Machu Picchu, the remains of a 15th Century Inca city, is Peru's most popular tourist destination, and a Unesco world heritage site. Yet a continuing dispute over the buses that take visitors up to the mountain-top site recently saw some 1,400 stranded tourists needing to be evacuated. Cristian Alberto Caballero Chacón is head of operations for bus company Consettur, which for the past 30 years has transported some 4,500 people every day to Machu Picchu from the local town of Aguas Calientes. It is a 20-minute journey, and the only alternative is an arduous, steep, two-hour walk. He admits that in the past few months there have been some conflicts between people from different communities here.

Has Britain become an economic colony? The UK could've been a true tech leader - but it has cheerfully submitted to US dominance in a way that may cost it dear T wo and a half centuries ago, the American colonies launched a violent protest against British rule, triggered by parliament's imposition of a monopoly on the sale of tea and the antics of a vainglorious king. Today, the tables have turned: it is Great Britain that finds itself at the mercy of major US tech firms - so huge and dominant that they constitute monopolies in their fields - as well as the whims of an erratic president. Yet, to the outside observer, Britain seems curiously at ease with this arrangement - at times even eager to subsidise its own economic dependence. Britain is hardly alone in submitting to the power of American firms, but it offers a clear case study in why nations need to develop a coordinated response to the rise of these hegemonic companies.

One not to remember video game Uno. One not to remember video game Uno. Are digital board games as fun as the real thing? When our family board game night got cancelled, I sampled digital spins on the classics instead. I'm not sure I should have bothered - with one exception The whole point of video games is to be faster, more visually arresting, and less reliant on other humans than old games played with dice and cards. But a recent family board game night was derailed by clashing schedules and family civil war, so I spent a Saturday night trying them out on the iPhone instead.

A judge ruled on Tuesday that Google would not be forced to sell its Chrome browser or the Android operating system, saving the tech giant from the most severe penalties sought by the US government. The same judge had ruled in favor of US prosecutors nearly a year ago, finding that Google built and maintained an illegal monopoly with its namesake search engine. Groups critical of Google's dominance in the internet search and online advertising industry are furious. They contend the judge missed an opportunity to enact meaningful change in an industry that has suffocated under the crushing weight of its heaviest player. Tech industry groups and investors, by contrast, are thrilled. Shares in Alphabet, Google's parent company, have risen 9% since Tuesday afternoon.

For almost a year, the future of the world's most popular web browser has been a question mark. After the United States declared Google an illegal monopoly in online search, federal prosecutors put forth a forced divestment of Chrome as one possible legal remedy. The case is now resolved, pending appeal, and Google won't have to sell Chrome. Instead, Google will have to provide search index data and amalgamated user metrics to at least some of its competitors. Judge Amit Mehta ruled that the government prosecutors couldn't prove that Google's dominance in the browser space--just under 70 percent of market share, at the time of writing--was essential to its illegal monopoly in search, as Ars Technica reports.

Google will not be forced to sell its Chrome browser, a federal judge ruled on Tuesday in the tech giant's ongoing legal battle over being ruled a monopoly last year. The company will be barred from certain exclusive deals with device makers and must share data from its search engine with competitors, the judge ruled. Judge Amit Mehta's ruling follows months of speculation surrounding what penalties Google would face as a result of his decision last year that the company violated antitrust laws as it built what he called an online search monopoly. The ruling, one of the most significant antitrust cases in decades, resulted in an additional hearing in April to determine what actions the government should take as a remedy. Mehta's decision to allow Google to keep Chrome represents a more lenient outcome for the company than what federal prosecutors requested: force the tech giant sell off its marquee search product and to ban it from entering the browser market for five years.

China will spearhead the creation of an international organization to jointly develop AI, the country's premier said, seeking to ensure that world-changing technology doesn't become the province of just a few nations or companies. Artificial intelligence harbors risks from widespread job losses to economic upheaval that require nations to work together to address, Premier Li Qiang told the World Artificial Intelligence Conference in Shanghai on Saturday. That means more international exchanges, Beijing's No. 2 official said during China's most important annual technology summit. Li didn't name any countries in his short address to kick off the event. But Chinese executives and officials have taken aim at Washington's efforts to curtail the Asian country's tech sector, including by slapping restrictions on the export of Nvidia chips crucial to AI development.

We describe GNOME (Generating Novelty in Open-world Multi-agent Environments), an experimental platform that is designed to test the effectiveness of multi-agent AI systems when faced with \emph{novelty}. GNOME separates the development of AI gameplaying agents with the simulator, allowing \emph{unanticipated} novelty (in essence, novelty that is not subject to model-selection bias). Using a Web GUI, GNOME was recently demonstrated at NeurIPS 2020 using the game of Monopoly to foster an open discussion on AI robustness and the nature of novelty in real-world environments. In this article, we further detail the key elements of the demonstration, and also provide an overview of the experimental design that is being currently used in the DARPA Science of Artificial Intelligence and Learning for Open-World Novelty (SAIL-ON) program to evaluate external teams developing novelty-adaptive gameplaying agents.

Google has a monopoly, and that's the official line of the US federal government. In fact, it has two of them, losing two separate antitrust cases that threaten to cripple the tech giant. The Department of Justice has proposed forcing Google to sell or otherwise divest itself of the Chrome browser as its first and preferred remedy. But who would buy it? Unsurprisingly, there are beaucoup business beaus lining up around the block for this browser bachelorette.

Google's parent company Alphabet will report its first quarter earnings on Thursday, which come as the tech giant is embroiled in antitrust lawsuits brought by the US government and a 17% drop in its stock price since the beginning of the year. It is also the company's first earnings report since Donald Trump levied tariffs on trade partners around the world. Despite the upheaval, analysts appear optimistic on Alphabet's outlook projecting first quarter revenue of 89.2bn, up 11% since the same time last year, and earnings of 2.01 per share, up 7%, according to consensus estimates. Analysts do not expect the global tariffs to create much of an impact for Alphabet, since they were mostly instituted after the end of the quarter. Alphabet is one of the world's most valuable companies, worth nearly 2trn.