europe to work on the recovery operation, which began last month. Inquest proceedings in the UK are looking at the deaths of Mr Lynch and his daughter, as well as Morgan Stanley International bank chairman Jonathan Bloomer (70) and his wife, Judy Bloomer (71), who were all British nationals. Advertisement Marine Accident Investigation Branch investigators said in an interim report that the Bayesian was knocked over by 'extreme wind'. The yacht had a vulnerability to winds, but the owner and crew would not have known, the report said. The Bayesian is lifted to the surface. Photo: Peter Byrne/PA US lawyer Chris Morvillo and his wife Neda Morvillo, and Canadian-Antiguan national Recaldo Thomas, who was working as a chef on the vessel, also died in the sinking. Fifteen people, including Mr Lynch's wife, Angela Bacares, were rescued. World Hewlett Packard to pursue Mike Lynch's estate in £... Read More Mr Lynch and his daughter were said to have lived in the vicinity of London and the Bloomers lived in Sevenoaks in Kent. The tycoon founded software giant Autonomy in 1996 and was cleared in June last year of carrying out a massive fraud over the sale of the firm to Hewlett-Packard (HP) in 2011. The boat trip was a celebration of his acquittal in the case in the US.

The Guardian

4 hours ago

• The Guardian

Internet users advised to change passwords after 16bn logins exposed

Internet users have been told to change their passwords and upgrade their digital security after researchers claimed to have revealed the scale of sensitive information – 16bn login records – potentially available to cybercriminals. Researchers at Cybernews, an online tech publication, said they had found 30 datasets stuffed with credentials harvested from malicious software known as 'infostealers' and leaks. The researchers said the datasets were exposed 'only briefly' but amounted to 16bn login records, with an unspecified number of overlapping records – meaning it is difficult to say definitively how many accounts or people have been exposed. Cybernews said the credentials could open access to services including Facebook, Apple and Google – although there had been no 'centralised data breach' at those companies. Bob Diachenko, the Ukrainian cybersecurity specialist behind the research, said the datasets had become temporarily available after being poorly stored on remote servers – before being removed again. Diachenko said he was able to download the files and would aim to contact individuals and companies that had been exposed. 'It will take some time of course because it is an enormous amount of data,' he said. Diachenko said the information he had seen in infostealer logs included login URLs to Apple, Facebook and Google login pages. Apple and Facebook's parent, Meta, have been contacted for comment. A Google spokesperson said the data reported by Cybernews did not stem from a Google data breach – and recommended people use tools like Google's password manager to protect their accounts. Internet users are also able to check if their email has been compromised in a data breach by using the website Cybernews said the information seen in the datasets followed a 'clear structure: URL, followed by login details and a password'. Diachenko said the data appeared to be '85% infostealers' and about 15% from historical data breaches such as a leak suffered by LinkedIn. Experts said the research underlined the need to update passwords regularly and adopt tough security measures such as multifactor authentication – or combining a password with another form of verification such as a code texted from a phone. Other recommended measures include passkeys, a password-free method championed by Google and Facebook's owner, Meta. 'While you'd be right to be startled at the huge volume of data exposed in this leak it's important to note that there is no new threat here: this data will have already likely have been in circulation,' said Peter Mackenzie, the director of incident response and readiness at the cybersecurity firm Sophos. Mackenzie said the research underlined the scale of data that can be accessed by online criminals. 'What we are understanding is the depth of information available to cybercriminals.' He added: 'It is an important reminder to everyone to take proactive steps to update passwords, use a password manager and employ multifactor authentication to avoid credential issues in the future.' Toby Lewis, the global head of threat analysis at the cybersecurity firm Darktrace, said the data flagged in the research is hard to verify but infostealers – the malware reportedly behind the data theft – are 'very much real and in use by bad actors'. He said: 'They don't access a user's account but instead scrape information from their browser cookies and metadata. If you're following good practice of using password managers, turning on two-factor authentication and checking suspicious logins, this isn't something you should be greatly worried about.' Cybernews said none of the datasets have been reported previously barring one revealed in May with 184m records. It described the datasets as a 'blueprint for mass exploitation' including 'account takeover, identity theft, and highly targeted phishing'. The researchers added: 'The only silver lining here is that all of the datasets were exposed only briefly: long enough for researchers to uncover them, but not long enough to find who was controlling vast amounts of data.' Alan Woodward, a professor of cybersecurity at Surrey University, said the news was a reminder to carry out 'password spring cleaning'. He added: 'The fact that everything seems to be breached eventually is why there is such a big push for zero trust security measures.'

Spectator

7 hours ago

• Spectator

Is AI eating your brain?

Do you remember long division? I do, vaguely – I certainly remember mastering it at school: that weird little maths shelter you built, with numbers cowering inside like fairytale children, and a wolf-number at the door, trying to eat them (I had quite a vivid imagination as a child). Then came the carnage as the wolf got in – but also a sweet satisfaction at the end. The answer! You'd completed the task with nothing but your brain, a pen, and a scrap of paper. You'd thought your way through it. You'd done something, mentally. You were a clever boy. I suspect 80 to 90 per cent of universities will close within the next ten years Could I do long division now? Honestly, I doubt it. I've lost the knack. But it doesn't matter, because decades ago we outsourced and off-brained that job to machines – pocket calculators – and now virtually every human on earth carries a calculator in their pocket, via their phones. Consequently, we've all become slightly dumber, certainly less skilled, because the machines are doing all the skilful work of boring mathematics. Long division is, of course, just one example. The same has happened to spelling, navigation, translation, even the choosing of music. Slowly, silently, frog-boilingly, we are ceding whole provinces of our minds to the machine. What's more, if a new academic study is right, this is about to get scarily and dramatically worse (if it isn't already worsening), as the latest AI models – from clever Claude Opus 4 to genius Gemini 2.5 Pro – supersede us in all cerebral departments. The recent study was done by the MIT Media Lab. The boffins in Boston apparently strapped EEG caps to a group of students and set them a task: write short essays, some using their own brains, some using Google, and some with ChatGPT. The researchers then watched what happened to their neural activity. The results were quite shocking, though not entirely surprising: the more artificial intelligence you used, the more your actual intelligence sat down for a cuppa. Those who used no tools at all lit up the EEG: they were thinking. Those using Google sparkled somewhat less. And those relying on ChatGPT? Their brains dimmed and flickered like a guttering candle in a draughty church. It gets worse still. The ChatGPT group not only produced the dullest prose – safe, oddly samey, you know the score – but they couldn't even remember what they'd written. When asked to recall their essays minutes later, 78 per cent failed. Most depressingly of all, when you took ChatGPT away, their brain activity stayed low, like a child sulking after losing its iPad. The study calls this 'cognitive offloading', which sounds sensible and practical, like a power station with a backup. What it really means is: the more you let the machine think for you, the harder it becomes to think at all. And this ain't just theory. The dulling of the mind, the lessening need for us to learn and think, is already playing out in higher education. New York Magazine's Intelligencer recently spoke to students from Columbia, Stanford, and other colleges who now routinely offload their essays and assignments to ChatGPT. They do this because professors can no longer reliably detect AI-generated work; detection tools fail to spot the fakes most of the time. One professor is quoted thus: 'massive numbers of students are going to emerge from university with degrees, and into the workforce, who are essentially illiterate.' In the UK the situation's no better. A recent Guardian investigation revealed nearly 7,000 confirmed cases of AI-assisted cheating across British universities last year – more than double the previous year, and that's just the ones who got caught. One student admitted submitting an entire philosophy dissertation written by ChatGPT, then defending it in a viva without having read it. The result? Degrees are becoming meaningless, and the students themselves – bright, ambitious, intrinsically capable – are leaving education maybe less able than when they entered. The inevitable endpoint of all this, for universities, is not good. Indeed, it's terminal. Who is going to take on £80k of debt to spend three years asking AI to write essays that are then marked by overworked tutors using AI – so that no actual human does, or learns, anything? Who, in particular, is going to do this when AI means there aren't many jobs at the end, anyhow? I suspect 80 to 90 per cent of universities will close within the next ten years. The oldest and poshest might survive as finishing schools – expensive playgrounds where rich kids network and get laid. But almost no one will bother with that funny old 'education' thing – the way most people today don't bother to learn the viola, or Serbo-Croat, or Antarctic kayaking. Beyond education, the outlook is nearly as bad – and I very much include myself in that: my job, my profession, the writer. Here's a concrete example. Last week I was in the Faroe Islands, at a notorious 'beauty spot' called Trælanípa – the 'slave cliff'. It's a mighty rocky precipice at the southern end of a frigid lake, where it meets the sea. The cliff is so-called because this is the place where Vikings ritually hurled unwanted slaves to their grisly deaths. Appalled and fascinated, I realised I didn't know much about slavery in Viking societies. It's been largely romanticised away, as we idealise the noble, wandering Norsemen with their rugged individualism. Knowing they had slaves to wash their undercrackers rather spoils the myth. So I asked Claude Opus 4 to write me a 10,000-word essay on 'the history, culture and impact of slavery in Viking society.' The result – five minutes later – was not far short of gobsmacking. Claude chose an elegant title ('Chains of the North Wind'), then launched into a stylish, detailed, citation-rich essay. If I had stumbled on it in a library or online, I would have presumed it was the product of a top professional historian, in full command of the facts, taking a week or two to write. But it was written by AI. In about the time it will take you to read this piece. This means most historians are doomed (like most writers). This means no one will bother learning history in order to write history. This means we all get dumber, just as the boffins in Boston are predicting. I'd love to end on a happy note. But I'm sorry, I'm now so dim I can't think of one. So instead, I'm going to get ChatGPT to fact-check this article – as I head to the pub.