Weekly output: Android + Chrome OS, Qualcomm’s AI vision, Microsoft cancels some IDF Unit 8200 services
This week’s trip to Hawaii and back for Qualcomm’s Snapdragon Summit–with that company paying my airfare and lodging for its invitation-only event–reminded me once again of the vast size of the United States. And yet I was able to wake up painfully early Friday morning on Maui, take a flight to San Francisco, board a second flight from SFO to Dulles, and land at IAD in time to catch the night’s last eastbound Silver Line train from the airport.
9/25/2025: Google Teases Its Android PC Project Again. Qualcomm Says ‘It’s Incredible’, PCMag
I wrote an update to this post by PCMag’s U.K.-based correspondent James Peckham after seeing a Google executive share a few more details about this upcoming rebuild of ChromeOS on an Android foundation in Wednesday’s keynote.
9/25/2025: Qualcomm’s CEO Touts a Future Where AI (and Cameras) Are Everywhere, PCMag
It wasn’t until I was an hour into writing up Tuesday afternoon’s keynote early Wednesday morning that I realized how Qualcomm’s vision of AI acting upon the inputs of always-on cameras in smart glasses and cars unintentionally echoed the “always-on camera” branding it had briefly and unwisely picked for a human-presence detection system in smartphones almost four years earlier.
9/27/2025: What’s behind Microsoft’s canceling of some services to Israel’s military?, Al Jazeera
I didn’t get to sleep in Saturday morning after coming home around 2 a.m. Instead, Al Jazeera asked me to join this discussion recorded then about Microsoft canceling some cloud services for the Israeli Defense Forces after reporting by the Guardian and the Israel-based news outlets +972 Magazine and Local Call documented how the IDF’s Unit 8200 had employed those services to conduct a pervasive and invasive surveillance campaign against Palestinians. My fellow panelists: Taghreed El-Khodary, a Palestinian journalist now based in the Netherlands, and Kenneth Roth, former executive director of Human Rights Watch. One of my contributions was reminding viewers of Microsoft president Brad Smith’s words at Web Summit 2018: “The tools that we’ve created, the tools often times that you’ve created, have been turned by others into weapons.”
#AI #android #BradSmith #ChromeOS #CristianoAmon #Gaza #GoogleOSes #IDF #Microsoft #privacy #Qualcomm #SameerSamat #smartGlasses #SnapdragonSummit #Unit8200
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