Hacker NewsFriday, April 18

A federal judge ruled that Google illegally maintained a monopoly in online advertising technology, particularly in tools for publishers and software systems. The ruling, which Google plans to appeal, found the company's actions harmed competition and could force significant restructuring of the tech giant.

On April 16, 2025, Zoom experienced a domain outage between 2:25-4:12 PM ET when GoDaddy Registry accidentally blocked zoom.us due to a communication error with Markmonitor. The issue was resolved by removing the block, and users experiencing connection problems were advised to flush their DNS cache.

The U.S. Supreme Court will soon decide whether to block a law banning TikTok in the U.S. The case focuses on constitutional arguments about national security and free speech. Evidence shows TikTok's harmful effects on children, including addiction, mental health issues, exposure to inappropriate content, and the company's awareness of these problems despite minimal action.

A network architect expands his home ISP business after receiving $2.6M in government funding to provide fiber Internet to underserved areas in Washtenaw County. He offers affordable 100Mbps and 1Gbps plans, aiming to complete the project by 2023 despite rising equipment costs.

OpenAI has released two new AI models, o3 and o4-mini, representing their most advanced models to date. These models excel in reasoning capabilities, can use multiple tools simultaneously, and demonstrate improved performance in coding, math, science, and visual tasks while maintaining enhanced safety measures.

The OpenAI Codex CLI is a lightweight coding agent that runs in the terminal, allowing developers to interact with ChatGPT-level reasoning while executing code and manipulating files under version control. It offers secure sandboxing, requires minimal setup with just an OpenAI API key, and supports various approval modes for code execution and file manipulation.

The article discusses Darwin Day and explores the personal side of Charles Darwin's life through digitized archives. It highlights drawings by Darwin's children found on his manuscripts, including a whimsical "Battle of Fruit and Vegetable Soldiers," as well as sketches from his wife Emma's diaries and poignant mementos of their daughter Annie, who died young.

Google introduces Gemini 2.5 Flash, a new AI model offering improved reasoning capabilities with controllable thinking features. The model allows developers to adjust thinking budgets to balance quality, cost, and speed, while maintaining fast performance even with thinking turned off. The update enhances complex problem-solving abilities.

3FS is DeepSeek's distributed filesystem that allows applications to treat distributed storage as local storage. It consists of four main components: Meta for metadata management, Mgmtd for cluster configuration, Storage for holding file data, and Client for system interaction. The system offers high data capacity, throughput, and fault tolerance for various applications.

The CVE Foundation has been established to maintain the Common Vulnerabilities and Exposures Program's independence after the U.S. government's decision not to renew its management contract. This transition ensures the program's stability and continued support for global cybersecurity professionals.