An anonymous reader quotes a report from Android Authority: No matter the manufacturer, every Android phone has one thing in common: its software base. Manufacturers can heavily customize the look and feel of the Android OS they ship on their Android devices, but under the hood, the core system functionality is derived from the same open-source foundation: the Android Ope ... ⌘ Read more
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Android Authority: No matter the manufacturer, every Android phone has one thing in common: its software base. Manufacturers can heavily customize the look and feel of the Android OS they ship on their Android devices, but under the hood, the core system functionality is derived from the same open-source foundation: the Android Ope ... ⌘ Read more
Computer maker Dell's staff numbers have fallen by 25,000 in the last two years. In its latest 10-K filing, published on Tuesday, the company said that it had about 108,000 global employees as of January 31, 2025. In February 2024, that number was 120,000, marking a 10% annual reduction in the workforce. From a report: Looking back two years, Dell's head count st ... ⌘ Read more
Microsoft has walked away from new data center projects in the US and Europe that would have amounted to a capacity of about 2 gigawatts of electricity, according to TD Cowen analysts, who attributed the pullback to an oversupply of the clusters of computers that power artificial intelligence. From a report: The analysts, who rattled investors with a February note highlig ... ⌘ Read more
The United States has won far more Nobel Prizes in physics, chemistry, and medicine than any other nation, with the UK and Germany following in second and third place, according to an analysis of nearly 900 prize-winning publications.
Universities account for roughly three-fourths of Nobel Prize-winning research, with a small number of elite institutions producing a disproportionate share of winners. Cambridge University leads wi ... ⌘ Read more
Here's one more reason to cling to a steady job: It doesn't pay to quit. From a report: Typically workers who snag a new position see higher pay bumps than those holding down the same job. But in February, median wage growth of 4.4% for job stayers surpassed a 4.2% gain for job switchers, according to data from the Federal Reserve Bank of Atlanta. The chan ... ⌘ Read more
Signal president Meredith Whittaker challenged recent assertions by WhatsApp head Will Cathcart that minimal differences exist between the two messaging platforms' privacy protections. "We're amused to see WhatsApp stretching the limits of reality to claim that they are just like Signal," Whittaker said in a statement published Monday, responding to Cathcart's comments to Dutch ... ⌘ Read more
Streaming platforms are increasingly indistinguishable to consumers despite high brand awareness, according to Hub Entertainment Research. The annual Evolution of Video Branding report shows major services like Netflix, Disney+, Hulu, and Max experiencing year-over-year declines in viewers' ability to articulate what makes each platform unique. ... ⌘ Read more
Transport for London will ban most e-bikes across its network from March 31 amid growing safety concerns over battery fires, the transport authority announced on Wednesday. The ban, covering London Underground, Overground, Elizabeth Line and DLR trains, exempts only folding e-bikes, which are considered less likely to have been modified and pose a reduced ... ⌘ Read more
A U.S. appeals court has ruled that Apple cannot participate in Google's upcoming antitrust trial, potentially jeopardizing a $20 billion annual deal between the tech giants. The DC Circuit Court of Appeals affirmed that Apple waited too long to join the proceedings, filing its request 33 days after the government proposed remedi ... ⌘ Read more
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Gizmodo: Scientists scrutinizing the seafloor beneath a calving iceberg found a remarkable array of living creatures, switching up notions of how the giant chunks of ice affect their immediate environs. The scientists investigated a region of seafloor recently exposed by the calving of a gigantic iceberg -- A-8 ... ⌘ Read more
wiredmikey shares a report from SecurityWeek: Google late Tuesday rushed out a patch for a sandbox escape vulnerability in its flagship Chrome browser after researchers at Kaspersky caught a professional hacking operation launching drive-by download exploits. The vulnerability, tracked as CVE-2025-2783, was chained with a second exploit for remote c ... ⌘ Read more
In an op-ed for MIT Technology Review, authors Carsten T. Charlesworth, Henry T. Greely, and Hiromitsu Nakauchi make the case for human "bodyoids" that could reduce animal testing, improve drug development, and alleviate organ shortages: Why do we hear about medical breakthroughs in mice, but rarely see them translate into cures for human ... ⌘ Read more
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: Software developer Xe Iaso reached a breaking point earlier this year when aggressive AI crawler traffic from Amazon overwhelmed their Git repository service, repeatedly causing instability and downtime. Despite configuring standard defensive measures - ... ⌘ Read more
GameStop announced it will invest part of its corporate cash in bitcoin and stablecoins, following MicroStrategy's lead. The meme stock jumped more than 6% in extended trading Tuesday following the news. CNBC reports: The video game retailer said a portion of its cash or future debt and equity issuances may be ... ⌘ Read more
The Register's Richard Speed reports: Baffled by the plethora of Outlook options out there? You aren't alone. Microsoft veteran Scott Hanselman posted a list of some more variants that could be used to do the same thing. It's a problem common to several Microsoft products. A file needs to be opened, but which app should be used? Should it be Outlook New, or Outlook (New)? With tongue f ... ⌘ Read more
An anonymous reader quotes a report from VentureBeat: Chinese AI startup DeepSeek has quietly released a new large language model that's already sending ripples through the artificial intelligence industry -- not just for its capabilities, but for how it's being deployed. The 641-gigabyte model, dubbed DeepSeek-V3-0324, appeared on AI repository Hugging Fac ... ⌘ Read more
"In a conversation with Tony Yu from Asus China, AMD CEO Lisa Su shared that the Radeon RX 9000 series graphics cards have quickly become a huge hit, breaking records as AMD's top-selling GPUs within just a week of release," writes Slashdot reader jjslash. TechSpot reports: AMD CEO Lisa Su has confirmed that the company's ... ⌘ Read more
World Liberty Financial, a crypto venture backed by Donald Trump and his family, has launched a U.S. dollar-pegged stablecoin called USD1. The token is backed by U.S. Treasuries and cash equivalents and will soon go live on the Ethereum and Binance Smart Chain networks. CNBC reports: The development comes as the market cap for dollar-backed stablecoins -- cryptocurrencies that promise a ... ⌘ Read more
According to Convergence Research, an estimated 46% of Canadian households didn't have a TV subscription with a cable, satellite, or telecom-based provider in 2024. MobileSyrup reports: In its latest annual "Couch Potato" report (PDF) on the streaming market, the firm notes that this was a four per cent increase from 2023 and that the number is expected to continue to ... ⌘ Read more
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: World of Warcraft Classic's Hardcore mode has set itself apart from the average MMO experience simply by making character death permanent across the entire in-game realm. For years, Blizzard has not allowed any appeals or rollbacks for these Hardcore mode character ... ⌘ Read more
Google DeepMind has launched Gemini 2.5, a new family of AI models designed to "think" before responding to queries. The initial release, Gemini 2.5 Pro Experimental, tops the LMArena leaderboard by what Google claims is a "significant margin" and demonstrates enhanced reasoning capabilities ... ⌘ Read more
A software engineer discovered that his newly purchased Bosch 500 series dishwasher locks basic functionality behind cloud connectivity, reigniting concerns about internet-dependent home appliances. Jeff Geerling found that features like rinse cycle, delayed start and eco mode on his $1,000 dishwasher require connecting to WiFi and creating an account with "Home Connect," Bo ... ⌘ Read more
Boeing is seeking to withdraw an earlier agreement to plead guilty in a long-running criminal case that blamed the company for deceiving regulators before two deadly crashes of 737 MAX jets, WSJ is reporting, citing people familiar with the matter. From the report: The aerospace giant is seeking more lenient treatment from the Justice Department, which under the Trump admi ... ⌘ Read more
The president of Signal defended the messaging app's security on Wednesday after top Trump administration officials mistakenly included a journalist in an encrypted chatroom they used to discuss looming U.S. military action against Yemen's Houthis. For a report: Signal's Meredith Whittaker did not directly address the blunder, which Democrati ... ⌘ Read more
An anonymous reader shares a report: Sometime earlier this month, Apple updated a section of its website that discloses how it collects and uses imagery for Apple Maps' Look Around feature, which is similar to Google Maps' Street View, as spotted by 9to5Mac. A newly added paragraph reveals that, beginning in March 2025, Apple will be using imagery an ... ⌘ Read more
An anonymous reader shares a report: The UK's Consumer Markets Authority (CMA) has provided an update into its investigation of Ticketmaster after the sale of Oasis reunion tour tickets resulted in grossly inflated ticket prices and numerous consumer complaints. The CMA said that the results of the investigation warranted, "consulting with the ticketing platform on cha ... ⌘ Read more
Alibaba Chairman Joe Tsai has warned of a potential bubble forming in data center construction, arguing that the pace of that buildout may outstrip initial demand for AI services. From a report: A rush by big tech firms, investment funds and other entities to erect server bases from the US to Asia is starting to look indiscriminate, the billionaire executive and f ... ⌘ Read more
OpenAI CEO Sam Altman believes companies will eventually need fewer software engineers as AI continues to transform programming. "Each software engineer will just do much, much more for a while. And then at some point, yeah, maybe we do need less software engineers," Altman told Stratechery.
AI now handles over 50% of code authorship in many ... ⌘ Read more
Infinite Reality, a 3D technology company, has acquired Napster for $207 million, the companies announced Tuesday. The deal aims to transform the once-notorious music sharing service into a metaverse platform.
Napster, launched in 1999 by Shawn Fanning and Sean Parker, was the first major peer-to-peer file-sharing application before legal battles forced its closure in 2001. Si ... ⌘ Read more
An anonymous reader quotes a report from ZDNet: There are many stories of how artificial intelligence came to take over the world, but one of the most important developments is the emergence in 2012 of AlexNet, a neural network that, for the first time, demonstrated a huge jump in a computer's ability to recognize images. Thursday, the Com ... ⌘ Read more
Firefly Aerospace has teamed up with Blue Origin's Honeybee Robotics unit to deploy a rover on its 2028 lunar mission to study the Gruithuisen Domes -- rare volcanic formations that may reveal insights into the moon's geology and potential resources. The announcement follows Firefly's successful Blue Ghost Miss ... ⌘ Read more
NASA's Curiosity rover has detected the largest organic molecules ever found on Mars -- decane, undecane, and dodecane -- suggesting that complex prebiotic chemistry may have occurred in the planet's ancient lakebeds. The findings have been published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. From a press release ... ⌘ Read more
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Reuters: German software company SAP overtook Danish healthcare company Novo Nordisk as Europe's largest company by market capitalization on Monday. At 0900 GMT, SAP had a market cap of $340 billion, slightly more than Novo Nordisk, according to Reuters calculations using LSEG Workspace data. SAP is Europe's largest software maker, ... ⌘ Read more
Meta is considering a paid subscription in the UK that would remove advertisements from its platform. The BBC reports: Under the plans, people using the social media sites could be asked to pay for an ad-free experience if they do not want their data to be tracked. Meta already provides ad-free subscriptions for Facebook and Instagram use ... ⌘ Read more
Samsung Electronics vice chairman and co-CEO, Han Jong-hee, passed away from a heart attack on Tuesday at the age of 63. The Korea Herald reports: Since joining Samsung Electronics, Han held several key positions, including head of the LCD TV Lab. In 2021, he was appointed vice chairman and co-CEO, taking charge of the company's Device eXperience or DX division, which oversees its electronics a ... ⌘ Read more
Two in five tech workers quit in the past year due to inflexible workplace policies around hours, location, and workload intensity, with most citing a desire for remote work and greater autonomy. The Register reports: The findings come from a survey of 26,000 plus staff that operate in 35 markets, including 2,548 respondents in tech, and fly in the face of m ... ⌘ Read more
A software engineer successfully ran Meta's Llama 2 generative AI model on a 20-year-old PowerBook G4, demonstrating how well-optimized code can push the limits of legacy hardware. MacRumors' Joe Rossignol reports: While hardware requirements for large language models (LLMs) are typically high, this particular PowerBook G4 model from 2005 is equ ... ⌘ Read more
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Bloomberg: Jack Ma-backed Ant Group used Chinese-made semiconductors to develop techniques for training AI models that would cut costs by 20%, according to people familiar with the matter. Ant used domestic chips, including from affiliate Alibaba and Huawei, to train models using the so-called Mixture of Experts machin ... ⌘ Read more
Microsoft is expanding its Security Copilot platform with six new AI agents designed to autonomously assist cybersecurity teams by handling tasks like phishing alerts, data loss incidents, and vulnerability monitoring. There are also five third-party AI agents created by its partners, including OneTrust and Tanium. The Verge reports: Microsoft's ... ⌘ Read more
An anonymous reader shares a Bloomberg column: Worries over China's "3D" problem -- that deflation, debt and demographics are structurally hampering growth -- are melting away. Instead, investors are talking about how the world's second-largest economy can take on the US and challenge its technological dominance. There is the prevailing sense that China's "engineer dividend" is fin ... ⌘ Read more
FaunaDB, a serverless database combining relational and document features, will shut down by the end of May due to unsustainable capital demands. The company plans to open source its core technology, including its FQL query language, in hopes of continuing its legacy within the developer community. The Register reports: The startup pocketed $27 million in VC funding in 2020 ... ⌘ Read more
An anonymous reader quotes a report from 404 Media: 23andMe filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy Sunday, leaving the fate of millions of people's genetic information up in the air as the company deals with the legal and financial fallout of not properly protecting that genetic information in the first place. The filing shows how dangerous it is to provide your DNA d ... ⌘ Read more
CERN faces a pivotal decision about its future as the Large Hadron Collider approaches the end of its usefulness by the early 2040s. Management proposes building the Future Circular Collider (FCC), a machine with a 90-kilometer circumference that would smash particles at eight times the energy of the LHC. This hugely consequ ... ⌘ Read more
Valve's early anti-piracy efforts, which eventually led to the Steam platform, were sparked by co-founder Monica Harrington's nephew using her money to buy a CD burner for copying games, she revealed at last week's Game Developers Conference. Harrington said her nephew's "lovely thank you note" about sharing games with friends represented a "generational shift ... ⌘ Read more
Scientists are developing biomarkers to objectively measure pain, addressing a fundamental medical challenge that has contributed to the opioid crisis and led to consistent underestimation of pain in women and minorities.
Four research teams funded by the Department of Health and Human Services are developing technologies to quantify pain like other vital sig ... ⌘ Read more
The Pentagon has canceled its troubled Defense Civilian Human Resources Management System after years of delays and budget overruns, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth said. The project, launched in 2018 with a one-year timeline and $36 million budget, ultimately ran eight years and exceeded costs by $280 million, reaching 780% over budget. "We're not doing that anymore," Hegseth ... ⌘ Read more
Google has confirmed that a technical issue has permanently deleted location history data for numerous users of its Maps application, with no recovery possible for most affected customers. The problem emerged after Google transitioned its Timeline feature from cloud to on-device storage in 2024 to enhance privacy protections. Users began reporting missing hist ... ⌘ Read more
schwit1 writes: A compact, deep-sea, cable-cutting device, capable of severing the world's most fortified underwater communication or power lines, has been unveiled by China -- and it could shake up global maritime power dynamics.
The revelation marks the first time any country has officially disclosed that it has ... ⌘ Read more
China's Cyberspace Administration and Ministry of Public Security have outlawed the use of facial recognition without consent. From a report: The two orgs last Friday published new rules on facial recognition and an explainer that spell out how orgs that want to use facial recognition must first conduc ... ⌘ Read more
Countries must develop their own artificial intelligence infrastructure or risk significant economic losses as the technology transforms global economies, Mistral CEO Arthur Mensch said last week.
"It will have an impact on GDP of every country in the double digits in the coming years," Mensch told the A16z podcast, warning that nations wi ... ⌘ Read more
prisoninmate shares a report: Highlights of Linux 6.14 include Btrfs RAID1 read balancing support, a new ntsync subsystem for Win NT synchronization primitives to boost game emulation with Wine, uncached buffered I/O support, and a new accelerator driver for the AMD XDNA Ryzen AI NPUs (Neural Processing Units).
Also new is DRM panic support for the AMDGPU driver, reflink and reverse-mapping support ... ⌘ Read more
DNA-testing company 23andMe has filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection \[non-paywalled source\] in Missouri and announced CEO Anne Wojcicki's immediate resignation, weeks after rejecting her proposal to buy back the business she co-founded. The bankruptcy filing represents "the best path forward to maximize the value of the business," said Mark Jensen, board member and special committ ... ⌘ Read more
It's "live-recording the World Wide Web," according to NPR, with a digital library that includes "hundreds of billions of copies of government websites, news articles and data."
They described the 29-year-old nonprofit Internet Archive as "more relevant than ever."
Every day, about 100 terabytes of material are uploaded to the Internet Archive, or about a billion URLs, ... ⌘ Read more
RockDoctor (Slashdot reader #15,477) writes:
A recent paper on ArXiv reports a novel idea about the central regions of "our" galaxy.
Remember the hoopla a few years ago about radio-astronomical observations producing an "image" of our central black hole — or rather, an image of the accretion disc around the black hole — long designated by astronomers as "Sagittarius A\*" (or SGR-A\*)? If y ... ⌘ Read more
Long-time Slashdot reader invisik reminds us that the "fish doorbell" is still going strong, according to the Associated Press.
"Now in its fifth year, the site has attracted millions of viewers from around the world with its quirky mix of slow TV and ecological activism."
The central Dutch city of Utrecht installed a "fish doorbell" on a river lock that lets view ... ⌘ Read more
NPR reports on research "into whether our defenses built up from past flu seasons can offer any protection against H5N1 bird flu."
So far, the findings offer some reassurance. Antibodies and other players in the immune system may buffer the worst consequences of bird flu, at least to some degree. "There's certainly p ... ⌘ Read more
Slashdot reader spatwei shared this report from the cybersecurity site SC World:
: AI coding assistants such as GitHub Copilot and Cursor could be manipulated to generate code containing backdoors, vulnerabilities and other security issues via distribution of malicious rule configuration files, Pillar Security researchers reported Tuesday. Rules f ... ⌘ Read more
For weeks Signal has been one of the three most-downloaded apps in the Netherlands, according to a local news site. And now "Higher education institutions in the Netherlands have been looking for an alternative," according to DUB (an independent news site for the Utrecht University community):
Employees of the Utrecht University of Applied Sciences ... ⌘ Read more
"There's no shortage of videos showing Steam running on expensive ARM single-board computers with discrete GPUs," writes Slashdot reader VennStone. "So I thought it would be worthwhile to make a guide for doing it on (relatively) inexpensive RK3588-powered single-board computers, using Box86/64 and Armbian."
The guides I came across were out of date, had a bu ... ⌘ Read more
Today long-time open source advocate/journalist Doc Searls revealed that years of work by consumer privacy groups has culminated in a proposed standard "that can vastly expand our agency in the digital world" — especially in a future world where agents surf the web on our behalf:
Meet IEEE P7012 , which "identifies/addresses ... ⌘ Read more
The latest Facebook whistleblower, a former international lawyer, "cannot grant any of the nearly 100 interview requests she has received from journalists from print and broadcast news outlets in the United States and the United Kingdom," reports the Washington Post (citing "a person familiar ... ⌘ Read more
In 30 minutes the Free Software Foundation holds a live auction of memorabilia to celebrate their upcoming 40th anniversary. "By moving out of the FSF office, we got to sort through all the fun and historically important memorabilia and selected the best ones," they announced earlier — and 25 items will up for bids. (To part ... ⌘ Read more
Reuters reported this week that several U.S. national security agencies "have halted work on a coordinated effort to counter Russian sabotage, disinformation and cyberattacks..."
The plan was led by the president's National Security Council (NSC) and involved at least seven national security agenc ... ⌘ Read more
"For developers and organisations that require a custom software image, a flexible and transparent build system is essential," according to an announcement Friday at Raspberry Pi.com.
"\[T\]o support these customers, we have created rpi-image-gen, a powerful new tool designed to put you in complete control of your Raspberry Pi images."
If you're b ... ⌘ Read more
Science magazine reports:
A strange-looking telescope that scanned the skies from a perch in northern Chile for 15 years has released its final data set: detailed maps of the infant universe showing the roiling clouds of hydrogen and helium gas that would one day coalesce into the stars and galaxies we see today.
The Atacama Cosmology Telescope is not the ... ⌘ Read more
Wired's web site "is going to stop paywalling articles that are primarily based on public records obtained through the Freedom of Information Act," their global editorial director announced this week:
They're called public records for a reason, after all. And access to public documen ... ⌘ Read more
NASA is considering "closing its headquarters and scattering responsibilities among the states," reports Politico, citing two people familiar with the plan.
"The proposal could affect up to 2,500 jobs and redistribute critical functions, including who manages space exploration and organizes major science missions."
While much of the day-to-day work ... ⌘ Read more
Hungary's Parliament not only voted to ban Pride events. They also voted to "allow authorities to use facial recognition software to identify attenders and potentially fine them," reports the Guardian.
\[The nationwide legislation\] amends the country's law on assembly to make it an offence to hold or attend events that violate Hungary's contentious "child pro ... ⌘ Read more
"Italy is using its Piracy Shield law to go after Google," reports Ars Technica, "with a court ordering the Internet giant to immediately begin poisoning its public DNS servers" to prevent people from reaching pirate streams of football games.
"Italy's communication regulator praises the ruling and hopes to continue sticking it ... ⌘ Read more
"China is considering trying to blunt greater U.S. tariffs and other trade barriers," reports the Wall Street Journal, "by offering to curb the quantity of certain goods exported to the U.S., according to advisers to the Chinese government."
Tokyo's adoption of so-called voluntary export restraints, or VERs, to lim ... ⌘ Read more
Besides administering standardized pre-college tests, America's nonprofit College Board designs college-level classes that high school students can take. But now they're also crafting courses "not just with higher education at the table, but industry partners such as the U.S. Chamber of Commerce and th ... ⌘ Read more
The governments of Australia, Canada, Cyprus, Denmark, Israel, and Singapore "are likely customers of Israeli spyware maker Paragon Solutions," reports TechCrunch, "according to a new technical report by a renowned digital security lab."
On Wednesday, The Citizen Lab, a group of academics and security researchers housed at the Univ ... ⌘ Read more
This week the "Old Vintage Computing Research" blog published a 21,000-word exploration of the DEC PDP-11, the 16-bit minicomputer sold by Digital Equipment Corporation. Slashdot reader AndrewZX calls the blog post "an excellent deep dive" into the machine's history and capabilities "and the classic Venix UNIX that it ran." The blogger still ... ⌘ Read more
Was the cutting of undersea cables part of a larger pattern? Russia and its proxies are accused by western officials of "staging dozens of attacks and other incidents across Europe since the invasion of Ukraine three years ago," reports the Associated Press.
That includes cyberattacks and committing acts of sabotage/vandalism/arson, as well as spreading propaganda and ... ⌘ Read more
Slashdot reader Required Snark shared this article from Phys.org:
In the realm of science fiction, \[sun-energy capturing\] Dyson spheres and ringworlds have been staples for decades. But it is well known that the simplest designs are unstable against gravitational forces and would thus be torn apart. Now a scientist from Scotland, UK has shown that ... ⌘ Read more
"I intend to sue the National Archives," said Joseph diGenova, an 80-year-old former Trump campaign lawyer (and a U.S. Attorney from 1983 to 1988). While releasing 63,000 unredacted pages about the 1963 assassination of President Kennedy, the U.S. government erroneously "made public the Social Security ... ⌘ Read more
Founded in 1979, the Association for the Advancement of AI is an international scientific society. Recently 25 of its AI researchers surveyed 475 respondents in the AAAI community about "the trajectory of AI research" — and their results were surprising.
Futurism calls the results "a resounding rebuff to the tech indu ... ⌘ Read more
Two "groundbreaking research reports" on open source security were announced this week by the Linux Foundation in partnership with the Open Source Security Foundation (OpenSSF) and Linux Foundation Europe. The reports specifically address the EU's Cyber Resilience ... ⌘ Read more
Computer programming jobs in the US have declined by more than a quarter over the past two years, placing the profession among the 10 hardest-hit occupations of 420-plus jobs tracked by the Bureau of Labor Statistics and potentially signaling the first concrete evidence of artificial intelligence replacing workers.
The timing coincides with OpenAI's release of ChatGPT in late 20 ... ⌘ Read more
Apple's latest iOS 18.3.2 update is automatically re-enabling its Apple Intelligence feature even for users who previously disabled it, adding to mounting concerns about the company's AI strategy.
The update presents a splash screen with no option except to tap "Continue," which activates the feature. Users must then manually ... ⌘ Read more
The French National Assembly has rejected a controversial provision that would have forced messaging platforms like Signal and WhatsApp to allow government access to encrypted private conversations, lawmakers voted Thursday night. The measure, embedded within anti-drug trafficking legislation, would have implemented a "ghost participant model" allowing law enforcement to silently join encrypted chats without user ... ⌘ Read more
London's Heathrow Airport resumed operations late Friday after an electrical fire at a nearby substation forced a full-day closure, causing global travel chaos with hundreds of canceled flights and thousands of stranded passengers. The explosion at a Hayes substation 1.5 miles from the airport knocked out power early Thursday, requir ... ⌘ Read more
Web infrastructure provider Cloudflare unveiled "AI Labyrinth" this week, a feature designed to thwart unauthorized AI data scraping by feeding bots realistic but irrelevant content instead of blocking them outright. The system lures crawlers into a "maze" of AI-generated pages containing neutral scientific information, deliberatel ... ⌘ Read more
Amazon CEO Andy Jassy is pushing to cut bureaucracy by reducing management layers, according to a recording of a recent internal all-hands meeting obtained by Business Insider. Amazon plans to increase the ratio of individual contributors to managers by 15% by March-end, a process the company says is now complete and affected ... ⌘ Read more
Hollywood filmmaker Carl Erik Rinsch has been charged with defrauding Netflix of $11 million after allegedly misusing funds intended for an unfinished science fiction series, federal prosecutors said.
Rinsch, 47, was arrested in West Hollywood this week on charges of wire fraud, mone ... ⌘ Read more
Apple has been hit with a federal lawsuit claiming that the company's promotion of now-delayed Apple Intelligence features constituted false advertising and unfair competition. From a report: The suit, filed Wednesday in U.S. District Court in San Jose, seeks class action status and unspecified financial damages on behalf of those who purchased Apple Intelligen ... ⌘ Read more
Meta is testing an AI feature that generates comment suggestions for Instagram posts. Users with access to the test see a pencil icon beside the comment field that activates "Write with Meta AI." The system analyzes photos before offering three comment suggestions, which users can refresh for alternatives. For a photo showing someone smiling with a thumbs-up in th ... ⌘ Read more
Higher use of chatbots like ChatGPT may correspond with increased loneliness and less time spent socializing with other people, according to new research from OpenAI in partnership with the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. From a report: Those who spent more time typing or speaking with ChatGPT each day tended to report higher levels of emotional dependen ... ⌘ Read more
The U.S. Treasury Department's sanctions watchdog removed cryptocurrency mixing tool Tornado Cash from its global blacklist on Friday, following a federal appeals court ruling last November that the Office of Foreign Asset Control couldn't sanction its smart contracts. Despite the delisting of over 100 Ethereum addresses from the Specially Designated Nationals list, Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent emphasiz ... ⌘ Read more
Microsoft has begun urging Windows 10 users to upgrade their systems ahead of the October 14, 2025 support deadline, but with a solution many find impractical: just buy a new computer. According to StatCounter data, 58.7% of Windows users remain on Windows 10 despite the impending end of security updates and technical assistance.
In emails to Windows 10 users, Microsoft's primar ... ⌘ Read more
Yahoo on Friday said it has struck a deal to sell TechCrunch, the 20-year-old tech journalism site, to Regent, a media investment firm. Axios: Yahoo's business centers mostly on aggregation. Journalism isn't its core focus. Regent is trying to pull together a portfolio of tech news sites and is eager to invest in news. Earlier this week, it acquired Foundry, which houses a slew of online tech publications, such as PCWorld, Macwo ... ⌘ Read more
Google has filed a lawsuit against alleged scammers who created and sold fake business profiles on Google Maps, the company said. The legal action follows an investigation that uncovered and eliminated more than 10,000 illegitimate listings.
The investigation began after a Texas business reported an unlicensed locksmith impersonating them on the platform. Google discovered the scams p ... ⌘ Read more
DaringFireball: Whole Reddit thread examining this simple question: "What month is it?" and Siri's "I'm sorry, I don't understand" response (which I just reproduced on my iPhone 16 Pro running iOS 18.4b4). One guy changed the question to "What month is it currently?" and got the answer "It is 2025." More comments from that thread:"I ask Siri to play a podcast and she literally says, "I'm trying to play from Apple Podc ... ⌘ Read more
European Central Bank Chief Economist Philip Lane warned that Europe must develop a digital euro to counter growing American influence over the continent's financial system \[alternative source\] amid escalating geopolitical tensions. Lane specifically cited Europe's "current dependence on US payment-card providers Visa and Mastercard, as we ... ⌘ Read more
Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang on Thursday walked back comments he made in January, when he cast doubt on whether useful quantum computers would hit the market in the next 15 years. From a report: At Nvidia's "Quantum Day" event, part of the company's annual GTC Conference, Huang admitted that his comments came out wrong. "This is the first event in history w ... ⌘ Read more
Controversial facial recognition company Clearview AI attempted to purchase hundreds of millions of arrest records including social security numbers, mugshots, and even email addresses to incorporate into its product, 404 Media reports. From the report: For years, Clearview AI has collected billions of photos from s ... ⌘ Read more
President Trump signed a long-expected executive action on Thursday calling on U.S. Education Secretary Linda McMahon to "take all necessary steps to facilitate the closure of the Department of Education and return authority over education to the States and local communities." From a report: "We're going to be returning education, very simply, back to the sta ... ⌘ Read more
LG is shutting down Art Lab, its NFT marketplace for TVs. From a report: In a notice posted to its website, LG says it has made the "difficult decision" to close the platform on June 17th. LG launched its Art Lab app during the NFT craze in 2022, billing it as a way to "buy, sell and enjoy high-quality digital artwork" from your TV. It added new digital art to the platform th ... ⌘ Read more
Scientists at Zhejiang University have created the world's smallest LED display, featuring pixels just 90 nanometers wide -- roughly the size of a typical virus and too tiny to be seen with optical microscopes. The breakthrough, described in Nature this week, uses perovskite semiconductors that maintain brightness even at microscopic scales, giving them an ... ⌘ Read more
A United States District Court judge has approved a settlement between HP and customers who sued the company for firmware updates that prevented printers from working with non-HP ink cartridges.
The class-action lawsuit, filed in December 2020, alleged HP "wrongfully compels users" to buy only HP ink by issuing updates that block competi ... ⌘ Read more