By Allison Grande ( January 10, 2025, 10:16 PM EST) — A Virginia federal judge has authorized Microsoft Corp. to seize a website that the tech giant alleges has been instrumental to a “sophisticated scheme” by foreign-based cybercriminals to circumvent safety guardrails built into artificial intelligence services in order to create offensive and harmful content, according to court filings made public Friday. … Law360 is on it, so you are, too. A Law360 subscription puts you at the center of fast-moving legal issues, trends and developments so you can act with speed and confidence. Over 200 articles are published daily across more than 60 topics, industries, practice areas and jurisdictions. A Law360 subscription includes features such as Daily newsletters Expert analysis Mobile app Advanced search Judge information Real-time alerts 450K+ searchable archived articles And more! Experience Law360 today with a free 7-day trial. source

TL;DR: CCleaner helps your sluggish PC run efficiently, and it’s only $15 for one year. Over time, unnecessary files, cookies, and outdated registry entries pile up in any computer, slowing your system. CCleaner is a PC optimization tool that simplifies the process of clearing out clutter from your machine so you don’t have to do it manually. The one-click cleaning feature is quick, efficient, and trusted by many. And for a short time, CCleaner Professional 2024 Key, which lasts for one year for three PCs, is on sale for $14.99 (reg. $29.99). CCleaner Professional 2024. Image: StackCommerce What to expect When your PC feels sluggish, run CCleaner. It will clear out unnecessary files, cookies, and outdated registry entries to free up space in your system and clear browser history to help keep your online activity confidential. For stability, its patented registry cleaner resolves errors that could lead to crashes or instability. For advanced users, CCleaner’s Driver Updater keeps your hardware running smoothly by updating outdated drivers. The Software Updater ensures all your apps are current, reducing security vulnerabilities. The Health Check tool analyzes your system and offers tailored fixes to improve performance. Whether you’re launching apps or starting up your PC, CCleaner reduces resource-hogging background programs so your machine can work faster. Get a 1-year CCleaner Professional 2024 Key for three PCs for $14.99. Prices and availability are subject to change. source

By Dani Kass ( January 10, 2025, 7:06 PM EST) — A Federal Circuit panel seemed doubtful Friday that none of the hundreds of people who downloaded a firmware upgrade affiliated with an early flash drive used it, which Ioengine LLC would need to prove to beat an on-sale bar invalidation of its patents…. Law360 is on it, so you are, too. A Law360 subscription puts you at the center of fast-moving legal issues, trends and developments so you can act with speed and confidence. Over 200 articles are published daily across more than 60 topics, industries, practice areas and jurisdictions. A Law360 subscription includes features such as Daily newsletters Expert analysis Mobile app Advanced search Judge information Real-time alerts 450K+ searchable archived articles And more! Experience Law360 today with a free 7-day trial. source

By Allison Grande ( January 9, 2025, 10:29 PM EST) — A California federal judge has refused to toss a proposed class action accusing Autotrader of unlawfully sharing website visitors’ search queries with third parties, rejecting the contention that tracking software isn’t covered by the state’s wiretap law and finding that the plaintiff would likely be able to fix separate standing deficiencies. … Law360 is on it, so you are, too. A Law360 subscription puts you at the center of fast-moving legal issues, trends and developments so you can act with speed and confidence. Over 200 articles are published daily across more than 60 topics, industries, practice areas and jurisdictions. A Law360 subscription includes features such as Daily newsletters Expert analysis Mobile app Advanced search Judge information Real-time alerts 450K+ searchable archived articles And more! Experience Law360 today with a free 7-day trial. source

Join our daily and weekly newsletters for the latest updates and exclusive content on industry-leading AI coverage. Learn More Cohere released North today, a secure AI workspace platform that directly challenges Microsoft Copilot and Google Vertex AI in the enterprise market. The company claims its new platform outperforms both tech giants’ offerings across finance, HR, customer support and IT functions. North combines large language models, search capabilities and automation tools in a secure package that lets companies deploy AI while maintaining control over sensitive data. The platform operates in private cloud environments or on-premises installations, targeting regulated industries like finance and healthcare. Internal benchmarks comparing Microsoft Copilot, Google Vertex AI and Cohere North show significant discrepancies between automated and human evaluations of AI performance. While all platforms scored well in automated tests, Cohere North maintained consistent accuracy when subjected to human review, while competitors showed marked declines. (Credit: Cohere) Security becomes major battleground for enterprise AI adoption “The market for artificial intelligence is maturing, and enterprises have begun to understand the opportunity,” Cohere CEO Aidan Gomez said in an internal company letter shared on LinkedIn last month. “While consumers have fallen in love with the technology and use it as part of their daily lives, enterprises are struggling to keep up.” Royal Bank of Canada has already partnered with Cohere to develop North for Banking, a specialized version designed for financial institutions. This marks one of the first major enterprise deployments of the platform. Search technology promises to slash workflow times North’s built-in search system, Compass, processes multiple data types including images, presentations, spreadsheets and documents across languages. Internal testing shows the system reduces task completion times by more than 80% compared to manual searches. “It’s becoming clear that for enterprises, it is not sufficient to simply prompt or fine-tune an off-the-shelf consumer AI chatbot for a work environment,” Gomez said. “They want something customized for their needs. They want a true partner to help achieve their goals.” Cohere North outperformed rival platforms across key business functions, with particularly strong advantages in finance and IT operations. Microsoft Copilot notably lagged in IT-related tasks, achieving only 29% relative accuracy compared to North’s benchmark performance. Graph shows relative accuracy normalized by maximum value for each platform. (Credit: Cohere) Enterprise AI race shifts from raw power to practical implementation Gomez challenged the industry’s focus on computational scale, noting that “data quality and novel methods like synthetic data have driven far more of the progress these past 18 months than scale.” He claimed this approach has made Cohere “an order of magnitude more capital-efficient than our competition.” The platform lets employees build and customize AI tools for their specific needs without requiring technical expertise. Early testers include companies in finance, healthcare, manufacturing and infrastructure — sectors where data security has traditionally limited AI adoption. Cohere North early access North is currently available through an early access program, targeting the finance, healthcare, manufacturing and critical infrastructure sectors. The launch could reshape how businesses implement AI technologies, as companies increasingly prioritize security and customization over raw computational power. “Going forward, every company will be an AI company,” Gomez said, emphasizing the need for secure, rapidly deployable solutions. source

This morning, Meta announced a pullback in its content moderation policies, just in time for a new administration to enter the White House. Meta’s current emphasis on “free expression” takes a turn from previous positions during and after the 2020 election, when it heavily promoted the measures that Meta was then taking to reduce the spread of misinformation and disinformation on its platform. This new tune reflects a growing shift in American sentiment around anti-censorship and free speech, which were central themes during this US presidential election. With five primary changes, Meta will: Swap third-party fact checkers with X-like Community Notes. Simplify policies and reduce restrictions to allow more content through. Dial back content filters and focus them on high-severity violations instead of all violations. Bring back political content on Facebook, Instagram, and Threads. Move moderation teams to Texas to alleviate concerns about political bias in California. Policy Simplification Isn’t Necessarily A Bad Thing Overzealous safety measures and keyword blocking lists are problematic in the media industry. Brands have essentially defunded the news for fear of controversy, and the few vendor-certified, brand-safe URLs have surged in price. Forrester predicts that the dam will break on unsustainable brand safety measures in 2025. The sentiment behind Meta’s proposed changes, to stop censoring innocuous content, makes sense. Even Mark Zuckerberg admits that this comes with a trade-off: Meta won’t catch all the “bad stuff” on the platform as a result. Consumers already think that social media platforms are riddled with fake news: Eighty-one percent of US online adults say there’s a lot of fake news and misinformation on social media. If these policy changes result in platform experiences riddled with spam and hateful content, consumers might spend their time elsewhere. Meta’s Changes Will Put Some Ad Dollars At Risk We’ve seen this moderation story play out already on X. When Elon Musk transformed X into a “free speech” platform, many brands stopped spending media dollars because they started appearing next to neo-Nazi content. In fact, WARC estimates that X missed out on nearly $6 billion in ad revenue since Musk took over in 2022. But … Meta isn’t X. It’s a much stronger paid media platform. It offers unprecedented scale to advertisers with auto-optimization capabilities between Facebook and Instagram (and eventually Threads). It’s an incredibly efficient one-stop shop for brands to reach their target audiences. While it was fairly easy for many advertisers to take a stand and say goodbye to X, the same won’t be true for Meta. Meta’s apps are — and will remain — a core part of most companies’ media mixes. And Meta’s position is only strengthened by the uncertainty around TikTok’s future. Forrester clients: Let’s chat more about your strategy via a Forrester guidance session. source

By Christopher Cole ( January 8, 2025, 5:49 PM EST) — T-Mobile’s $4.4 billion plan to buy spectrum and lease cell towers from UScellular appears likely to benefit consumers, a free-market think tank told the Federal Communications Commission as public interest groups continue to fight the deal…. Law360 is on it, so you are, too. A Law360 subscription puts you at the center of fast-moving legal issues, trends and developments so you can act with speed and confidence. Over 200 articles are published daily across more than 60 topics, industries, practice areas and jurisdictions. A Law360 subscription includes features such as Daily newsletters Expert analysis Mobile app Advanced search Judge information Real-time alerts 450K+ searchable archived articles And more! Experience Law360 today with a free 7-day trial. source

For this report, we grouped countries into high-income and middle-income categories based on definitions from the World Bank. source

Executives in the automotive sector spent a lot of the past decade talking about cars that would be connected, autonomous, shared, and electric (CASE, sometimes ACES). Unsurprisingly, connectivity is less interesting to consumers than what they might do with it, full autonomy on public roads is hard, ride sharing hasn’t been wholeheartedly embraced, and the rate of electric vehicle (EV) adoption has slowed in many markets.   But maybe those auto execs were on to something. Instead of focusing attention on building a car that is CASE, things become a lot more interesting (and plausible) if we think about the value of making the whole mobility ecosystem CASE. That’s exactly what a cross-disciplinary team here at Forrester has been doing, and two reports based on that work have just been published. Forrester’s New Research Series On The Future Of Mobility Has Now Launched! In The Future Of Mobility Will Be Connected, Autonomous, Shared, Electric — And More, we discuss external trends affecting three broad types of mobility: personal mobility (moving individuals or small groups of people), mass transit (moving large numbers of people), and the movement of goods (short- or long-distance movement of cargo). Those external trends include themes like sustainability, post-COVID changes in mobility patterns, and a growing interest in seamless experiences more aligned to the customer’s mobility moment than to the vendor’s product. The report then builds on that final theme, stressing that the future of mobility must focus more on the mobility and less on the tech. For example: Innovators in mobility use technology to do some amazing things: Concorde used to whisk passengers from New York to London in less than 3 hours; more than 500 self-driving taxis transport paying passengers around Wuhan; drones deliver mail to several of Scotland’s islands; and Maersk cut the fuel consumption of one tanker by 8% after fitting her with high-tech sails. But Concorde was noisy and not economically viable; Baidu’s taxis in Wuhan are heavily subsidized; Royal Mail suspended deliveries in the Orkney Islands after a drone sank in the sea off Hoy; and Maersk sold the Pelican to an Indonesian shipping company. To secure real advances in mobility, technological innovation isn’t enough. New offerings must pull together a range of stakeholders capable of ensuring that products work in real-world environments (including real-world weather), are cost-effective and reliable at real-world scale, and play a useful role in the journeys of people living real (and complex) lives. In Adapt Personal Mobility Ecosystems To New Customer Expectations, we focus on the first of our three broad types of mobility: the movement of individuals or small groups of people. This report explores the relationship between personal mobility and each of connectivity, autonomy, shared mobility, and electrification. It highlights some early successes and discusses the challenges that prevent these from scaling more broadly. Organizational silos, and insufficient focus on addressing the real customer need, emerge as more prominent barriers than you might have assumed. Three more reports will follow the two we just published. There will be one each for mass transit and the movement of goods, then one will explore how changes to the mobility sector will play out over the short term (two to three years), medium term (five to 10 years), and longer term (over 10 years), with Forrester’s predictions on the innovations we should expect to see gain traction. We also have our report on the state of autonomous mobility technologies, an on-demand client webinar on the future of mobility, and plans for much more. As always, if you have your own perspectives to share, please schedule a briefing and tell me all about them. If you’re a Forrester client and want to discuss (or challenge) my thinking on this topic, please schedule an inquiry. source

In a down economy, stick with a large company “When I was thinking of leaving my job to start the company I now own,” says Andrew Nieman, co-founder and managing principal at Arro Labs, “my then boss told me that, in a down economy — and we were very admittedly, at the time, in a down economy — the smart move is to stick with a big company.” This is a commonly held belief. People typically assume there is job security in a big company and that large firms are better able to weather economic ups and downs. “You generally think of them as having less inherent risk, and it’s a safer career move to stay there,” says Nieman. With the benefit of hindsight, though, he sees that this assumption is false and that the advice, if he had listened to it, would not have served him well. “Big companies are forced to make harsh, often shortsighted decisions,” he says. “Whether it’s to move the stock price or satisfy executive KPIs you didn’t even know existed. That means you might be swept up in a layoff round of 2,000 people without explanation.” Eliminating staff — especially key decision-makers — is brutal at a small company. They think hard before cutting loose key roles. Those people are core to the operation of the organization. “You’re safer at a small company when times are tough,” says Nieman. “You likely have a closer relationship with the final decision-makers, your impact on the company is more apparent to everyone there, and it’s easier for management to envision the harsh reality of life without you. A company will feel the impact of pulling one person out of a 20-, 50-, or 100-person organization more than from a 25,000-person organization.” Always have the final word “Early in my career I was counseled to ‘always have the final word’ in any decision,” says Raviraj Hegde, SVP of growth at Donorbox. “The idea was to establish authority by having my voice be the loudest and, ultimately, unquestioned.” This advice might stem from a belief that leaders should always appear decisive and confident, he says. But it didn’t go well for him. With this advice in mind, he found himself inadvertently shutting off input from team members and losing valuable, diverse perspectives, ideas, and solutions. None of this served his goals or those of the company. “It finally dawned on me that great leadership isn’t about having the last word,” he says. “It’s about facilitating a team culture where everybody is comfortable contributing. As I turned my attention to open communications and team-member empowerment, our outcomes started to improve — as did our team dynamics.” source