Fox Buying Roku; UK to Ban Social Media for Kids Under 16; KPMG Pulls AI Usage Report-Hallucinations; Amazon Breakthrough Could Cut Power Use at Data Centers

Fox is dropping a hefty $22 billion to acquire Roku. Ehgadget.com reports that Roku will operate as its own ‘partner-friendly’ platform. Roku presently gets into over 100 million households worldwide. Fox says it will have greater scale with Roku, reaching audiences for live content and streaming. The companies claim that combined, it would create the third-largest entity in US TV based on viewer share and yes, the deal is subject to regulatory approval.

First Australia implemented a ban, now the United Kingdom will bar social media from offering services to youngsters under 16. According to cnbc.com, the ban could include platforms like Snapchat, TikTok, YouTube, Instagram, Facebook, and X. It could take effect starting in the spring of 2027. Restrictions include blocking livestreaming and communication with strangers for users under 16, while similar protections will be enabled by default for 16- and 17-year-olds. The government is also considering overnight curfews and measures to limit infinite scrolling for minors. A little aside here. If you don’t think those kids will come up with work arounds, you are in for a shock. A high school friend taught math and computer science at my old high school in the midwest. The administration and faculty got a proprietary app to show location of all staff, in order to dispatch them to areas where there might be a squabble or the like. My friend said it wasn’t even days before a couple of his students had hacked and cloned the app, and kids had it…so they could see where the administration and teachers were, and avoid them to either squabble, skip class, etc. Good luck to the United Kingdom and Australia!

It’s happened in court filings…AI generated pleadings have used fake cases the AI made up…and the industry calls this ‘hallucinations,’ because that sounds better than ‘lying.’ Now, major professional services firm KPMG has had to recall a report that was titled ‘Redefining excellence in the age of agentic AI,’ after numerous organizations said the report’s claims about their AI usage were untrue. TechCrunch.com notes that research group GPTZero found a number of inaccuracies in the report, which dropped last October. Some major entities like UBS Bank, UK’s National Health Service, and Swiss Federal Railways said the report’s claims on their AI usage were either untrue or misleading. 

Amazon has come up with some tech that will make data centers more power efficient. Bgr.com reports that the new architecture will let the company use 69% fewer routers and switches and overall use 40% less power at its giant Amazon Web Services data centers. They actually gain 33% more throughput, too. The trick is using random cable connections to make a network more efficient. Amazon achieved this with a piece of hardware dubbed a ShuffleBox that randomizes physical cable connections between components on the net to make the structure more efficient. This is paired with software called Spraypoint, which is a custom traffic-routing algorithm designed to work in what they call RNG, or Resilient Network Graphs. Less power for data centers…especially 40% less is a huge deal. Now, if they can only figure out how to cool the systems without being giant water pigs, maybe people will be a bit less up in arms about new data centers being built.

I’m Clark Reid and you’re ‘Technified’ for now.