☕️ Amazon launches dashboard to monitor employee productivity

Hi there, this is your daily ☕️ Techpresso.

In today's Techpresso:

👀 Amazon launches dashboard to monitor employee productivity

🛰️ SpaceX approved to launch 7500 more Starlink satellites

🤖 Insiders say DeepSeek V4 will beat Claude and ChatGPT

🔒 Anthropic blocks unauthorized third-party access to Claude

📡 Cloudflare defies Italy’s Piracy Shield

📚 Study proves AI models can reproduce entire copyrighted books

🎁 + 9 other news & articles you might like

🧰 + 6 trending tools

📚 + 6 trending papers & reports

FROM OUR PARTNER

• Amazon has launched a new dashboard that lets managers track how often employees come into the office and how long they stay, using badge tap data collected over eight weeks.
• The system groups workers into categories like "low-time" and "zero" badgers, and it flags people who frequently enter buildings they aren't assigned to, though managers decide what action to take.
• The stricter tracking follows Amazon's five-day return-to-office mandate from 2024, when an internal survey found 73% of employees were considering quitting over the policy change.

• The Federal Communications Commission approved SpaceX to launch 7,500 more second-generation Starlink satellites, which doubles the company's total Gen2 authorization to 15,000 satellites for its internet network.
• The FCC had delayed this approval since December 2022 to address concerns about orbital debris and space safety, and the new order allows SpaceX to operate across multiple frequency bands.
• SpaceX also plans to lower about 4,400 existing satellites from 550 kilometers to 480 kilometers during 2026, saying the lower altitudes have less debris that satellites could hit.

• Sources say DeepSeek plans to release its V4 model around mid-February, and internal tests reportedly show it outperforms both Claude and ChatGPT, especially when handling extremely long code prompts.
• V4 is a hybrid model focused on coding tasks for enterprise developers, and to claim dominance it would need to beat Claude Opus 4.5, which holds the SWE-bench Verified record at 80.9%.
• DeepSeek's potential edge comes from a new training method called Manifold-Constrained Hyper-Connections, which lets models scale larger without becoming unstable, even with limited access to advanced chips due to U.S. export restrictions.

• Anthropic has added new technical safeguards to stop third-party apps from pretending to be its official Claude Code tool, which let users access Claude AI models with better pricing and higher limits.
• The crackdown broke workflows for users of OpenCode and similar tools that spoofed Claude Code headers to run automated coding tasks on flat-rate consumer subscriptions instead of paying per-token API prices.
• Separately, Anthropic cut off access for staff at Elon Musk's xAI lab, who had been using Claude models through the Cursor IDE, citing terms of service rules against competitors training rival AI systems.

• Cloudflare has been fined 14.2 million euros by Italy's communications agency AGCOM for refusing to block access to pirate sites through its 1.1.1.1 DNS service under the Piracy Shield law.
• Cloudflare argued that filtering roughly 200 billion daily DNS requests would increase latency and hurt legitimate sites, but AGCOM rejected this, claiming the targeted IP addresses were only used for copyright infringement.
• Researchers found hundreds of legitimate websites were affected by Piracy Shield blocking, while illegal streamers continued to evade enforcement by exploiting the abundance of available address space online.

• A new study from Stanford and Yale researchers shows that major AI models can reproduce nearly complete copies of copyrighted books like Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone when prompted with specific techniques.
• Claude 3.7 Sonnet reproduced 95.8% of the Harry Potter book after jailbreak prompts, while Gemini 2.5 Pro and Grok 3 output 76.8% and 70.3% respectively without any jailbreaking needed at all.
• The findings directly challenge AI companies' legal defense that models do not store training data, which could affect ongoing copyright lawsuits and potentially expose the industry to billions in damages.

Other news & articles you might like

• OpenAI and SoftBank announce $1 billion investment in SB Energy as part of massive AI buildout LINK

• North Korean hackers using malicious QR codes in spear phishing, FBI warns LINK

• Google: Don’t make “bite-sized” content for LLMs if you care about search rank LINK

• “Ungentrified” Craigslist may be the last real place on the Internet LINK

• AI benchmarks are broken and the industry keeps using them anyway, study finds LINK

• Burry explains why Oracle is on his short list LINK

• Google moonshot spinout SandboxAQ claims an ex-exec is attempting ‘extortion’ LINK

🧰 Trending tools

📚 Trending papers & reports

Want to get the latest news differently?