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2026-02-26 20:40:00 UTC

iPhone and iPad Are First Consumer Devices Cleared for NATO Classified Data
Apple's iPhone and iPad running iOS 26 and iPadOS 26 have become the first consumer mobile devices cleared for NATO-restricted classified data. No special software or settings are required. MacRumors reports: Apple's devices are the first and only consumer mobile products that have reached this government certification level after security testing and evaluation by the German government. iPhones and iPads running iOS 26 and iPadOS 26 are now certified for use with classified data in all NATO nations.
In an announcement of the security clearance, Apple touted its security features: "Apple designs security into all of its products from the start, ensuring the most sophisticated protections are built in across hardware, software, and Apple silicon. This unique approach allows Apple users to benefit from industry-leading security protections such as best-in-class encryption, biometric authentication with Face ID, and groundbreaking features like Memory Integrity Enforcement. These same protections are now recognized as meeting stringent government and international security requirements, even for restricted data."
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2026-02-22 17:34:00 UTC

Amazon Disputes Report an AWS Service Was Taken Down By Its AI Coding Bot
Friday Amazon published a blog post "to address the inaccuracies" in a Financial Times report that the company's own AI tool Kiro caused two outages in an AWS service in December.
Amazon writes that the "brief" and "extremely limited" service interruption "was the result of user error — specifically misconfigured access controls — not AI as the story claims."
And "The Financial Times' claim that a second event impacted AWS is entirely false."
The disruption was an extremely limited event last December affecting a single service (AWS Cost Explorer — which helps customers visualize, understand, and manage AWS costs and usage over time) in one of our 39 Geographic Regions around the world. It did not impact compute, storage, database, AI technologies, or any other of the hundreds of services that we run. The issue stemmed from a misconfigured role — the same issue that could occur with any developer tool (AI powered or not) or manual action.
We did not receive any customer inquiries regarding the interruption. We implemented numerous safeguards to prevent this from happening again — not because the event had a big impact (it didn't), but because we insist on learning from our operational experience to improve our security and resilience. Additional safeguards include mandatory peer review for production access. While operational incidents involving misconfigured access controls can occur with any developer tool — AI-powered or not — we think it is important to learn from these experiences.
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2026-02-22 11:34:00 UTC

Has the AI Disruption Arrived - and Will It Just Make Software Cheaper and More Accessible?
Programmer/entrepreneur Paul Ford is the co-founder of AI-driven business software platform Aboard. This week he wrote a guest essay for the New York Times titled "The AI Disruption Has Arrived, and It Sure Is Fun," arguing that Anthropic's Claude Code "was always a helpful coding assistant, but in November it suddenly got much better, and ever since I've been knocking off side projects that had sat in folders for a decade or longer... [W]hen the stars align and my prompts work out, I can do hundreds of thousands of dollars worth of work for fun (fun for me) over weekends and evenings, for the price of the Claude $200-a-month."
He elaborates on his point on the Aboard.com blog:
I'm deeply convinced that it's possible to accelerate software development with AI coding — not deprofessionalize it entirely, or simplify it so that everything is prompts, but make it into a more accessible craft. Things which not long ago cost hundreds of thousands of dollars to pull off might come for hundreds of dollars, and be doable by you, or your cousin. This is a remarkable accelerant, dumped into the public square at a bad moment, with no guidance or manual — and the reaction of many people who could gain the most power from these tools is rejection and anxiety. But as I wrote....
I believe there are millions, maybe billions, of software products that don't exist but should: Dashboards, reports, apps, project trackers and countless others. People want these things to do their jobs, or to help others, but they can't find the budget. They make do with spreadsheets and to-do lists.
I don't expect to change any minds; that's not how minds work. I just wanted to make sure that I used the platform offered by the Times to say, in as cheerful a way as possible: Hey, this new power is real, and it should be in as many hands as possible. I believe everyone should have good software, and that it's more possible now than it was a few years ago.
From his guest essay:
Is the software I'm making for myself on my phone as good as handcrafted, bespoke code? No. But it's immediate and cheap. And the quantities, measured in lines of text, are large. It might fail a company's quality test, but it would meet every deadline. That is what makes A.I. coding such a shock to the system... What if software suddenly wanted to ship? What if all of that immense bureaucracy, the endless processes, the mind-boggling range of costs that you need to make the computer compute, just goes?
That doesn't mean that the software will be good. But most software today is not good. It simply means that products could go to market very quickly. And for lots of users, that's going to be fine. People don't judge A.I. code the same way they judge slop articles or glazed videos. They're not looking for the human connection of art. They're looking to achieve a goal. Code just has to work... In about six months you could do a lot of things that took me 20 years to learn. I'm writing all kinds of code I never could before — but you can, too. If we can't stop the freight train, we can at least hop on for a ride.
The simple truth is that I am less valuable than I used to be. It stings to be made obsolete, but it's fun to code on the train, too. And if this technology keeps improving, then all of the people who tell me how hard it is to make a report, place an order, upgrade an app or update a record — they could get the software they deserve, too. That might be a good trade, long term.
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2026-02-17 09:00:00 UTC

EU Parliament Blocks AI Features Over Cyber, Privacy Fears
An anonymous reader shares a report: The European Parliament has disabled AI features on the work devices of lawmakers and their staff over cybersecurity and data protection concerns, according to an internal email seen by POLITICO. The chamber emailed its members on Monday to say it had disabled "built-in artificial intelligence features" on corporate tablets after its IT department assessed it couldn't guarantee the security of the tools' data.
"Some of these features use cloud services to carry out tasks that could be handled locally, sending data off the device," the Parliament's e-MEP tech support desk said in the email. "As these features continue to evolve and become available on more devices, the full extent of data shared with service providers is still being assessed. Until this is fully clarified, it is considered safer to keep such features disabled."
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2026-02-04 16:00:00 UTC

Anthropic Pledges To Keep Claude Ad-free, Calls AI Conversations a 'Space To Think'
Anthropic said today that its AI assistant Claude will not carry advertising of any kind -- no sponsored links next to conversations, no advertiser influence on the model's responses, and no unsolicited third-party product placements -- calling Claude a "space to think" that should remain free of commercial interruption. The announcement comes days after Anthropic's chief rival, OpenAI, announced plans to bring ads to some of its ChatGPT offerings.
Anthropic said its internal analysis of Claude conversations found that a significant share involve sensitive or deeply personal topics. An advertising-based model would also create incentives to optimize for engagement and time spent rather than usefulness, Anthropic said, noting that the most helpful AI interaction might be a short one that doesn't prompt further conversation.
Anthropic generates revenue from enterprise contracts and paid subscriptions. The company said it is exploring agentic commerce -- Claude handling a purchase or booking on a user's behalf -- but stressed that all such interactions should be user-initiated, not advertiser-driven. Anthropic has also brought AI tools to educators in over 60 countries and said it may consider lower-cost subscription tiers and regional pricing.
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2025-12-12 02:02:00 UTC

97% of Buildings On Earth 3D-Mapped
Longtime Slashdot reader Gilmoure shares a report from Nature: Scientists have produced the most detailed 3D map of almost all buildings in the world. The map, called GlobalBuildingAtlas, combines satellite imagery and machine learning to generate 3D models for 97% of buildings on Earth. The dataset, published in the open-access journal Earth System Science Data on December 1, covers 2.75 billion buildings, each mapped with footprints and heights at a spatial resolution of 3 meters by 3 meters. The 3D map opens new possibilities for disaster risk assessment, climate modeling and urban planning, according to study co-author Xiaoxiang Zhu, an Earth observation data scientist at the Technical University of Munich in Germany. "Imagine a video game with the world's buildings already mapped in basic spatial dimensions!" writes Gilmoure.
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2025-10-01 03:30:00 UTC

Scientists Make Embryos From Human Skin DNA For First Time
An anonymous reader quotes a report from the BBC: US scientists have, for the first time, made early-stage human embryos by manipulating DNA taken from people's skin cells and then fertilizing it with sperm. The technique could overcome infertility due to old age or disease, by using almost any cell in the body as the starting point for life. It could even allow same-sex couples to have a genetically related child. [...]
The Oregon Health and Science University research team's technique takes the nucleus -- which houses a copy of the entire genetic code needed to build the body -- out of a skin cell. This is then placed inside a donor egg that has been stripped of its genetic instructions. So far, the technique is like the one used to create Dolly the Sheep -- the world's first cloned mammal -- born back in 1996. However, this egg is not ready to be fertilized by sperm as it already contains a full suite of chromosomes.
You inherit 23 of these bundles of DNA from each of your parents for a total of 46, which the egg already has. So the next stage is to persuade the egg to discard half of its chromosomes in a process the researchers have termed "mitomeiosis" (the word is a fusion of mitosis and meiosis, the two ways cells divide). The study, published in the journal Nature Communications, showed 82 functional eggs were made. These were fertilized with sperm and some progressed onto the early stages of embryos development. None were developed beyond the six-day-stage.
The technique is far from polished as the egg randomly chooses which chromosomes to discard. It needs to end up with one of each of the 23 types to prevent disease, but ends up with two of some and none of others. There is also a poor success rate (around 9%) and the chromosomes miss an important process where they rearrange their DNA, called crossing over. Prof Mitalipov, a world-renowned pioneer in the field, told me: "We have to perfect it. "Eventually, I think that's where the future will go because there are more and more patients that cannot have children."
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2025-09-30 23:40:00 UTC

Charlie Javice Sentenced To 7 Years In Prison For Fraudulent Sale of Her Startup To JPMorgan
Charlie Javice, founder of college financial-aid startup Frank, was sentenced to over seven years in prison for defrauding JPMorgan by inflating user numbers before the bank's $175 million acquisition. CNN reports: Javice, 33, was convicted in March of duping the banking giant when it bought her company, called Frank, in the summer of 2021. She made false records that made it seem like Frank had over 4 million customers when it had fewer than 300,000. Addressing the court before she was sentenced, Javice, who was in her mid-20s when she founded the company, said she was "haunted that my failure has transformed something meaningful into something infamous." Sometimes speaking through tears, she said she "made a choice that I will spend my entire life regretting."
Judge Alvin K. Hellerstein largely dismissed arguments by Javice's lawyer, Ronald Sullivan, that he should be lenient because the negotiations that led to Frank's sale pitted "a 28-year-old versus 300 investment bankers from the largest bank in the world." Still, the judge criticized the bank, saying "they have a lot to blame themselves" for after failing to do adequate due diligence. He quickly added, though, that he was "punishing her conduct and not JPMorgan's stupidity." Javice was among a number of young tech executives who vaulted to fame with supposedly disruptive or transformative companies, only to see them collapse amid questions about whether they had engaged in puffery and fraud while dealing with investors.
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2025-09-30 23:20:00 UTC

Spotify's Founder and CEO Daniel Ek Is Stepping Down
Spotify founder Daniel Ek will step down as CEO by year's end, transitioning to executive chairman after nearly two decades at the helm. In his place will be Gustav Soderstrom and Alex Norstrom as co-CEOs. TechCrunch reports: "Over the last few years, I've turned over a large part of the day-to-day management and strategic direction of Spotify to Alex and Gustav -- who have shaped the company from our earliest days and are now more than ready to guide our next phase," Ek said in a statement. "This change simply matches titles to how we already operate. In my role as Executive Chairman, I will focus on the long arc of the company and keep the Board and our co-CEOs deeply connected through my engagement."
In a post on X, Ek also mentioned that Spotify has been profitable for over a year. Ek has served as Spotify's CEO since he founded it in 2006, so this is a big change in leadership for the streaming giant.
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2025-09-30 22:20:00 UTC

Chinese Woman Convicted After 'World's Biggest' Bitcoin Seizure
An anonymous reader quotes a report from the BBC: A Chinese national has been convicted following an international fraud investigation which resulted in what's believed to be the single largest cryptocurrency seizure in the world. The Metropolitan Police says it recovered 61,000 bitcoin worth more than $6.7 billion in current prices. Zhimin Qian, also known as Yadi Zhang, pleaded guilty on Monday at Southwark Crown Court of illegally acquiring and possessing the cryptocurrency. A second person appeared in court on Tuesday to admit to their role in the scheme.
Malaysian national Seng Hok Ling, of Matlock, Derbyshire, pleaded guilty at Southwark Crown Court of entering into a money laundering arrangement on or before April 23, 2024. According to the charge, he had been dealing in cryptocurrency on Qian's behalf, "knowing or suspecting his actions would facilitate the acquisition or control of criminal property by another." Between 2014 and 2017 Qian led a large-scale scam in China which involved cheating more than 128,000 victims and storing the stolen funds in bitcoin assets, the Met said in a statement.
It said the 47-year-old's guilty plea followed a seven-year probe into a global money laundering web which began when it got a tipoff about the transfer of criminal assets. Qian had been "evading justice" for five years up to her arrest, which required a complex investigation involving multiple jurisdictions, said Detective Sergeant Isabella Grotto, who led the Met's investigation. She fled China using false documents and entered the UK, where she attempted to launder the stolen money by buying property, said the Met. "By pleading guilty today, Ms Zhang hopes to bring some comfort to investors who have waited since 2017 for compensation, and to reassure them that the significant rise in cryptocurrency values means there are more than sufficient funds available to repay their losses," said Qian's solicitor Roger Sahota, of Berkeley Square Solicitors.
"Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies are increasingly being used by organised criminals to disguise and transfer assets, so that fraudsters may enjoy the benefits of their criminal conduct," added deputy chief Crown prosecutor, Robin Weyell. "This case, involving the largest cryptocurrency seizure in the UK, illustrates the scale of criminal proceeds available to those fraudsters."
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2025-09-30 20:20:00 UTC

FCC To Consider Ending Merger Ban Among US Broadcast Networks
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Reuters: The U.S. Federal Communications Commission voted on Tuesday to consider whether to lift the long-standing prohibition on a merger between any of the largest four broadcast networks and to consider relaxing other media ownership rules. The FCC said it would consider public comments before deciding whether to reverse the rule that bars a merger among the "Big Four" networks: NBC, owned by Comcast, Walt Disney Co's ABC, Paramount Skydance's CBS or Fox. The FCC also said it was seeking public comment on whether to eliminate or revise a rule that limits a single entity from owning more than two of the four largest television stations in the same local market and a rule that limits the total number of local radio stations that may be owned in a single market.
Previously, the FCC noted that a version of the rule barring dual ownership of networks has existed since the 1940s. A 2018 media ownership review concluded the bar should be upheld "because it advances the agency's core policy objectives of competition and localism. "We intend to take a fresh approach to competition by examining the broader media marketplace, rather than treating broadcast radio and television as isolated markets," FCC Chair Brendan Carr said. "If we determine that any rule no longer serves the public interest, we will fulfill our statutory duty to modify or eliminate those rules."
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2025-09-30 17:30:00 UTC

Imgur Pulls Out of UK as Data Watchdog Threatens Fine
Imgur, a popular image hosting platform with more than 130 million users, has stopped being available in the UK after regulators signalled their intention to impose penalties over concerns around children's data. From a report: The Information Commissioner's Office (ICO) said that it has reached provisional findings in an investigation in the parent company of image hosting site, Imgur. Its probe was launched earlier this year, as part of the regulator's Children's Code strategy, which is intended to set the standards for how online services handle the personal information of young people. BBC adds: The UK's data watchdog, the Information Commissioner's Office (ICO), said it recently notified the platform's parent company, MediaLab AI, of plans to fine Imgur after probing its approach to age checks and use of children's personal data.
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2025-09-30 14:06:00 UTC

'America's Elite Universities Have Lost Their Way'
Trust in America's elite universities has declined sharply over the past decade [non-paywalled source]. A Manhattan Institute survey conducted in June 2025 found that only 42% of Americans have significant trust in higher education, down 15 percentage points from a decade earlier. Trust in Ivy League institutions stands at just 15%.
Harvard is considering building trade schools as part of a settlement with the Trump administration. The proposal comes as elite universities face criticism for shifting focus from academic excellence to shaping students' political and moral values. Princeton changed its informal motto in 2016 to "In the Nation's Service and the Service of Humanity." Grade inflation has become prevalent at elite schools. A Bloomberg column argues universities should adopt more objective admissions criteria, reduce grade inflation, and make education their primary mission again rather than attempting to fix societal problems.
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2025-09-30 13:00:00 UTC

Swift To Build a Global Financial Blockchain
Camembert writes: In a move that is sure to make Ripple nervous, traditional financial network Swift announced yesterday that it is partnering with Consensys and more than 30 global banks to build a blockchain based network that will run in parallel with its traditional network. Interestingly, unlike XRP, there is no native coin, rather it aims for interoperability (probably using Chainlink with whom the company did case studies for a few years already). There is also a strong focus on regulatory compliance. There are several news articles and opinion pieces on this event; I linked the Reuters article.
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2025-09-30 10:00:00 UTC

NASA Backs Lunar Wi-Fi Project To Connect Astronauts and Rovers On the Moon
BrianFagioli shares a report from NERDS.xyz: NASA has awarded Solstar Space a $150,000 SBIR Phase I contract to develop a Lunar Wi-Fi Access Point (LWIFI-AP). The system is designed to provide wireless connectivity for astronauts, rovers, and orbiting spacecraft as part of the Artemis and Commercial Lunar Payload Services programs. Solstar's goal is to build a space-rated, multi-band, multi-protocol access point that can survive radiation, extreme lunar temperatures, and other harsh conditions. NASA has identified Wi-Fi and 3GPP standards as core communication needs across mission systems ranging from the Human Landing System and Lunar Terrain Vehicle to the Lunar Gateway.
Although this is only an early-stage contract, Solstar's proposal addresses a clear gap in space-qualified networking hardware. The company says that just as Wi-Fi transformed daily life on Earth, it will be equally important for living and working on the Moon. If the project advances, astronauts could soon be relying on familiar wireless technology that has been adapted for one of the most challenging environments in existence.
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2025-09-30 03:30:00 UTC

Climate Change Spurs Rare Hybrid Between Blue Jay and Green Jay
Researchers in Texas confirmed the first documented wild hybrid between a blue jay and a green jay -- a rare pairing that is likely a result of climate change and habitat shifts. Slashdot reader fjo3 shares a report from CNN: "We think it's the first observed vertebrate that's hybridized as a result of two species both expanding their ranges due, at least in part, to climate change," said Brian Stokes, a doctoral student of biology at the University of Texas at Austin and first author of the study published September 10 in the journal Ecology and Evolution. The vividly colored green jay is found in parts of South and Central America, Mexico and a limited portion of southern Texas. But since 2000, the tropical bird's territory has expanded north by hundreds of kilometers -- more than 100 miles and about 2 degrees of latitude -- along the Rio Grande and up toward San Antonio, said study coauthor Timothy Keitt.
Avid birders across Central Texas have taken note, sharing sightings of the emerald birds on social media and apps like eBird. Keitt, a professor of integrative biology at UT Austin, has been keeping tabs on their rapid northward creep since 2018. "They're pretty unmistakable in the field," he told CNN. "You see a green jay and you absolutely know that it's a green jay." Stokes joined Keitt's project a few years later, trapping birds to take blood samples for genetic analysis and releasing them back into the wild. While monitoring social media for green jay sightings in May 2023, Stokes came across an intriguing post on a Facebook group called Texbirds. A woman in a suburb of San Antonio shared a photo of an unusual bird that didn't look like any jay Stokes or Keitt had ever seen.
"He happened to notice that this person posted a picture of this odd jay, and immediately told me, and we got in the car and drove down to find it right away," Keitt said. He and Stokes described their finding as one of the "increasingly unexpected outcomes" that arise when global warming and land development converge to drive animal populations to new habitat ranges. This, they wrote, can lead to unpredictable animal interactions -- in this case, between a tropical species and a temperate one -- and create never-before-seen ecological communities.
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2025-09-30 01:40:00 UTC

Streameast Reclaims Domain Name Previously Seized By US Government
Pirate sports streaming site Streameast has quietly reclaimed the Streameast.xyz domain after U.S. authorities allowed it to expire, despite having seized it under a federal warrant in 2024. TorrentFreak reports: While researching both old and newly-seized Streameast domains recently, we noticed that Streameast.xyz expired earlier this year. Apparently, it was not renewed by those who controlled it, as the seizure banner was gone. Instead, the domain appeared to have been reclaimed by the original Streameast team. While it is not listed as an official mirror site, Streameast.xyz points to content from the original site once again. And indeed, the original Streameast team confirms that the domain is theirs.
It is not clear why the U.S. authorities lost control of the domain or whether it was intentional. Other domain names covered by the same seizure warrant were renewed recently, including Streameast.io. The Streameast team might view this as a significant symbolic victory. After all, they effectively reclaimed a federally seized domain name without having to mount a legal challenge. In the grander scheme, one domain name is not going to make a massive difference. However, the U.S. government went through the trouble to obtain a federal warrant, so it's ironic to see it controlled by pirates once again.
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2025-09-30 01:00:00 UTC

ChatGPT Adds 'Instant Checkout' To Shop Directly In Chat
OpenAI unveiled Instant Checkout, a new ChatGPT feature that lets users buy stuff directly through its chatbot. Currently, the feature supports single-item purchases directly from Etsy sellers, but support for more than one million Shopify merchants is coming soon. It's also only available to U.S. ChatGPT Plus, Pro and Free users at this time. CNBC reports: OpenAI will take a fee from transactions that are completed through ChatGPT, which means Instant Checkout could become an important new revenue stream for the startup. OpenAI is not yet profitable, and is burning through cash as it works to scale up its computing infrastructure. The company declined to share specific details about how large the fees are since they are determined through confidential contracts with Etsy and Shopify. Instant Checkout is free to users and will not affect their prices, OpenAI said.
"Our vision for ChatGPT -- and a lot of the technology we create, but especially ChatGPT -- is that it's not just providing you information, it is also helping you get things done in the real world," Michelle Fradin, OpenAI's product lead for ChatGPT commerce, told CNBC in an interview. The company plans to introduce multi-item carts and expand the regional availability of Instant Checkout moving forward. [...]
Instant Checkout is powered by OpenAI's Agentic Commerce Protocol, which is the underlying technology that allows users to complete a transaction directly with a merchant through ChatGPT. OpenAI built the framework in partnership with the fintech company Stripe, which powers ChatGPT subscriptions. OpenAI initially decided to use Agentic Commerce Protocol for e-commerce, but Fradin said the company thinks it could be used to facilitate other types of purchases or payments as well. OpenAI is open-sourcing the framework to help merchants build integrations more quickly, and so that developers can explore different use cases, she said.
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2025-09-30 00:20:00 UTC

Buyers of RadioShack Accused of Running $112 Million Ponzi Scheme
An anonymous reader quotes a report from CBS News: A pair of e-commerce entrepreneurs who bought a number of well-known retail brands -- including RadioShack, Modell's Sporting Goods and Pier 1 Imports -- out of bankruptcy are accused of running a Ponzi scheme. The Securities and Exchange Commission on Monday accused Alex Mehr and Tai Lopez, founders of the Miami-based Retail Ecommerce Ventures (REV), of defrauding investors out of approximately $112 million. Through their holding company, Mehr and Lopez acquired distressed brick-and-mortar companies in order to turn them into successful, online-only brands. Dress Barn and Linens 'n Things were also among their acquisitions. [...]
The SEC's suit alleges that between 2020 and 2022, Mehr and Lopez, "made material misrepresentations" to hundreds of investors about the bankrupt retailers they had acquired. For example, to entice individuals to invest in their acquisitions, they said their portfolio companies were "on fire" and that "cash flow is strong." They also told prospective backers that money raised for a company would only be invested in that specific firm. That proved not to be the case, according to the SEC's lawsuit, which was filed Monday in the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of Florida.
"Contrary to these representations, while some of the REV Retailer Brands generated revenue, none generated any profits," the suit states. "Consequently, in order to pay interest, dividends and maturing note payments, Defendants resorted to using a combination of loans from outside lenders, merchant cash advances, money raised from new and existing investors, and transfers from other portfolio companies to cover obligations." The SEC alleges that at least $5.9 million of returns paid to investors were actually Ponzi-like payments funded by other investors, as opposed to companies' profits. Additionally, the federal regulatory agency claims that Mehr and Lopez allocated $16 million worth of investments for their own use, according to the filing.
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2025-09-29 23:00:00 UTC

Afghanistan Hit By Nationwide Internet Blackout As Taliban Cuts Fiber Optic Cables
The Taliban have imposed a nationwide telecommunications shutdown in Afghanistan, severing fibre-optic connections and cutting off internet, mobile, and satellite services as part of "morality" measures. Netblock is currently tracking the outages. The BBC reports: Since seizing power in 2021, the Taliban have imposed numerous restrictions in accordance with their interpretation of Islamic Sharia law. Flights from Kabul airport have also been disrupted, according to reports. Several people in Kabul have told the BBC that their fibre-optic internet stopped working towards the end of the working day, around17:00 local time (12:30 GMT). Because of this, it is understood many people will not notice the impact until Tuesday morning, when banking services and other businesses are due to resume. [...]
The Taliban earlier said an alternative route for internet access would be created, without giving any details. Business leaders at the time warned that if the internet ban continued their activities would be seriously hit. Hamid Haidari, former editor-in-chief of Afghan news channel 1TV, said after the shutdown that "loneliness enveloped the entire country." "Afghanistan has now officially taken first place in the competition with North Korea for [internet] disconnection" he said on X.
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2025-09-29 22:20:00 UTC

Gavin Newsom Signs First-In-Nation AI Safety Law
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Politico: California Gov. Gavin Newsom signed a first-in-the-nation law on Monday that will force major AI companies to reveal their safety protocols -- marking the end of a lobbying battle with big tech companies like ChatGPT maker OpenAI and Meta and setting the groundwork for a potential national standard.
The proposal was the second attempt by the author, ambitious San Francisco Democrat state Sen. Scott Wiener, to pass such legislation after Newsom vetoed a broader measure last year that set off an international debate. It is already being watched in Congress and other states as an example to follow as lawmakers seek to rein in an emerging technology that has been embraced by the Trump administration in the race against China, but which has also prompted concerns for its potential to create harms.
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2025-09-29 21:00:00 UTC

OpenAI's New Sora Video Generator To Require Copyright Holders To Opt Out
An anonymous reader shares a report: OpenAI is planning to release a new version of its Sora video generator that creates videos featuring copyrighted material unless copyright holders opt out of having their work appear, according to people familiar with the matter. OpenAI began alerting talent agencies and studios about the forthcoming product and its opt-out process over the last week and plans to release the new version in the coming days, the people said.
The new opt-out process means that movie studios and other intellectual property owners would have to explicitly ask OpenAI not to include their copyrighted material in videos Sora creates. While copyrighted characters will require an opt-out, the new product won't generate images of recognizable public figures without their permission, people familiar with OpenAI's thinking said.
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2025-09-29 20:20:00 UTC

UK Government To Guarantee $2 Billion Jaguar Land Rover Loan After Cyber Shutdown
The UK government will underwrite a $2 billion loan guarantee to Jaguar Land Rover in a bid to support its suppliers as a cyber-attack continues to halt production at the car maker. BBC: Business Secretary Peter Kyle said the loan, from a commercial bank, would protect jobs in the West Midlands, Merseyside and across the UK. The manufacturer has been forced to suspend production for weeks after being targeted by hackers at the end of August. There have been growing concerns some suppliers, mostly small businesses, could go bust due to the prolonged shutdown.
About 30,000 people are directly employed at the company's UK plants with about 100,000 working for firms in the supply chain. Some of these firms supply parts exclusively to JLR, while others sell components to other carmakers as well. It is believed to be the first time that a company has received government help as a result of a cyber-attack.
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2025-09-29 19:40:00 UTC

Daylight Savings Time Is So Bad, It's Messing With Our View of the Cosmos
An anonymous reader shares a report: In a preprint titled "Can LIGO Detect Daylight Savings Time?," Reed Essick, former LIGO member and now a physicist at the University of Toronto, gives a simple answer to the paper's title: "Yes, it can." The paper, which has yet to be peer-reviewed, was recently uploaded to arXiv. That might seem like an odd connection. It's true that observational astronomy must contend with noise from light pollution, satellites, and communication signals. But these are tangible sources of noise that scientists can sink their teeth into, whereas daylight savings time is considerably more nebulous and abstract as a potential problem.
To be clear, and as the paper points out, daylight savings time does not influence actual signals from merging black holes billions of light-years away -- which, as far as we know, don't operate on daylight savings time. The "detection" here refers to the "non-trivial" changes in human activity having to do with the researchers involved in this kind of work, among other work- and process-related factors tied to the sudden shift in time. The presence of individuals -- whether through operational workflows or even their physical activity at the observatories -- has a measurable impact on the data collected by LIGO and its sister institutions, Virgo in Italy and KAGRA in Japan, the new paper argues.
To see why this might be the case, consider again the definition of gravitational waves: ripples in space-time. A very broad interpretation of this definition implies that any object in space-time affected by gravity can cause ripples, like a researcher opening a door or the rumble of a car moving across the LIGO parking lot. Of course, these ripples are so tiny and insignificant that LIGO doesn't register them as gravitational waves. But continued exposure to various seismic and human vibrations does have some effect on the detector -- which, again, engineers and physicists have attempted to account for. What they forgot to consider, however, were the irregular shifts in daily activity as researchers moved back and forth from daylight savings time. The bi-annual time adjustment shifted LIGO's expected sensitivity pattern by roughly 75 minutes, the paper noted. Weekends, and even the time of day, also influenced the integrity of the collected data, but these factors had been raised by the community in the past.
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2025-09-29 19:01:00 UTC

Environmental Damage is Putting European Way of Life at Risk, Says Report
The European way of life is being jeopardized by environmental degradation, a report has found, with EU officials warning against weakening green rules. The Guardian: The continent has made "important progress" in cutting planet-heating pollution, according to the European Environment Agency, but the death of wildlife and breakdown of the climate are ruining ecosystems that underpin the economy. The seventh edition of the report, which has been published every five years since 1995, found:
1. More than 80% of protected habitats are in a poor or bad state, with "unsustainable" consumption and production patterns driving loss of wildlife.
2. The EU's "carbon sink" has declined by about 30% in a decade as logging, wildfires and pests damage forests.
3. Emissions from transport and food have barely budged since 2005, despite progress in other sectors.
4. Member states have failed to adapt to extreme weather as fast as risk levels have risen.
5. Water stress already affects one in three Europeans and will worsen as the climate changes.
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2025-09-29 18:18:00 UTC

Microplastics Could Be Weakening Your Bones, Research Suggests
A review of 62 scientific studies published in Osteoporosis International found that microplastics weaken bones by disrupting bone marrow stem cells and stimulating osteoclasts, cells that degrade bone tissue. Laboratory experiments found the particles reduce cell viability, induce premature cellular aging, modify gene expression, and trigger inflammatory responses. Animal studies found microplastic accumulation decreases white blood cell counts and deteriorates bone microstructure, creating irregular cell structures that increase fracture risk. Rodrigo Bueno de Oliveira from the State University of Campinas in Brazil said the effects interrupted skeletal growth in test animals.
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2025-09-29 17:33:00 UTC

New Claude Model Runs 30-Hour Marathon To Create 11,000-Line Slack Clone
Anthropic's Claude Sonnet 4.5 ran autonomously for 30 hours to build a chat application similar to Slack or Teams, generating approximately 11,000 lines of code before stopping upon task completion. The model, announced today, marks a significant leap from the company's Opus 4 model, which ran for seven hours in May.
Claude Sonnet 4.5 performs three times better at browser navigation and computer use than Anthropic's October technology. Beta-tester Canva deployed the model for complex engineering tasks in its codebase and product features. Anthropic paired the release with virtual machines, memory, context management, and multi-agent support tools, enabling developers to build their own AI agents using the same building blocks that power Claude Code.
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2025-09-29 14:00:00 UTC

Saudi Takeover of EA in $55 Billion Deal Raises Serious Concerns
BrianFagioli writes: Electronic Arts has agreed to a $55 billion buyout by Saudi Arabia's Public Investment Fund (PIF), private equity firm Silver Lake, and Jared Kushner's Affinity Partners, marking the largest all-cash sponsor take-private deal ever. Shareholders will receive $210 per share, a 25 percent premium over EA's unaffected price, and once the transaction closes the company will be delisted from public markets. EA CEO Andrew Wilson will remain in charge, with the group arguing that private ownership will allow the publisher to innovate faster and expand its global footprint.
The deal, however, is already sparking controversy. PIF, a sovereign wealth fund controlled by the Saudi government, will effectively gain control of one of the most influential names in gaming. While investors stand to profit, many gamers and industry watchers are concerned about how Saudi ownership could shape EA's creative direction, monetization strategies, and role in esports. With regulatory approvals still pending, the takeover raises difficult questions about the intersection of gaming, politics, and global soft power.
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2025-09-29 11:34:00 UTC

Professor Warns CS Graduates are Struggling to Find Jobs
"Computer science went from a future-proof career to an industry in upheaval in a shockingly small amount of time," writes Business Insider, citing remarks from UC Berkeley professor Hany Farid said during a recent episode of Nova's "Particles of Thought" podcast.
"Our students typically had five internship offers throughout their first four years of college," Farid said. "They would graduate with exceedingly high salaries, multiple offers. They had the run of the place. That is not happening today. They're happy to get one job offer...."
It's too easy to just blame AI, though, Farid said. "Something is happening in the industry," he said. "I think it's a confluence of many things. I think AI is part of it. I think there's a thinning of the ranks that's happening, that's part of it, but something is brewing..."
Farid, one of the world's experts on deepfake videos, said he is often asked for advice. He said what he tells students has changed... "Now, I think I'm telling people to be good at a lot of different things because we don't know what the future holds."
Like many in the AI space, Farid said that those who use breakthrough technologies will outlast those who don't. "I don't think AI is going to put lawyers out of business, but I think lawyers who use AI will put those who don't use AI out of business," he said. "And I think you can say that about every profession."
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2025-09-29 07:44:00 UTC

Ladybird Browser Gains Cloudflare Support to Challenge the Status Quo
An anonymous reader shared this report from the blog Linuxiac:
In a somewhat unexpected move, Cloudflare has announced its sponsorship of the Ladybird browser, an independent (still-in-development) open-source initiative aimed at developing a modern, standalone web browser engine.
It's a project launched by GitHub's co-founder and former CEO, Chris Wanstrath, and tech visionary Andreas Kling. It's written in C++, and designed to be fast, standards-compliant, and free of external dependencies. Its main selling point? Unlike most alternative browsers today, Ladybird doesn't sit on top of Chromium or WebKit. Instead, it's building a completely new rendering engine from scratch, which is a rare thing in today's web landscape. For reference, the vast majority of web traffic currently runs through engines developed by either Google (Blink/Chromium), Apple (WebKit), or Mozilla (Gecko).
The sponsorship means the Ladybird team will have more resources to accelerate development. This includes paying developers to work on crucial features, such as JavaScript support, rendering improvements, and compatibility with modern web applications. Cloudflare stated that its support is part of a broader initiative to keep the web open, where competition and multiple implementations can drive enhanced security, performance, and innovation.
The article adds that Cloudflare also chose to sponsor Omarchy, a tool that runs on Arch and sets up and configures a Hyprland tiling window manager, along with a curated set of defaults and developer tools including Neovim, Docker, and Git.
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2025-09-29 03:05:00 UTC

Some Athletes are Trying the Psychedelic Ibogaine to Treat Brain Injuries
"As awareness grows around the dangers of head trauma in sports, a small number of professional fighters and football players are turning to a psychedelic called ibogaine for treatment," reports the Los Angeles Times.
They note that the drug's proponents "tout its ability to treat addiction, post-traumatic stress disorder and traumatic brain injury, or TBI. "
Ibogaine, which is derived from a West African shrub, is a Schedule 1 drug in America with no legal medical uses, and experts urge caution because of the need for further studies. But the results, several athletes say, are "game-changing".... Although athletes are just discovering ibogaine, the drug is well known within the veteran community, which experiences high rates of brain injury and PTSD. In Stanford's study on the effects of ibogaine on special forces veterans, participants saw average reductions of 88% in PTSD symptoms, 87% in depression symptoms and 81% in anxiety symptoms. They also exhibited improvements in concentration, information processing and memory.
"No other drug has ever been able to alleviate the functional and neuropsychiatric symptoms of traumatic brain injury," Dr. Nolan Williams, a professor of psychiatry and behavioral sciences, said in a statement on the results. "The results are dramatic, and we intend to study this compound further...."
States can work faster than the federal government by carving out exemptions for supervised ibogaine therapy programs, similar to what Oregon has done with psilocybin therapy. Many states have also opted to legalize marijuana for medicinal or recreational use... In June, Texas approved a historic $50-million investment in state funding to support drug development trials for ibogaine, inspired by the results seen by veterans. Arizona legislators approved $5 million in state funding for a clinical study on ibogaine in March, and California legislators are pushing to fast-track the study of ibogaine and other psychedelics.
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2025-09-29 01:32:00 UTC

Culture Magazine Urges Professional Writers to Resist AI, Boycott and Stigmatize AI Slop
The editors of the culture magazine n + 1 decry the "well-funded upheaval" caused by a large and powerful coalition of pro-AI forces. ("According to the logic of market share as social transformation, if you move fast and break enough things, nothing can contain you...")
"An extraordinary amount of money is spent by the AI industry to ensure that acquiescence is the only plausible response. But marketing is not destiny."
The AI bubbleâS — âSand it is a bubble, as even OpenAI overlord Sam Altman has admittedâS — âSwill burst. The technology's dizzying pace of improvement, already slowing with the release of GPT-5, will stall... [P]rofessional readers and writers: We retain some power over the terms and norms of our own intellectual life. We ought to stop acting like impotence in some realms means impotence everywhere. Major terrains remain AI-proofable. For publishers, editors, critics, professors, teachers, anyone with any say over what people read, the first step will be to develop an ear. Learn to tellâS — âSto read closely enough to tellâS — âSthe work of people from the work of bots...
Whatever nuance is needed for its interception, resisting AI's further creep into intellectual labor will also require blunt-force militancy. The steps are simple. Don't publish AI bullshit. Don't even publish mealymouthed essays about the temptation to produce AI bullshit. Resist the call to establish worthless partnerships like the Washington Post's Ember, an "AI writing coach" designed to churn out Bezos-friendly op-eds. Instead, do what better magazines, newspapers, and journals have managed for centuries. Promote and produce original work of value, work that's cliché-resistant and unreplicable, work that triesâS — âSas Thomas Pynchon wrote in an oracular 1984 essay titled "Is It OK to Be a Luddite?"âS — âS"through literary means which are nocturnal and deal in disguise, to deny the machine...."
Punishing already overdisciplined and oversurveilled students for their AI use will help no one, but it's a long way from accepting that reality to Ohio State's new plan to mandate something called "AI fluency" for all graduates by 2029 (including workshops sponsored, naturally, by Google). Pedagogically, alternatives to acquiescence remain available. Some are old, like blue-book exams, in-class writing, or one-on-one tutoring. Some are new, like developing curricula to teach the limits and flaws of generative AI while nurturing human intelligence...
Our final defenses are more diffuse, working at a level of norms and attitudes. Stigmatization is a powerful force, and disgust and shame are among our greatest tools. Put plainly, you should feel bad for using AI. (The broad embrace of the term slop is a heartening sign of a nascent constituency for machine denial.) These systems haven't worked well for very long, and consensus about their use remains far from settled. That's why so much writing about AI writing sounds the way it doesâS — âSnervous, uneven, ambivalent about the new regime's utilityâS — âSand it means there's still time to disenchant AI, provincialize it, make it uncompelling and uncool...
As we train our sights on what we oppose, let's recall the costs of surrender. When we use generative AI, we consent to the appropriation of our intellectual property by data scrapers. We stuff the pockets of oligarchs with even more money. We abet the acceleration of a social media gyre that everyone admits is making life worse. We accept the further degradation of an already degraded educational system. We agree that we would rather deplete our natural resources than make our own art or think our own thoughts... A literature which is made by machines, which are owned by corporations, which are run by sociopaths, can only be a "stereotype"âS — âSa simplification, a facsimile, an insult, a fakeâS — âSof real literature. It should be smashed, and can.
The 3,800-word article also argues that "perhaps AI's ascent in knowledge-industry workplaces will give rise to new demands and new reasons to organize..."
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2025-09-28 22:48:00 UTC

Switzerland Approves Digital ID In Narrow Vote, UK Proposes One Too
"Swiss voters have backed plans for electronic identity cards by a wafer-thin margin," reports the Guardian, "in the second nationwide vote on the issue."
In a referendum on Sunday, 50.4% of voters supported an electronic ID card, while 49.6% were against, confounding pollsters who had forecast stronger support for the "yes" vote. Turnout was 49.55%, higher than expected... [V]oters rejected an earlier version of the e-ID in 2021, largely over objections to the role of private companies in the system. In response to these concerns, the Swiss state will now provide the e-ID, which will be optional and free of charge... To ensure security the e-ID is linked to a single smartphone, users will have to get a new e-ID if they change their device... An ID card containing biometric data — fingerprints — will be available from the end of next year.
Critics of the e-ID scheme raised data protection concerns and said it opened the door to mass surveillance. They also fear the voluntary scheme will become mandatory and disadvantage people without smartphones. The referendum was called after a coalition of rightwing and data-privacy parties collected more than 50,000 signatures against e-ID cards, triggering the vote.
"To further ease privacy concerns, a particular authority seeking information on a person — such as proof of age or nationality, for example — will only be able to check for those specific details," notes the BBC:
Supporters of the Swiss system say it will make life much easier for everyone, allowing a range of bureaucratic procedures — from getting a telephone contract to proving you are old enough to buy a bottle of wine — to happen quickly online. Opponents of digital ID cards, who gathered enough signatures to force another referendum on the issue, argue that the measure could still undermine individual privacy. They also fear that, despite the new restrictions on how data is collected and stored, it could still be used to track people and for marketing purposes.
The BBC adds that the UK government also announced plans earlier this week to introduce its own digital ID, "which would be mandatory for employment. The proposed British digital ID would have fewer intended uses than the Swiss version, but has still raised concerns about privacy and data security."
The Guardian reports:
The referendum came soon after the UK government announced plans for a digital ID card, which would sit in the digital wallets of smartphones, using state-of-the-art encryption. More than 1.6 million people have signed a petition opposing e-ID cards, which would be mandatory for people working in the UK by 2029.
Thanks to long-time Slashdot reader schwit1 for sharing the news.
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2025-09-28 19:37:00 UTC

Facebook and Instagram Offer UK Users an Ad-Stopping Subscription Fee
"Facebook and Instagram owner Meta is launching paid subscriptions for users who do not want to see adverts in the UK," reports the BBC:
The company said it would start notifying users in the coming weeks to let them choose whether to subscribe to its platforms if they wish to use them without seeing ads. EU users of its platforms can already pay a fee starting from €5.99 (£5) a month to see no ads — but subscriptions will start from £2.99 a month for UK users.
"It will give people in the UK a clear choice about whether their data is used for personalised advertising, while preserving the free access and value that the ads-supported internet creates for people, businesses and platforms," Meta said. But UK users will not have an option to not pay and see "less personalised" adverts — a feature Meta added for EU users after regulators raised concerns...
Meta said its own model would see its subscription for no ads cost £2.99 a month on the web or £3.99 a month on iOS and Android apps — with the higher fee to offset cuts taken from transactions by Apple and Google... [Meta] reiterated its critical stance on the EU on Friday, saying its regulations were creating a worse experience for users and businesses unlike the UK's "more pro-growth and pro-innovation regulatory environment".
"Meta said its own model would see its subscription for no ads cost £2.99 a month on the web or £3.99 a month on iOS and Android apps," according to the BBC, "with the higher fee to offset cuts taken from transactions by Apple and Google."
Even users not paying for an ad-free experience have "tools and settings that empower people to control their ads experience," according to Meta's announcement. The include Ad Preferences which influences data used to inform ads including Activity Information from Ad Partners. "We also have tools in our products that explain 'Why am I seeing this ad?' and how people can manage their ad experience. We do not sell personal data to advertisers."
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2025-09-28 18:26:00 UTC

Will AI Mean Bring an End to Top Programming Language Rankings?
IEEE Spectrum ranks the popularity of programming languages — but is there a problem? Programmers "are turning away from many of these public expressions of interest. Rather than page through a book or search a website like Stack Exchange for answers to their questions, they'll chat with an LLM like Claude or ChatGPT in a private conversation."
And with an AI assistant like Cursor helping to write code, the need to pose questions in the first place is significantly decreased. For example, across the total set of languages evaluated in the Top Programming Languages, the number of questions we saw posted per week on Stack Exchange in 2025 was just 22% of what it was in 2024...
However, an even more fundamental problem is looming in the wings... In the same way most developers today don't pay much attention to the instruction sets and other hardware idiosyncrasies of the CPUs that their code runs on, which language a program is vibe coded in ultimately becomes a minor detail... [T]he popularity of different computer languages could become as obscure a topic as the relative popularity of railway track gauges... But if an AI is soothing our irritations with today's languages, will any new ones ever reach the kind of critical mass needed to make an impact? Will the popularity of today's languages remain frozen in time?
That's ultimately the larger question. "how much abstraction and anti-foot-shooting structure will a sufficiently-advanced coding AI really need...?"
[C]ould we get our AIs to go straight from prompt to an intermediate language that could be fed into the interpreter or compiler of our choice? Do we need high-level languages at all in that future? True, this would turn programs into inscrutable black boxes, but they could still be divided into modular testable units for sanity and quality checks. And instead of trying to read or maintain source code, programmers would just tweak their prompts and generate software afresh.
What's the role of the programmer in a future without source code? Architecture design and algorithm selection would remain vital skills... How should a piece of software be interfaced with a larger system? How should new hardware be exploited? In this scenario, computer science degrees, with their emphasis on fundamentals over the details of programming languages, rise in value over coding boot camps.
Will there be a Top Programming Language in 2026? Right now, programming is going through the biggest transformation since compilers broke onto the scene in the early 1950s. Even if the predictions that much of AI is a bubble about to burst come true, the thing about tech bubbles is that there's always some residual technology that survives. It's likely that using LLMs to write and assist with code is something that's going to stick. So we're going to be spending the next 12 months figuring out what popularity means in this new age, and what metrics might be useful to measure.
Having said that, IEEE Spectrum still ranks programming language popularity three ways — based on use among working programmers, demand from employers, and "trending" in the zeitgeist — using seven different metrics.
Their results? Among programmers, "we see that once again Python has the top spot, with the biggest change in the top five being JavaScript's drop from third place last year to sixth place this year. As JavaScript is often used to create web pages, and vibe coding is often used to create websites, this drop in the apparent popularity may be due to the effects of AI... In the 'Jobs' ranking, which looks exclusively at what skills employers are looking for, we see that Python has also taken 1st place, up from second place last year, though SQL expertise remains an incredibly valuable skill to have on your resume."
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2025-09-28 16:34:00 UTC

Researchers (Including Google) are Betting on Virtual 'World Models' for Better AI
"Today's AIs are book smart," reports the Wall Street Journal. "Everything they know they learned from available language, images and videos. To evolve further, they have to get street smart."
And that requires "world models," which are "gaining momentum in frontier research and could allow technology to take on new roles in our lives."
The key is enabling AI to learn from their environments and faithfully represent an abstract version of them in their "heads," the way humans and animals do. To do it, developers need to train AIs by using simulations of the world. Think of it like learning to drive by playing "Gran Turismo" or learning to fly from "Microsoft Flight Simulator." These world models include all the things required to plan, take actions and make predictions about the future, including physics and time... There's an almost unanimous belief among AI pioneers that world models are crucial to creating next-generation AI. And many say they will be critical to someday creating better-than-human "artificial general intelligence," or AGI. Stanford University professor and AI "godmother" Fei-Fei Li has raised $230 million to launch world-model startup World Labs...
Google DeepMind researchers set out to create a system that could generate real-world simulations with an unprecedented level of fidelity. The result, Genie 3 — which is still in research preview and not publicly available — can generate photo-realistic, open-world virtual landscapes from nothing more than a text prompt. You can think of Genie 3 as a way to quickly generate what's essentially an open-world videogame that can be as faithful to the real world as you like. It's a virtual space in which a baby AI can endlessly play, make mistakes and learn what it needs to do to achieve its goals, just as a baby animal or human does in the real world. That experimentation process is called reinforcement learning. Genie 3 is part of a system that could help train the AI that someday pilots robots, self-driving cars and other "embodied" AIs, says project co-lead Jack Parker-Holder. And the environments could be filled with people and obstacles: An AI could learn how to interact with humans by observing them moving around in that virtual space, he adds.
"It isn't clear whether all these bets will lead to the superintelligence that corporate leaders predict," the article concedes.
"But in the short term, world models could make AIs better at tasks at which they currently falter, especially in spatial reasoning."
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2025-09-28 15:34:00 UTC

Million-Year-Old Skull Rewrites Human Evolution, Scientists Claim
The BBC reports that a million-year-old human skull found in China suggests that the human species "began to emerge at least half a million years earlier than we thought, researchers are claiming in a new study."
It also shows that we co-existed with other sister species, including Neanderthals, for much longer than we've come to believe, they say.
The scientists claim their analysis "totally changes" our understanding of human evolution and, if correct, it would certainly rewrite a key early chapter in our history. But other experts in a field where disagreement over our emergence on the planet is rife, say that the new study's conclusions are plausible but far from certain.
The discovery, published in the leading scientific journal Science, shocked the research team, which included scientists from a university in China and the UK's Natural History Museum. "From the very beginning, when we got the result, we thought it was unbelievable. How could that be so deep into the past?" said Prof Xijun Ni of Fudan University, who co-led the analysis. "But we tested it again and again to test all the models, use all the methods, and we are now confident about the result, and we're actually very excited."
Thanks to long-time Slashdot reader sinij for sharing the article.
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2025-09-28 14:34:00 UTC

California Now Has 68% More EV Chargers Than Gas Nozzles, Continues Green Energy Push
Six months ago California had 48% more public and "shared" private EV chargers than gasoline nozzles. (In March California had 178,000 public and shared private EV chargers, versus about 120,000 gas nozzles.)
Since then they've added 23,000 more public/shared charging ports — and announced this week that there's now 68% more EV charger ports than the number of gasoline nozzles statewide. "Thanks to the state's ever-expanding charger network, 94% of Californians live within 10 minutes of an EV charger," according to the announcement from the state's energy policy agency. And the California Energy Commission staff told CleanTechnica they expect more chargers in the future. "We are watching increased private investment by consortiums like IONNA and OEMs like Rivian, Ford, and others that are actively installing EV charging stations throughout the state."
Clean Technica notes in 2019, the state had roughly 42,000 charging ports and now there are a little over 200,000. (And today there's about 800,000 home EV chargers.)
This week California announced another milestone: that in 2024 nearly 23% of all the state's new truck sales — that's trucks, buses, and vans — were zero-emission vehicles. (The state subsidizes electric trucks — $200 million was requested on the program's first day.)
Greenhouse gas emissions in California are down 20% since 2000 — even as the state's GDP increased 78% in that same time period all while becoming the world's fourth largest economy.
The state also continues to set clean energy records. California was powered by two-thirds clean energy in 2023, the latest year for which data is available — the largest economy in the world to achieve this level of clean energy. The state has run on 100% clean electricity for some part of the day almost every day this year.
"Last year, California ran on 100% clean electricity for the equivalent of 51 days," notes another announcement, which points out California has 15,763 MW of battery storage capacity — roughly a third of the amount projected to be needed by 2045.
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2025-09-28 11:34:00 UTC

Mistral's New Plan for Improving Its AI Models: Training Data from Enterprises
Paris-based AI giant Mistral "is pushing to improve its models," reports the Wall Street Journal, "by looking inside legacy enterprises that hold some of the world's last untapped data reserves...."
Mistral's approach will be to form partnerships with enterprises to further train existing models on their own proprietary data, a phenomenon known as post-training... [At Dutch chip-equipment company ASML], Mistral embeds its own solutions architects, applied AI engineers and applied scientists into the enterprise to work on improving models with the company's data. [While Mistral sells some models under a commercial license], this co-creation strategy allows Mistral to make money off the services side of its business and afford to give away its open source AI free of charge, while improving model performance for the customer with more industry context...
This kind of hand-holding approach is necessary for most companies to tackle AI successfully, said Arthur Mensch [co-founder and chief executive of Mistral]. "The very high-tech companies [and] a couple of banks are able to do it on their own. But when it comes to getting some [return on investment] from use cases, in general, they fail," he said. Mensch attributes that in part to a mismatch between expectations and reality. "The curse of AI is that it looks like magic. So you can very quickly make something that looks amazing to your boss," but it doesn't scale or work more broadly, he said. In other cases, enterprises simply might not know what to focus on. For example, it is a mistake to think equipping all employees with a chatbot will create meaningful gains on the bottom line, he said. Mensch said to fully take advantage of AI, companies will have to rethink organizational structures. With information flowing more easily, they could require fewer middle managers, for example.
There is a lot of work yet to do, Mensch said, but in a large sense, the future of AI development now lies inside the enterprise itself. "This is a pattern that we've seen with many of our customers: At some point, the capabilities of the frontier model can only be increased if we partner," he said.
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2025-09-28 07:34:00 UTC

Should Salesforce's Tableau Be Granted a Patent On 'Visualizing Hierarchical Data'?
Long-time Slashdot reader theodp says America's Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) has granted a patent to Tableau (Salesforce's visual analytics platform) — for a patent covering "Data Processing For Visualizing Hierarchical Data":
"A provided data model may include a tree specification that declares parent-child relationships between objects in the data model. In response to a query associated with objects in the data model: employing the parent-child relationships to determine a tree that includes parent objects and child objects from the objects based on the parent-child relationships; determining a root object based on the query and the tree; traversing the tree from the root object to visit the child objects in the tree; determining partial results based on characteristics of the visited child objects such that the partial results are stored in an intermediate table; and providing a response to the query that includes values based on the intermediate table and the partial results."
A set of 15 simple drawings is provided to support the legal and tech gobbledygook of the invention claims. A person can have a manager, Tableau explains in Figures 5-6 of its accompanying drawings, and that manager can also manage and be managed by other people. Not only that, Tableau illustrates in Figures 7-10 that computers can be used to count how many people report to a manager. How does this magic work, you ask? Well, you "generate [a] tree" [Fig. 13] and "traverse a tree" [Fig. 15], Tableau explains. But wait, there's more — you can also display the people who report to a manager in multi-level or nested pie charts (aka Sunburst charts), Tableau demonstrates in Fig. 11.
Interestingly, Tableau released a "pre-Beta" Sunburst chart type in late April 2023 but yanked it at the end of June 2023 (others have long-supported Sunburst charts, including Plotly). So, do you think Tableau should be awarded a patent in 2025 on a concept that has roots in circa-1921 Sunburst charts and tree algorithms taught to first-year CS students in circa-1975 Data Structures courses?
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2025-09-28 03:34:00 UTC

Firefox Will Offer Visual Searching on Images With AI-Powered Google Lens
"We've decided to support image-based search," announced the product manager for Firefox Search. Powered by the AI-driven Google Lens search technology, they promise the new feature offers "a frictionless, fast, and a curiosity-sparking way to (as Google puts it) 'search what you see'."
With just a right-click on any image, you'll be able to:
- Find similar products, places, or objects
- Copy, translate, or search text from images
- Get inspiration for learning, travel, or shopping
Look for the new "Search Image with Google Lens" option in your right-click menu (tagged with a NEW badge at first). This is a desktop-only feature, and it will start gradually rolling out worldwide. Note: Google must be set as your default search engine for this feature to appear.
We'll be listening closely to your feedback as we roll it out. Some of the things we're wondering about:
Does the placement in the context menu align with your expectations?
Would you prefer the option to choose your visual search provider?
Where else would you like entry points to visual search (e.g. when you open a new tab, in the address bar, on mobile devices, etc.)
We can't wait to hear your thoughts as the rollout begins!
Some thoughts from WebProNews:
Mozilla emphasizes that this is an opt-in feature, giving users control over activation, which aligns with the company's longstanding commitment to privacy and user agency.
Yet, for industry observers, this partnership with Google raises intriguing questions about competitive dynamics in the browser space, where Firefox has historically positioned itself as an independent alternative to Chrome... This move comes at a time when browsers are increasingly becoming platforms for AI-driven enhancements, as evidenced by recent updates in competitors like Microsoft's Edge, which integrates Copilot AI. Mozilla's decision to leverage Google Lens rather than developing an in-house solution could be seen as a pragmatic step to accelerate feature parity, especially given Firefox's smaller market share. Insiders note that by tapping into established technologies, Mozilla can focus resources on core strengths like privacy protections, potentially attracting users disillusioned with data-heavy ecosystems... While mobile users might feel left out, the phased rollout over the next few weeks allows for feedback loops through community channels, a hallmark of Mozilla's open-source ethos.
Data from similar integrations in other browsers suggests visual search can boost engagement by 15-20%, per industry reports, though Mozilla has not disclosed specific metrics yet... Looking ahead, Mozilla's strategy appears geared toward incremental innovations that bolster user retention without alienating its privacy-focused base. If successful, this could help Firefox claw back some ground against Chrome's dominance, estimated at over 60% market share. For now, the feature's gradual deployment invites ongoing dialogue, underscoring Mozilla's community-driven model in an industry often criticized for top-down decisions.
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2025-09-28 01:34:00 UTC

When This EV Company Went Bankrupt, Its Customers Launched a Nonprofit to Keep Their Cars Running
Cristian Fleming paid around $70,000 for one of Fisker Ocean's electric mid-size crossover SUVs. Seven months later the company filed for bankruptcy in June of 2024, reports the Verge, "having only delivered 11,000 vehicles."
"Early adopters were left with cars plagued by battery failures, glitchy software, inconsistent key fobs, and door handles that did not always open. With the company gone, there was no way to fix any issues."
Regulators logged dozens of complaints as replacement parts vanished. Passionate owners who spent top dollar on high-end trims saw their cars reduced to expensive driveway ornaments.
Rather than accept defeat, thousands of Ocean owners have organized into their own makeshift car company. The Fisker Owners Association (FOA) is a nonprofit that's launched third-party apps, built a global parts supply chain, and came together around a future for their orphaned vehicles. It's part car club, part tech startup, part survival mission. Fleming now serves as the organization's president... FOA calls itself the first entirely owner-controlled EV fleet in history. So far, 4,055 Ocean owners have signed up, paying $550 a year in dues that the group estimates will raise around $3 million annually, about 0.1 percent of Fisker's peak valuation. Only verified Ocean owners can become full members, but anyone can donate.
The grassroots effort has precedent — DeLorean diehards and Saab enthusiasts have kept their favorite brands alive after factory closures. But those efforts focused on preserving aging vehicles. FOA is attempting something different: real-time software updates and hardware improvements for a connected, two-year-old EV fleet... The organization has spawned three separate companies. Tsunami Automotive handles parts in North America while Tidal Wave covers Europe, scavenging insurance auctions and contracting with tooling manufacturers to reproduce components. UnderCurrent Automotive, run by former Google and Apple engineers, focuses on software solutions.
UnderCurrent's first product is OceanLink Pro, a third-party mobile app now used by over 1,200 members that restores basic EV features, such as remote battery monitoring and climate control. A companion device called OceanLink Pulse adds wireless CarPlay and Android Auto, with plans for future upgrades including keyless entry. "Those are things you would have expected to be in a $70,000 luxury car," says Clint Bagley [FOA's treasurer]. "But, you know, we're happy to provide what the billion-dollar automaker apparently couldn't."
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2025-09-27 19:34:00 UTC

Bundler's Lead Maintainer Asserts Trademark in Ongoing Struggle with Ruby Central
After the nonprofit Ruby Central removed all RubyGems' maintainers from its GitHub repository, André Arko — who helped build Bundler — wrote a new blog post on Thursday "detailing Bundler's relationship with Ruby Central," according to this update from The New Stack.
"In the last few weeks, Ruby Central has suddenly asserted that they alone own Bundler," he wrote. "That simply isn't true. In order to defend the reputation of the team of maintainers who have given so much time and energy to the project, I have registered my existing trademark on the Bundler project."
He adds that trademarks do not affect copyright, which stays with the original contributors unchanged. "Trademarks only impact one thing: Who is allowed say that what they make is named 'Bundler,'" he wrote. "Ruby Central is welcome to the code, just like everyone else. They are not welcome to the project name that the Bundler maintainers have painstakingly created over the last 15 years."
He is, however, not seeking the trademark for himself, noting that the "idea of Bundler belongs to the Ruby community." "Once there is a Ruby organization that is accountable to the maintainers, and accountable to the community, with openly and democratically elected board members, I commit to transfer my trademark to that organization," he said. "I will not license the trademark, and will instead transfer ownership entirely. Bundler should belong to the community, and I want to make sure that is true for as long as Bundler exists."
The blog It's FOSS also has an update on Spinel, the new worker-owned collective founded by Arko, Samuel Giddins [who Giddins led RubyGems security efforts], and Kasper Timm Hansen (who served served on the Rails core team from 2016 to 2022 and was one of its top contributors):
These guys aren't newcomers but some of the architects behind Ruby's foundational infrastructure. Their flagship offering is rv ["the Ruby swiss army knife"], a tool that aims to replace the fragmented Ruby tooling ecosystem. It promises to [in the future] handle everything from rvm, rbenv, chruby, bundler, rubygems, and others — all at once while redefining how Ruby development tools should work... Spinel operates on retainer agreements with companies needing Ruby expertise instead of depending on sponsors who can withdraw support or demand control. This model maintains independence while ensuring sustainability for the maintainers.
The Register had reported Thursday:
Spinel's 'rv' project aims to supplant elements of RubyGems and Bundler with a more modular, version-aware manager. Some in the Ruby community have already accused core Rails figures of positioning Spinel as a threat. For example, Rafael FranÃa of Shopify commented that admins of the new project should not be trusted to avoid "sabotaging rubygems or bundler."
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2025-09-27 18:34:00 UTC

Did Microsoft Hide Key Data Flow Information In Plain Sight?
An anonymous reader shared this report from Computer Weekly:
Policing data hosted in Microsoft's hyperscale cloud infrastructure could be processed in more than 100 countries, but the tech giant is obfuscating this information from its customers, Computer Weekly can reveal. According to documents released by the Scottish Police Authority (SPA) under freedom of information (FoI) rules, Microsoft refused to hand over crucial information about its international data flows to the SPA and Police Scotland when asked...
The tech giant also refused to disclose its own risk assessments into the transfer of UK policing data to other jurisdictions, including China and others deemed "hostile" in the DPIA documents. This means Police Scotland and the SPA — which are jointly rolling out Office 365 — are unable to satisfy the law enforcement-specific data protection rules laid out in Part Three of the Data Protection Act 2018 (DPA18), which places strict limits on the transfer of policing data outside the UK. The same documents also contain an admission from Microsoft — given while simultaneously refusing to divulge key information about data flows — that it is unable to guarantee the sovereignty of policing data held and processed within its O365 infrastructure. This echoes the statements senior Microsoft representatives made to the French senate in June 2025, in which they admitted the company cannot guarantee the sovereignty of European data stored and processed in its services generally.
The revelation that Microsoft may access customer data from more than 100 countries is a result of the correspondence previously disclosed under Freedom of Information and reported on by Computer Weekly... All in all, an analysis of Microsoft's distributed documentation — conducted by independent security consultant Owen Sayers and shared with Computer Weekly — suggests that Microsoft personnel or contractors can remotely access the data from 105 different countries, using 148 different sub-processors. Despite technically being public, Sayers highlighted how this information is not transparently laid out for Microsoft customers, and is distributed across different documents contained in non-indexed webpages.... "[A]ny normal amount of due diligence — even if it is conducted by skilled persons will likely fail to see the full scope of offshoring in play," he said...
Microsoft did not contest the accuracy of the remote access location figures cited by Computer Weekly in this story.
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2025-09-27 17:34:00 UTC

Hugging Face Researchers Warn AI-Generated Video Consumes Much More Power Than Expected
"Researchers have found that the carbon footprint of generative AI-based tools that can turn text prompts into images and videos is far worse than we previously thought," writes Futurism:
As detailed in a new paper, researchers from the open-source AI platform Hugging Face found that the energy demands of text-to-video generators quadruple when the length of a generated video doubles — indicating that the power required for increasingly sophisticated generations doesn't scale linearly. For instance, a six-second AI video clip consumes four times as much energy as a three-second clip.
"These findings highlight both the structural inefficiency of current video diffusion pipelines and the urgent need for efficiency-oriented design," the researchers concluded in their paper... Fortunately, there are ways to slim down those demands, including intelligent caching, the reusing of existing AI generations, and "pruning," meaning the sifting out of inefficient examples from training datasets.
The Hugging Face researchers gave their paper a cheeky title. "Video Killed the Energy Budget: Characterizing the Latency and Power Regimes of Open Text-to-Video Mode."
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2025-09-27 16:34:00 UTC

BYD's All-Electric Hypercar Hits 308 MPH, Becomes Fastest Car in Production
Electric powertrains allow for "crazy fast acceleration figures," reports Car and Driver, as well as "huge power numbers." And now a Chinese luxury electric car brand owned by BYD Auto "just hit a top speed of 308.4 mph, making it not only the fastest electric car on the planet, but the fastest car. Period."
Engadget reports that the U9 Xtreme "is packed with four motors that produce just under 3,000 horsepower. The electric hypercar also runs on one of the world's first 1,200V platforms, which offers better performance and efficiency, along with some weight reduction." And Car and Driver adds that "Other changes to achieve the speed include dropping the wheel size from 21 to 20 inches, narrowing the front track, and adding wider, semi-slick track tires at the front of the car."
One small caveat that doesn't lessen the impressiveness of the feat is that while the U9 Xtreme does classify as a production model, it barely does. That's because BYD is planning to limit production of the top-speed version of the U9 to no more than 30 units.
The car hit its "facemelting" top speed during a livestream at Germany's Automotive Testing Papenburg, reports Engadget.
Thanks to long-time Slashdot reader hackingbear for sharing the news.
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2025-09-27 15:34:00 UTC

NASA's New Mission Will Try to Map the Heliosphere After Voyager's Exit
The heliosphere "plays a major role in why life is possible on our planet," reports CNN, "and how it perhaps once existed on others such as Mars." (Basically solar winds create "a constant flow of charged particles" that form "an enormous bubble that protects the planets in our solar system from cosmic radiation permeating the Milky Way".)
NASA says the heliosphere's boundary is three times the distance between Earth and Pluto. (After leaving the heliosphere NASA's Voyager probes collected key data about the heliosphere.) But now there's a new mission to investigate "how that solar wind interacts with interstellar space at the boundary of the heliosphere," CNN reports — called the Interstellar Mapping and Acceleration Probe (or IMAP):
The spacecraft's 10 instruments will also fill gaps in the existing map of the heliosphere, pieced together from data collected by previous missions, and help further explain how the heliosphere largely shields our solar system from damaging cosmic rays, the most highly energetic particles in the universe. Along with two other space weather missions that lifted off aboard the same rocket on Wednesday, IMAP will help scientists better predict when solar storms unleashed by the sun could affect our planet. When aimed at Earth, harsh radiation from the storms, also known as space weather, can pose risks to astronauts on the International Space Station as well as interfere with communications, the electric power grid, navigation, and radio and satellite operations.
"This next set of missions is the ultimate cosmic carpool," said Dr. Joe Westlake, director of NASA's Heliophysics Division, during a news conference on Sunday. "They will provide unprecedented insight into space weather. Every human on Earth, as well as nearly every system involved in space exploration and human needs, is affected by space weather...." The IBEX, or Interstellar Boundary Explorer, satellite has been mapping the heliosphere since launching in 2008. But IMAP can explore and map the boundaries of the heliosphere like never before because it has instruments with faster imaging that are capable of 30 times higher resolution. Once it reaches an orbit about 1 million miles (1.6 million kilometers) from Earth in about three months, IMAP will also capture observations of the solar wind in real time and measure particles that travel from the sun, study the heliosphere's boundary between 6 billion and 9 billion miles (9.7 billion to 14.5 billion kilometers) away, and even collect data from interstellar space.
Also launching was the SWFO-L1 mission, which CNN says is "intended to act as a solar storm detector, providing early warnings to protect astronauts in low-Earth orbit and satellites that provide critical communications on Earth. It's a tool that will be even more necessary as astronauts venture farther into deep space."
NASA streamed the launch live on YouTube.
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2025-09-27 14:34:00 UTC

YouTube Music is Testing AI Hosts That Will Interrupt Your Tunes
YouTube's new "Labs" program plans to "offer a glimpse of the AI features it's developing for YouTube Music," reports Ars Technica.
But Ars Technica adds that this future "starts with AI 'hosts' that will chime in while you're listening to music. Yes, really." (YouTube says the AI aims to "deepen your listening experience"...)
The "Beyond the Beat" host will break in every so often with relevant stories, trivia, and commentary about your musical tastes. YouTube says this feature will appear when you are listening to mixes and radio stations. The experimental feature is intended to be a bit like having a radio host drop some playful banter while cueing up the next song. It sounds a bit like Spotify's AI DJ, but the YouTube AI doesn't create playlists like Spotify's robot...
After joining, the YouTube Music app will get a new button on the Now Playing screen with the familiar Gemini sparkle logo. Tapping that will allow you to snooze the commentary for an hour or the remainder of the day. There is no option to completely disable the AI host in the app, so you'll have to opt out of the test if you decide Beyond the Beat is more trouble than it's worth.
YouTube calls it "a way for users to take our cutting edge AI experiments for a test drive," promises that "a limited number of US-based participants can test early prototypes and experiments and influence the future of YouTube. Sign up at YouTube.com/New."
Ars Technica believes "This is still generative AI, which comes with the risk of hallucinations and low-quality slop, neither of which belongs in your music. That said, Google's Audio Overviews are often surprisingly good in small doses."
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2025-09-26 23:50:00 UTC

Videogame Giant Electronic Arts Nears Roughly $50 Billion Deal to Go Private
Videogame maker Electronic Arts is in advanced talks to go private in a roughly $50 billion deal that would likely be the largest leveraged buyout of all time, WSJ is reporting, citing people familiar with the matter. From the report: A group of investors including private-equity firm Silver Lake, Saudi Arabia's Public Investment Fund and Jared Kushner's investment firm Affinity Partners could unveil a deal for the publisher best known for its sports games as soon as next week, the people said.
EA has long made games including FIFA, the soccer videogame now known as FC, and the football game Madden NFL as well as The Sims and other titles. The California-based company had a market value of around $43 billion before The Wall Street Journal reported on the talks, which sent the stock up nearly 15% Friday. Its shares closed at $193.35, a record high, giving the company a market value of around $48 billion.
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2025-09-26 19:20:00 UTC

Abu Dhabi Royal Family To Take Stake In TikTok US
Abu Dhabi's MGX (chaired by Sheikh Tahnoon bin Zayed Al Nahyan) is set to take a 15% stake in TikTok's U.S. business after Donald Trump signed an executive order Thursday night brokering a deal that puts the social media company under U.S. ownership. "Larry Ellison's Oracle, the private equity group Silver Lake and Abu Dhabi's MGX will control roughly 45% of TikTok US," adds The Guardian. "Overall, American companies are expected to control just over 65% of the company, with Trump also naming the personal computer pioneer Michael Dell and Rupert Murdoch's Fox as other investors." From the report: "[TikTok US] will be majority-owned and controlled by United States persons and will no longer be controlled by any foreign adversary," Trump said. "We have American investors taking it over, running it [who are] highly sophisticated, including Larry Ellison. Great investors, the biggest. They don't get bigger. This is going to be American-operated all the way."
TikTok's Chinese owner, ByteDance, will retain a 19.9% stake in the US operation. China has not publicly made clear whether it will approve the deal, although Trump said that he "had a good talk" with the Chinese president, Xi Jinping, who "gave us the go-ahead."
JD Vance, the US vice-president, said the deal valued TikTok US at $14 billion. "There was some resistance on the Chinese side," Vance said. "But the fundamental thing that we wanted to accomplish is that we wanted to keep TikTok operating but we wanted to make sure that protected Americans' data privacy as required by law." He added: "This deal really does mean that Americans can use TikTok, but actually use it with more confidence than in the past. Because their data is going to be secure and it's not going to be used as a propaganda weapon against our fellow citizens."
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2025-09-26 16:40:00 UTC

Streaming Is Overtaking Theaters For Movie Watchers, an AP-NORC Poll Finds
alternative_right writes: Americans are more likely to watch newly released movies from the comfort of their own homes instead of heading out to a theater, according to a new poll.
About three-quarters of U.S. adults said they watched a new movie on streaming instead of in the theater at least once in the past year, according to the survey from The Associated Press-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research, including about 3 in 10 who watched new movies on streaming at least once a month.
Meanwhile, about two-thirds of Americans said that they've watched a recently released movie in a theater in the past year, and only 16% said they went at least once a month. The results suggest that, on the whole, American moviegoers are more likely to stream a film than see it in the theaters, a shifting tide that was only accelerated during the COVID-19 pandemic and its aftermath.
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2025-09-26 15:22:00 UTC

Raspberry Pi's Upgraded Keyboard Computer Gets RGB Lighting, Mechanical Switches and SSD Storage
Raspberry Pi has launched the Raspberry Pi 500 Plus for $200, more than doubling the $90 price of the standard model. The keyboard computer now includes an M.2 2280 SSD socket alongside the SD card slot, 256GB of storage and 16GB of LPDDR4x-4267 RAM instead of 8GB. The company added Gateron KS-33 Blue mechanical switches, replaceable low-profile keycaps finished to allow RGB lighting to shine through and an RP2040 microcontroller running QMK firmware.
The 500 Plus retains Wi-Fi 5, Bluetooth, gigabit Ethernet, two micro HDMI ports, three USB-A ports, and USB-C power from the base model. A $220 Desktop Kit bundles necessary cables, power supply, and mouse.
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2025-09-26 00:02:00 UTC

Nintendo of America Boss Doug Bowser Is Retiring
Doug Bowser, president of Nintendo of America since 2019, will retire at the end of 2025 after overseeing major expansions including theme parks, films, and the launch of the Switch 2. He will be succeeded by Devon Pritchard, while Satoru Shibata will also take on a CEO role at Nintendo of America.
"One of my earliest video game experiences was playing the arcade version of Donkey Kong," Bowser said in a statement. "Since that time, all things Nintendo have continued to be a passion for both me and my family. Leading Nintendo of America has been the honor of a lifetime, and I am proud of what our team has accomplished in both business results and the experiences we've created for consumers." Pritchard said that "Doug has been a fantastic mentor" and that he looks forward to "building on the incredible foundation he has helped establish."
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2025-09-25 22:40:00 UTC

Google Asks US Supreme Court To Freeze App Store Injunction In Epic Games Case
Google has asked the U.S. Supreme Court to pause a judge's order requiring major changes to its Play Store after losing an antitrust case to Epic Games. The injunction would force Google to allow rival app stores, external billing links, and broader competition -- changes Google says could harm users and developers. Epic argues they're necessary to break Google's monopoly. Reuters reports: Google said it has urged the U.S. Supreme Court to halt key parts of a judge's order that would force major changes to its app store Play, as it prepares to appeal a decision in a lawsuit brought by "Fortnite" maker Epic Games. Google called the judge's order unprecedented, and said it would cause reputational harm, safety and security risks and put the company at a competitive disadvantage if allowed to take effect, according to a filing, opens new tab provided late on Wednesday by Google, which said it had submitted it to the court. [...]
Google in its Supreme Court filing said that the changes will have enormous consequences for more than 100 million U.S. Android users and 500,000 developers. It asked the court to decide by October 17 whether to put the order on hold. Google said it plans to file its appeal to the Supreme Court by October 27, which could allow the justices to take up the case during their nine-month term that begins on October 6.
Epic in a statement said Google is relying on what it called "flawed security claims" to justify its control over Android devices. "The court's injunction should go into effect as ordered so consumers and developers can benefit from competition, choices and lower prices," Epic said. The jury, siding with Epic in the trial, found that Google illegally stifled competition. Donato subsequently issued the order directing Google to make changes to its app store.
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2025-09-25 20:03:00 UTC

Amazon Blamed AI For Layoffs, Then Hired Cheap H1-B Workers, Senators Allege
An anonymous reader shares a report: Senators are demanding answers from Big Tech companies accused of "filing thousands of H-1B skilled labor visa petitions after conducting mass layoffs of American employees." In letters sent to Amazon, Meta, Apple, Google, and Microsoft -- among some of the largest sponsors of H-1B visas -- Senators Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa) and Dick Durbin (D-Ill.) requested "information and data from each company regarding their recruitment and hiring practices, as well as any variation in salary and benefits between H-1B visa holders and American employees."
The letters came shortly after Grassley sent a letter to Department of Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem requesting that DHS stop "issuing work authorizations to student visa holders." According to Grassley, "foreign student work authorizations put America at risk of technological and corporate espionage," in addition to allegedly "contributing to rising unemployment rates among college-educated Americans."
[...] In the letters to tech firms, senators emphasized that the unemployment rate in America's tech sector is "well above" the overall jobless rate. Amazon perhaps faces the most scrutiny. US Citizenship and Immigration Services data showed that Amazon sponsored the most H-1B visas in 2024 at 14,000, compared to other criticized firms like Microsoft and Meta, which each sponsored 5,000, The Wall Street Journal reported. Senators alleged that Amazon blamed layoffs of "tens of thousands" on the "adoption of generative AI tools," then hired more than 10,000 foreign H-1B employees in 2025.
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2025-09-25 18:01:00 UTC

OpenAI Says GPT-5 Stacks Up To Humans in a Wide Range of Jobs
An anonymous reader shares a report: OpenAI released a new benchmark on Thursday that tests how its AI models perform compared to human professionals across a wide range of industries and jobs. The test, GDPval, is an early attempt at understanding how close OpenAI's systems are to outperforming humans at economically valuable work -- a key part of the company's founding mission to develop artificial general intelligence or AGI.
OpenAI says its found that its GPT-5 model and Anthropic's Claude Opus 4.1 "are already approaching the quality of work produced by industry experts." That's not to say that OpenAI's models are going to start replacing humans in their jobs immediately. Despite some CEOs' predictions that AI will take the jobs of humans in just a few years, OpenAI admits that GDPval today covers a very limited number of tasks people do in their real jobs. However, it is one of the latest ways the company is measuring AI's progress towards this milestone. GDPval is based on nine industries that contribute the most to America's gross domestic product, including domains such as healthcare, finance, manufacturing, and government. The benchmark tests an AI model's performance in 44 occupations among those industries, ranging from software engineers to nurses to journalists.
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2025-09-25 17:20:00 UTC

AI Isn't Replacing Radiologists
Despite AI models outperforming radiologists on benchmark tests since 2017, demand for human radiologists has reached record highs. American diagnostic radiology residency programs offered 1,208 positions this year, up 4% from 2024, while average salaries hit $520,000 -- 48% higher than 2015. Over 700 FDA-cleared radiology AI models exist, yet only 48% of radiologists use AI at all. Models trained on standardized datasets lose up to 20% points accuracy when deployed in different hospitals. Radiologists spend just 36% of their time interpreting images, with the majority devoted to patient communication, teaching, and administrative tasks that current AI cannot perform.
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2025-09-25 15:52:00 UTC

Amazon Reaches $2.5 Billion Settlement With FTC Over 'Deceptive' Prime Program
Amazon will pay $2.5 billion to settle Federal Trade Commission allegations that it duped users into paying for Prime memberships, the regulatory agency announced Thursday. CNBC: The surprise settlement comes as Amazon and the FTC were just three days into the trial in a Seattle federal court. Opening arguments took place on Tuesday. The lawsuit, filed by the FTC in June 2023 under the Biden administration, claimed that Amazon deceived tens of millions of customers into signing up for its Prime subscription program and sabotaged their attempts to cancel it.
Three senior Amazon executives were at risk of being held individually liable if the jury sided with the FTC. Amazon will pay a $1 billion civil penalty to the FTC and will refund $1.5 billion to an estimated 35 million customers who were impacted by "unwanted Prime enrollment or deferred cancellation," the agency said.
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2025-09-25 14:01:00 UTC

Apple Asks EU To Scrap Landmark Digital Competition Law
Apple asked the European Union to scrap its landmark digital competition law on Thursday, arguing that it poses security risks and creates a "worse experience" for consumers. From a report: The US tech giant and the EU have repeatedly locked horns over the bloc's Digital Markets Act (DMA), which Brussels says seeks to make the digital sector in the 27-nation bloc fairer and more open. "The DMA should be repealed while a more appropriate fit for purpose legislative instrument is put in place," Apple said in a formal submission to the European Commission as part of a consultation on the law.
[...] "It's become clear that the DMA is leading to a worse experience for Apple users in the EU," the tech giant said in a blog post accompanying its submission. "It's exposing them to new risks, and disrupting the simple, seamless way their Apple products work together."
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2025-09-25 01:10:00 UTC

Qualcomm Announces Snapdragon X2 Elite and Extreme For Windows PCs
Qualcomm unveiled its Snapdragon X2 Elite and Extreme chips, claiming they're the "fastest and most efficient processors for Windows PCs." Built on 3nm with up to 18 cores and a 5GHz Arm CPU boost, the chips promise 31% more CPU power, up to 2.3x GPU performance, stronger AI processing, and "multi-day battery life," with devices expected in the first half of 2026. The Verge reports: There's also a new 80 TOPS Hexagon NPU, for AI tasks, that offers 37 percent more performance with a 16 percent power consumption improvement, the company claims. Qualcomm's characterizing all of this as a "legendary leap in performance," claiming the Elite Extreme in particular offers "up to 75 percent faster CPU performance" at the same power. But it doesn't say who the competition is, or which chip it was up against, at least not in the press release. And while Qualcomm claims these power savings will lead to "multi-day battery life," that's also what the company said about last year's Snapdragon X Elite.
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2025-09-25 00:50:00 UTC

Neon Pays Users To Record Their Phone Calls, Sell Data To AI Firms
Neon Mobile, now the No. 2 social networking app in Apple's U.S. App Store, pays users up to $30 per day to record their phone calls and sell the data to AI companies. The app claims to only capture one side of a call unless both parties use Neon, but its terms grant sweeping rights over recordings. TechCrunch reports: The app, Neon Mobile, pitches itself as a money-making tool offering "hundreds or even thousands of dollars per year" for access to your audio conversations. Neon's website says the company pays 30 cents per minute when you call other Neon users and up to $30 per day maximum for making calls to anyone else. The app also pays for referrals.
According to Neon's terms of service, the company's mobile app can capture users' inbound and outbound phone calls. However, Neon's marketing claims to only record your side of the call unless it's with another Neon user. That data is being sold to "AI companies," the company's terms of service state, "for the purpose of developing, training, testing, and improving machine learning models, artificial intelligence tools and systems, and related technologies."
Despite what Neon's privacy policy says, its terms include a very broad license to its user data, where Neon grants itself a: "...worldwide, exclusive, irrevocable, transferable, royalty-free, fully paid right and license (with the right to sublicense through multiple tiers) to sell, use, host, store, transfer, publicly display, publicly perform (including by means of a digital audio transmission), communicate to the public, reproduce, modify for the purpose of formatting for display, create derivative works as authorized in these Terms, and distribute your Recordings, in whole or in part, in any media formats and through any media channels, in each instance whether now known or hereafter developed." That leaves plenty of wiggle room for Neon to do more with users' data than it claims. The terms also include an extensive section on beta features, which have no warranty and may have all sorts of issues and bugs. Peter Jackson, cybersecurity and privacy attorney at Greenberg Glusker, told TechCrunch: "Once your voice is over there, it can be used for fraud. Now, this company has your phone number and essentially enough information -- they have recordings of your voice, which could be used to create an impersonation of you and do all sorts of fraud."
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2025-09-25 00:10:00 UTC

Broadcom's Prohibitive VMware Prices Create a Learning 'Barrier,' IT Pro Says
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: When the COVID-19 pandemic forced kids to stay home, educators flocked to VMware, and thousands of school districts adopted virtualization. The technology became a solution for distance learning during the pandemic and after, when events such as bad weather and illness can prevent children from physically attending school. However, the VMware being sold to K-12 schools today differs from the VMware that existed before and during the pandemic. Now a Broadcom business, the platform features higher prices and a business strategy that favors big spenders. This has created unique problems for educational IT departments juggling restrictive budgets and multiple technology vendors with children's needs.
Ars Technica recently spoke with an IT director at a public school district in Indiana. The director requested anonymity for themself and the district out of concern about potential blowback. The director confirmed that the district has five schools and about 3,000 students. The district started using VMware's vSAN, a software-defined storage offering, and the vSphere virtualization platform in 2019. The Indiana school system bought the VMware offerings through a package that combined them with VxRail, which is hyperconverged infrastructure (HCI) hardware that Dell jointly engineered with VMware.
However, like many of VMware customers, the Indiana school district was priced out of VMware after Broadcom's acquisition of the company. The IT director said the district received a quote that was "three to six" times higher than expected. This came as the school district is looking to manage changes in education-related taxes and funding over the next few years. As a result, the district's migration from VMware is taking IT resources from other projects, including ones aimed at improving curriculum. For instance, the Indiana district has been trying to bolster its technology curriculum, the IT director said. One way is through a summer employment program for upperclassmen that teaches how to use real-world IT products, like VMware and Cisco Meraki technologies. The district previously relied on VMware-based virtual machines (VMs) for creating "very easily and accessible" test environments for these students. But the school is no longer able to provide that opportunity, creating a learning "barrier," as the IT director put it. The IT director told Ars that dealing with a migration could be "catastrophic in that that's too much work for one person," adding: "It could be a chokehold, essentially, to where they're going to be basically forced into switching platforms -- maybe before they were anticipating -- or paying exorbitant prices that have skyrocketed for absolutely no reason. Nothing on the software side has changed. It's the same software. There's no features being added. Nobody's benefiting from the higher prices on the education side."
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2025-09-24 22:50:00 UTC

Record-Breaking DDoS Attack Peaks At 22 Tbps and 10 Bpps
Cloudflare blocked the largest-ever DDoS attack against a European network infrastructure company, which peaked at 22.2 Tbps and 10.6 Bpps. The hyper-volumetric attack has been linked to the Aisuru botnet and lasted just 40 seconds, but was double the size of the previous record. SecurityWeek reports: Cloudflare told SecurityWeek that the attack was aimed at a single IP address of an unnamed European network infrastructure company. Cloudflare has yet to determine who was behind the attack, but believes it may have been powered by the Aisuru botnet, which was also linked earlier this year to a massive 6.3 Tbps attack on the website of cybersecurity blogger Brian Krebs. Aisuru has been around for more than a year. The botnet is powered by hacked IoT devices such as routers and DVRs that have been compromised through the exploitation of known and zero-day vulnerabilities.
According to Cloudflare, the 22 Tbps attack was traced to over 404,000 unique source IPs across over 14 ASNs worldwide. "Based on internal analysis using a proprietary system, the source IPs were not spoofed," the company explained. The security firm described it as a UDP carpet bomb attack targeting an average of 31,000 destination ports per second, with a peak of 47k ports, all of a single IP address. Cloudflare revealed in July that the number of DDoS attacks it blocked in the first half of 2025 had already exceeded all the attacks mitigated in 2024.
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2025-09-24 20:10:00 UTC

Microsoft Offers No-Cost Windows 10 Lifeline
Microsoft on Sept 24 announced new options for US and European customers to safely extend the life of the Windows 10 operating system free of charge just days before a key deadline to upgrade to Windows 11. From a report: The US tech giant plans to end support for Windows 10 on Oct 14, a move that has drawn criticism from consumer advocacy groups and sparked concerns among users who fear they will need to purchase new computers to stay protected from cyber threats.
Users who are unable to upgrade or choose to forgo the extended security updates will face increased vulnerability to cyberattacks. In response to these concerns, Microsoft informed European users that essential security updates will be extended for one year at no additional cost, provided they log in with a Microsoft account. Previously, the company had offered a one-year extension of Windows 10 security updates for $30 to users whose hardware is incompatible with Windows 11. In the US, a similar free option will allow users to upload their Windows 10 profiles to Microsoft's backup service and receive security updates for up to one year.
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2025-09-24 17:25:00 UTC

Horror Film's Wedding Scene Digitally Altered for Chinese Audiences
Australian horror film Together, starring Dave Franco and Alison Brie, underwent digital alterations for its mainland China release on September 12. Chinese cinemagoers discovered that a wedding scene between two men had been modified using face-swapping technology to transform one male character into a female appearance. The change only became apparent after side-by-side screenshots from the original and altered versions circulated on social media platforms.
Chinese viewers are expressing outrage over the AI-powered modification, The Guardian reports, citing concerns about creative integrity and the difficulty of detecting such alterations compared to traditional scene cuts. The film's distributor halted the scheduled September 19 general release following the backlash. China's censorship authorities require all imported films to undergo approval before release.
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2025-09-24 16:52:00 UTC

Qualcomm CEO Says He's Seen Google's Android-ChromeOS Merger, Calls It 'Incredible'
Qualcomm CEO Cristiano Amon told attendees at yesterday's Snapdragon Summit opening keynote that he has seen Google's merged Android-ChromeOS platform for PCs. Speaking alongside Google's head of platforms and devices Rick Osterloh, Amon said the software "delivers on the vision of convergence of mobile and PC" and that he "can't wait to have one."
Osterloh confirmed Google is building a common technical foundation for PCs and desktop computing systems that combines Android and ChromeOS. The platform will include Gemini, the full Android AI stack, all Google applications and the Android developer community. "I've seen it, it is incredible," replied Amon excitedly. "It delivers on the vision of convergence of mobile and PC. I can't wait to have one."
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2025-09-24 00:45:00 UTC

Disney+, Hulu Are Hiking Prices Again Next Month
Disney is raising prices again for Disney+, Hulu, and ESPN Select starting October 21, 2025, with most ad-supported tiers going up by $2-3 per month and bundles also seeing increases. It marks the third consecutive year of U.S. streaming price hikes. Variety reports: It's that time of year again, apparently: Disney is raising the prices of its Disney+ and Hulu plans in the U.S., including most bundles, as of next month. The standalone Disney+ with ads service is rising from $9.99 to $11.99/month on Oct. 21, 2025, while the Disney+ Premium (without ads) is going from $15.99 to $18.99/month. The Hulu standalone plan with ads is increasing from $9.99 to $11.99/month as of the same date; the premium version of Hulu with no ads will remain at $18.99 per month.
In addition, the price of ESPN Select (the service formerly known as ESPN+, which has a more limited content lineup than the recently launched ESPN Unlimited all-in app) will increase from $11.99 to $12.99 per month on Oct. 21. For now, the introductory price of the Disney+, Hulu and ESPN Unlimited bundle with ads will remain $29.99 per month (for the first 12 months). It's the third time in three years Disney is raising the prices of the streaming services in the U.S., after price hikes for Disney+ and Hulu in October 2024 and in October 2023. Disney provided notifications of the latest price hikes Tuesday on its customer support sites.
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2025-09-24 00:02:00 UTC

Microsoft Is Reportedly Building An AI Marketplace To Pay Publishers For Content
Microsoft is preparing a Publisher Content Marketplace to pay publishers when their work is used in AI products like Copilot. Neowin reports: Microsoft is reportedly discussing with select US publishers a pilot program for its so-called Publisher Content Marketplace, a system that pays publishers for their content when it gets used by AI products, starting with its own Copilot assistant. The PCM will launch with a limited number of partners before Microsoft hopes to expand the program over time. The company pitched the idea to publishing executives at an invite-only Partner Summit in Monaco last week. Microsoft was allegedly courting them with the message: "You deserve to be paid on the quality of your IP." No concrete launch date for the pilot was shared.
As Axios notes, Microsoft is the first major company to try to build a proper AI marketplace for publishers. Other AI labs like OpenAI have mostly focused on securing one-off licensing deals instead of building a platform for ongoing transactions. Companies like Cloudflare are also working on a more technical, network-level solution to this problem.
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2025-09-23 22:00:00 UTC

YouTube Reinstating Creators Banned For COVID-19, Election Content
YouTube's parent company, Alphabet, said it will reinstate creators previously banned for spreading COVID-19 misinformation and false election claims, citing free expression and shifting policy guidelines. The Hill reports: "Reflecting the Company's commitment to free expression, YouTube will provide an opportunity for all creators to rejoin the platform if the Company terminated their channels for repeated violations of COVID-19 and elections integrity policies that are no longer in effect," the company said in a letter to Rep. Jim Jordan (R-Ohio), chair of the House Judiciary Committee. "YouTube values conservative voices on its platform and recognizes that these creators have extensive reach and play an important role in civic discourse. The Company recognizes these creators are among those shaping today's online consumption, landing 'must-watch' interviews, giving viewers the chance to hear directly from politicians, celebrities, business leaders, and more," it added in the five-page correspondence.
Alphabet blamed the Biden administration for limiting political speech on the platform. "Senior Biden Administration officials, including White House officials, conducted repeated and sustained outreach to Alphabet and pressed the Company regarding certain user-generated content related to the COVID-19 pandemic that did not violate its policies," the letter read. "While the Company continued to develop and enforce its policies independently, Biden Administration officials continued to press the Company to remove non-violative user-generated content," it continued. Guidelines were changed after former President Biden took office and urged platforms to remove content that encouraged citizens to drink bleach to cure COVID-19, as President Trump suggested in 2020, or join insurrection efforts launched on Jan. 6, 2021, to overthrow his 2020 presidential win. But the company said the Biden administration's decisions were "unacceptable" and "wrong," while noting it would forgo future fact-checking mechanisms and instead allow users to add context notes to content.
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2025-09-23 20:02:00 UTC

Journals Infiltrated With 'Copycat' Papers That Can Be Written By AI
An analysis of a literature database finds that text-generating AI tools -- including ChatGPT and Gemini -- can be used to rewrite scientific papers and produce 'copycat' versions that are then passed off as new research. Nature: In a preprint posted on medRxiv on 12 September, researchers identified more than 400 such papers published in 112 journals over the past 4.5 years, and demonstrated that AI-generated biomedicine studies could evade publishers' anti-plagiarism checks.
The study's authors warn that individuals and paper mills -- companies that produce fake papers to order and sell authorships -- might be exploiting publicly available health data sets and using large language models (LLMs) to mass-produce low-quality papers that lack scientific value.
"If left unaddressed, this AI-based approach can be applied to all sorts of open-access databases, generating far more papers than anyone can imagine," says Csaba Szabo, a pharmacologist at the University of Fribourg in Switzerland, who was not involved in the work. "This could open up Pandora's box [and] the literature may be flooded with synthetic papers."
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2025-09-23 18:41:00 UTC

Pope Leo XIV Rejects AI Avatar for Virtual Papal Audiences
Pope Leo XIV declined to authorize an AI avatar that would have provided virtual papal audiences to Catholics worldwide. The first American pontiff rejected the proposal during an interview with papal biographer Elise Allen. "Someone recently asked authorization to create an artificial me so that anybody could sign onto this website and have a personal audience with 'the Pope,'" he said. "This artificial intelligence Pope would give them answers to their questions, and I said, 'I'm not going to authorize that.'"
The Pope expressed broader concerns about AI's societal impact. He warned that automation could leave only a few people able to live meaningful lives while others merely survive. These concerns influenced his papal name choice, taking inspiration from Pope Leo XIII, who authored Rerum novarum addressing workers' rights during the Industrial Revolution. Leo XIV maintained he isn't opposed to technological innovation but believes links between faith, humanity, and science must be preserved.
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2025-09-23 18:02:00 UTC

Quarter of Workers Under 35 Expect AI To Take Their Jobs Within Two Years, Deutsche Bank Survey Finds
Nearly a quarter of workers aged 18-34 fear they'll lose their jobs to AI within two years, according to a Deutsche Bank survey of 10,000 people across the US and major European economies. The survey, conducted from June through August, found 24% of younger respondents scored their concern at 8 or above on a 10-point scale, compared to just 10% among workers 55 and older. Workers anticipate growing AI risk over time. 22% expressed high concern over a five-year horizon versus 18% for the two-year timeframe, the bank wrote in a report, reviewed by Slashdot.
Americans show greater concern than Europeans across all time periods, scoring roughly five percentage points higher. The survey also revealed major differences in AI adoption patterns. The US leads workplace adoption at 56%, while Spain shows the highest home adoption at 68% over three months. Germany and the UK demonstrate contrasting behaviors -- both countries report similar home usage above 50%, but workplace adoption differs significantly at 41% for Germany versus 5% for the UK. Training gaps persist across regions. Only one in four European respondents has received AI training at work compared to nearly one in three Americans, though 52% of Europeans and 54% of Americans want employer-led AI training.
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2025-09-23 16:48:00 UTC

DHS Has Been Collecting US Citizens' DNA for Years
Customs and Border Protection collected DNA from nearly 2,000 US citizens between 2020 and 2024 and sent the samples to the FBI's CODIS crime database, according to Georgetown Law's Center on Privacy & Technology analysis of newly released government data. The collection included approximately 95 minors, some as young as 14, and travelers never charged with crimes.
Congress never authorized DNA collection from citizens, children or civil detainees. DHS has contributed 2.6 million profiles to CODIS since 2020, with 97% collected under civil rather than criminal authority. The expansion followed a 2020 Justice Department rule that revoked DHS's waiver from DNA collection requirements. Former FBI director Christopher Wray testified in 2023 that monthly DNA submissions jumped from a few thousand to 92,000, creating a backlog of 650,000 unprocessed kits. Georgetown researchers project DHS could account for one-third of CODIS by 2034. The DHS Inspector General found in 2021 that the department lacked central oversight of DNA collection.
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2025-09-23 16:05:00 UTC

U.S. News Rankings Are Out After a Tumultuous Year for Colleges
An anonymous reader shares a report: Battered by funding cuts, bombarded by the White House and braced for demographic changes set to send enrollment into a nosedive, America's colleges and universities have spent this year in flux. But one of higher education's rituals resurfaced again on Tuesday, when U.S. News & World Report published the college rankings that many administrators obsessively track and routinely malign. And, at least in the judgment of U.S. News, all of the headline-making upheaval has so far led to ... well, a lot of stability.
Princeton University, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Harvard University retained the top three spots in the publisher's rankings of national universities. Stanford University kept its place at No. 4, though Yale University also joined it there. Williams College remained U.S. News's pick for the best national liberal arts college, just as Spelman College was again the top-ranked historically Black institution. In one notable change, the University of California, Berkeley, was deemed the country's top public university. But it simply switched places with its counterpart in Los Angeles.
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2025-09-23 00:30:00 UTC

Supreme Court Allows Trump to Fire Remaining Democrat On FTC
The Supreme Court has temporarily allowed President Trump to fire Rebecca Slaughter, the last Democrat on the FTC. "The court's action is technically temporary, since the justices said they will hear arguments in the case in December, but every indication is that the conservative court majority will use the case to reverse a major Supreme Court precedent that dates back almost a century," reports NPR. From the report: Congress created the FTC and lots of other agencies to be multi-member, bipartisan regulatory agencies. And the Supreme Court in 1935 upheld those statutes ruling ruled against then-President Franklin D. Roosevelt's claim that he could fire FTC commissioners at will. In a unanimous opinion at the time, the court said Congress acted within its powers in declaring that a commissioner could only be fired for misconduct -- not for a policy disagreement. But now, prodded by President Trump, the court's six-member conservative majority seems poised to remake the way independent agencies operate. And if the handwriting on the wall is as clear as it seems to be, the independent agencies won't be independent. Their membership will be subject to the will of the president.
The court's action Monday was hardly subtle. While the lower courts had ruled that the president could not fire Slaughter, under the court's 1935 precedent, the conservative Supreme Court majority allowed the president to fire her. Indeed, her name isn't even on the FTC website anymore. And the court so far has allowed Trump to fire other agency board members. In short, the justices are not playing hide-the-ball. And it's a good bet that the court will reverse the 1935 precedent, which until now had been reaffirmed multiple times. The result will be that whereas in the past, these agencies had to be bipartisan, with a minority of opposition party members, now there will be no such requirement. In short, Trump can name all the agency members. And if his successor is a Democrat, he or she can fire all the Republicans.
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2025-09-22 23:30:00 UTC

Google's Gemini AI Is Coming To Your TV
Google is rolling out its Gemini AI assistant to Google TV, bringing conversational AI to over 300 million devices. Users will be able to ask Gemini for help with TV recommendations, show recaps, reviews, or even general tasks like homework help, vacation planning, or learning new skills. TechCrunch reports: The company stresses that Gemini's addition doesn't mean that you won't be able to do the same things you used to be able to do through the (non-AI) Google Assistant integration. Those commands will still work, says Google. The Gemini rollout to Google TV begins on the TCL QM9K series starting today. Later in the year, Gemini will arrive on the Google TV Streamer, Walmart onn 4K Pro, 2025 Hisense U7, U8, and UX models, and 2025 TCL QM7K, QM8K, and X11K models. More functionality will be added over time.
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2025-09-22 22:30:00 UTC

Top Economists Agree That Gen Z's Hiring Nightmare Is Real
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Fortune: The dramatic rise in unemployment among Americans under 25 -- especially recent graduates -- has become one of the most troubling economic headlines of 2025. Recent insights from economists, central bankers, and labor market analysts signal that this appears to be a uniquely American challenge, underpinned by a "no hire, no fire" economy rather than solely by the rapid ascent of artificial intelligence.
For many Gen Z workers, the struggle to land a job can feel isolating and fuel self-doubt. But that frustration recently got some high-level validation: Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell echoed economists' concerns about the cooling labor market, telling reporters at his regular press conference following the Federal Open Market Committee that it's an "interesting labor market" right now, adding that "kids coming out of college and younger people, minorities, are having a hard time finding jobs." Noting a low job finding rate, along with a low redundancy rate, he said, "you've got a low firing, low hiring environment." and noting that it's harder than ever for young jobseekers to break in.
While recent months have been dubbed by Deutsche Bank "the summer AI turned ugly," and some major studies find AI adoption disrupting some entry-level roles, Powell was less sure. AI "may be part of the story," but he insisted the main drivers are a broadly slowed economy and hiring restraint. Top economists at Goldman Sachs and UBS tackled the subject soon after and found Powell to be mostly on the money. This isn't an AI story, at least not yet. "The U.S. labor market experience is peculiar," said Paul Donovan, UBS Chief Economist. "Young Euro area workers have a record low unemployment rate. In the UK, the young persons' unemployment rate has fallen steadily. Employment participation by young Japanese workers is near all-time highs. It seems highly implausible that AI uniquely hurts the employment prospects of younger US workers."
"It might be tempting to blame technology... Machines, robots, or computers replacing humans is an ever-popular dystopian scenario." Donovan concludes that the U.S. pattern "more convincingly fits a broader hiring freeze narrative, affecting new entrants to the workforce."
Goldman Sachs economist Pierfrancesco Mei said last Thursday that "finding a job takes longer in a low-turnover labor market." He argued that "job reallocation," or the pace at which new jobs are created and existing ones destroyed, has been on the decline since the late 1990s... "almost all the variation in turnover since the Great Recession mostly falls on younger workers" and is taking place as "churn." Goldman found that in 2019, it took a young unemployed worker about 10 weeks to find a new job in a low-churn state; now that's 12 weeks on average.
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2025-09-22 21:50:00 UTC

LinkedIn Set To Start To Train Its AI on Member Profiles
LinkedIn has said it will start using some member profiles, posts, resumes and public activity to train its AI models from November 3, 2025. From a report: Users are rightly frustrated with the change, with the biggest concern isn't the business networking platform will do so, but that it's set to be enabled by default, with users instead having to actively opt out. Users can choose to opt out via the 'data for generative AI improvement' setting, however it will only apply to data collected after they opt out, with data up until that point still retained within the training environment.
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2025-09-22 20:30:00 UTC

TikTok Algorithm To Be Retrained On US User Data Under Trump Deal
The Trump administration has struck a deal requiring TikTok's algorithm to be copied, retrained, and operated in the U.S. using only U.S. user data, with Oracle auditing the system and U.S. investors forming a joint venture to oversee it. The BBC reports: It comes after President Donald Trump said a deal to prevent the app's ban in the US, unless sold by its Chinese parent company ByteDance, had been reached with China's approval. White House officials claim the deal will be a win for the app's US users and citizens. President Trump is expected to sign an executive order later this week on the proposed deal, which will set out how it will comply with US national security demands.
The order will also outline a 120-day pause to the enforcement deadline to allow the deal to close. It is unclear whether the Chinese government has approved this agreement, or begun to take regulatory steps required to deliver it. However, the White House appears confident it has secured China's approval. Data belonging to the 170m users TikTok says it has in the US is already held on Oracle servers, under an existing arrangement called Project Texas. It saw US user data siphoned off due to concerns it could fall into the hands of the Chinese government.
A senior White House official said that under President Trump's deal, the company would take on a comprehensive role in securing the entirety of the app for American users. They said this would include auditing and inspecting the source code and recommendation system underpinning the app, and rebuilding it for US users using only US user data.
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2025-09-22 19:50:00 UTC

California Issues Historic Fine Over Lawyer's ChatGPT Fabrications
An anonymous reader quotes a report from CalMatters: A California attorney must pay a $10,000 fine for filing a state court appeal full of fake quotations generated by the artificial intelligence tool ChatGPT. The fine appears to be the largest issued over AI fabrications by a California court and came with a blistering opinion (PDF) stating that 21 of 23 quotes from cases cited in the attorney's opening brief were made up. It also noted that numerous out-of-state and federal courts have confronted attorneys for citing fake legal authority. "We therefore publish this opinion as a warning," it continued. "Simply stated, no brief, pleading, motion, or any other paper filed in any court should contain any citations -- whether provided by generative AI or any other source -- that the attorney responsible for submitting the pleading has not personally read and verified."
The opinion, issued 10 days ago in California's 2nd District Court of Appeal, is a clear example of why the state's legal authorities are scrambling to regulate the use of AI in the judiciary. The state's Judicial Council two weeks ago issued guidelines requiring judges and court staff to either ban generative AI or adopt a generative AI use policy by Dec. 15. Meanwhile, the California Bar Association is considering whether to strengthen its code of conduct to account for various forms of AI following a request by the California Supreme Court last month.
The Los Angeles-area attorney fined last week, Amir Mostafavi, told the court that he did not read text generated by the AI model before submitting the appeal in July 2023, months after OpenAI marketed ChatGPT as capable of passing the bar exam. A three-judge panel fined him for filing a frivolous appeal, violating court rules, citing fake cases, and wasting the court's time and the taxpayers money, according to the opinion. Mostafavi told CalMatters he wrote the appeal and then used ChatGPT to try and improve it. He said that he didn't know it would add case citations or make things up.
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2025-09-22 19:13:00 UTC

Apple's iPhone 17 Pro Can Be Easily Scratched
An anonymous reader shares a report: The iPhone 17 Pro and 17 Pro Max appear to provide little resistance to scratches and scuffs around the sharp edges of the camera bump. Tech blogger Zack Nelson demonstrates this weakness in a durability test on his JerryRigEverything YouTube channel, explaining that the anodized aluminium layer on the iPhone 17 Pro and 17 Pro Max "does not stick to corners very well" -- creating a weak point in the coating. This is a known issue with the electrochemical anodizing process, so it was a design decision Apple knowingly made.
"For some reason, Apple didn't add a chamfer, fillet, or radius around the camera plateau, and I think it was intentional, so it looks cooler," Nelson says in the video. "But that decision to look cool out of the box is going to plague everyone who owns this phone down the road." The video shows that everyday objects, like a coin or house key carried in the same pocket as the iPhone 17 Pro, can chip away at the anodized coating around the sharp corners of the camera bump. However, that same mildly aggressive scratching on the flat surface of the camera plateau only produced dust that could be easily wiped away.
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2025-09-22 18:05:00 UTC

Uber CEO Says Robotaxis Could Displace Drivers in 10 To 15 Years and Create 'a Big, Big Societal Question'
The rise of self-driving cars could eventually cost many ride-hailing drivers their jobs -- and that's a big problem, Uber CEO Dara Khosrowshahi said. From a report: Khosrowshahi spoke about the issue onstage this month at a summit hosted by the "All-In" podcast, which posted a video of the conversation on Wednesday. At the summit, Khosrowshahi was asked about concerns that gig workers, who have played a key role in Uber's development, will eventually lose their jobs as self-driving cars become more prevalent.
The Uber CEO said he expects human drivers to continue working alongside self-driving cars in Uber's network in the coming years. "For the next five to seven years, we're going to have more human drivers and delivery people, just because we're going so quickly," Khosrowshahi said. "But, I think, 10 to 15 years from now, this is going to be a real issue," he said about drivers losing their jobs.
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2025-09-22 17:26:00 UTC

Microsoft is Bringing Video Wallpapers To Windows 11
Microsoft is working on bringing support for setting a video as your desktop wallpaper on Windows 11. From a report: Hidden in the latest Windows 11 preview builds, the feature lets you set an MP4, MOV, AVI, WMV, M4V, or MKV file as your wallpaper, which will play the video whenever you view the desktop.
For many years, users have wanted the ability to set a video as a desktop background. It's a feature that many Linux distributions support, and macOS also supports the ability to set a moving background as your lock screen. Windows Vista did support setting videos as your wallpaper, but only as part of the Ultimate SKU via a feature called DreamScene.
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2025-09-21 23:42:00 UTC

Why One Computer Science Professor is 'Feeling Cranky About AI' in Education
Long-time Slashdot reader theodp writes: Over at the Communications of the ACM, Bard College CS Prof Valerie Barr explains why she's Feeling Cranky About AI and CS Education. Having seen CS education go through a number of we-have-to-teach-this moments over the decades — introductory programming languages, the Web, Data Science, etc. — Barr turns her attention to the next hand-wringing "what will we do" CS education moment with AI. "We're jumping through hoops without stopping first to question the run-away train," Barr writes...
Barr calls for stepping back from "the industry assertion that the ship has sailed, every student needs to use AI early and often, and there is no future application that isn't going to use AI in some way" and instead thoughtfully "articulate what sort of future problem solvers and software developers we want to graduate from our programs, and determine ways in which the incorporation of AI can help us get there."
From the article:
In much discussion about CS education:
a.) There's little interest in interrogating the downsides of generative AI, such as the environmental impact, the data theft impact, the treatment and exploitation of data workers.
b.) There's little interest in considering the extent to which, by incorporating generative AI into our teaching, we end up supporting a handful of companies that are burning billions in a vain attempt to each achieve performance that is a scintilla better than everyone else's.
c.) There's little interest in thinking about what's going to happen when the LLM companies decide that they have plateaued, that there's no more money to burn/spend, and a bunch of them fold—but we've perturbed education to such an extent that our students can no longer function without their AI helpers.
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2025-09-21 21:17:00 UTC

AI Tools Give Dangerous Powers to Cyberattackers, Security Researchers Warn
"On a recent assignment to test defenses, Dave Brauchler of the cybersecurity company NCC Group tricked a client's AI program-writing assistant into executing programs that forked over the company's databases and code repositories," reports the Washington Post.
"We have never been this foolish with security," Brauchler said...
Demonstrations at last month's Black Hat security conference in Las Vegas included other attention-getting means of exploiting artificial intelligence. In one, an imagined attacker sent documents by email with hidden instructions aimed at ChatGPT or competitors. If a user asked for a summary or one was made automatically, the program would execute the instructions, even finding digital passwords and sending them out of the network. A similar attack on Google's Gemini didn't even need an attachment, just an email with hidden directives. The AI summary falsely told the target an account had been compromised and that they should call the attacker's number, mimicking successful phishing scams.
The threats become more concerning with the rise of agentic AI, which empowers browsers and other tools to conduct transactions and make other decisions without human oversight. Already, security company Guardio has tricked the agentic Comet browser addition from Perplexity into buying a watch from a fake online store and to follow instructions from a fake banking email...
Advanced AI programs also are beginning to be used to find previously undiscovered security flaws, the so-called zero-days that hackers highly prize and exploit to gain entry into software that is configured correctly and fully updated with security patches. Seven teams of hackers that developed autonomous "cyber reasoning systems" for a contest held last month by the Pentagon's Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency were able to find a total of 18 zero-days in 54 million lines of open source code. They worked to patch those vulnerabilities, but officials said hackers around the world are developing similar efforts to locate and exploit them. Some longtime security defenders are predicting a once-in-a-lifetime, worldwide mad dash to use the technology to find new flaws and exploit them, leaving back doors in place that they can return to at leisure.
The real nightmare scenario is when these worlds collide, and an attacker's AI finds a way in and then starts communicating with the victim's AI, working in partnership — "having the bad guy AI collaborate with the good guy AI," as SentinelOne's [threat researcher Alex] Delamotte put it. "Next year," said Adam Meyers, senior vice president at CrowdStrike, "AI will be the new insider threat."
In August more than 1,000 people lost data to a modified Nx program (downloaded hundreds of thousands of times) that used pre-installed coding tools from Google/Anthropic/etc. According to the article, the malware "instructed those programs to root out" sensitive data (including passwords or cryptocurrency wallets) and send it back to the attacker. "The more autonomy and access to production environments such tools have, the more havoc they can wreak," the article points out — including this quote from SentinelOne threat researcher Alex Delamotte.
"It's kind of unfair that we're having AI pushed on us in every single product when it introduces new risks."
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2025-09-21 20:17:00 UTC

More Durable UV Coating For Solar Panels Made From Red Onion Skins
Long-time Slashdot reader fahrbot-bot shared this report from ZME Science
Researchers from the University of Turku, in collaboration with Aalto University and Wageningen University, have developed a bio-based UV protection film for solar cells that not only blocks nearly all harmful ultraviolet light but also outperforms commercial plastic films. The key ingredient is a water extract made from red onion skins...
[T]he same sunlight that powers [solar cells] can also degrade their delicate components — particularly the electrolyte inside dye-sensitized solar cells (DSSCs), a type known for their flexibility and low-light performance. To mitigate this, manufacturers typically wrap cells in UV-protective films made from petroleum-based plastics like polyethylene terephthalate (PET). But these plastics degrade over time and are difficult to recycle... Nanocellulose can be processed into thin, transparent films that serve as the perfect substrate for UV-blocking compounds.
Their breakthrough came when they dyed these films using an extract from red onion skins, a common kitchen waste. The result was a filter that blocked 99.9% of UV radiation up to 400 nanometers, a feat that outstripped even the PET-based commercial filters chosen for comparison... [T]he onion-treated filter excelled: it let through over 80% of light in the 650-1,100 nm range — an ideal sweet spot for energy absorption... Even predictive modeling based on early degradation trends suggested the CNF-ROE filter could extend a solar cell's lifetime to roughly 8,500 hours. The PET-based filter? Just 1,500 hours... [T]he red onion extract offered a rare combination of longevity, transparency, and sustainability...
The team envisions biodegradable solar cells for smart packaging, remote sensors, or wearable devices — especially in applications where recovery and recycling are not feasible. Their work is part of the BioEST project, funded by the Research Council of Finland, which supports sustainable innovation across electronics and materials science. This achievement taps into a broader movement to decarbonize every step of solar energy production. Plastic packaging is one of the overlooked sources of emissions in clean technology. Swapping out fossil-based plastics for biodegradable alternatives helps close that loop...
The findings appeared in the journal Applied Optical Materials.
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2025-09-21 19:17:00 UTC

Meta's UK Arbitration 'Threatens to Bankrupt' Facebook Whistleblower, Says Her Lawyer
In a debate on employment rights, a U.K. Parliament member brought up Meta's former director of global public policy Sarah Wynn-Williams
Louise Haigh, the former Labour transport secretary, said Wynn-Williams was facing a fine of $50,000 (£37,000) every time she breached an order secured by Meta preventing her from talking disparagingly about the company... "I am sure that the whole house and the government will stand with Sarah as we pass this legislation to ensure that whistleblowers and those with the moral courage to speak out are always protected...."
Meta has emphasised that Wynn-Williams entered into the non-disparagement agreement voluntarily as part of her departure. Meta said that to date, Wynn-Williams had not been forced to make any payments under the agreement... [The ruling came after Wynn-Williams published an exposé in March about her time at Facebook titled Careless People: A Cautionary Tale of Power, Greed, and Lost Idealism.] The ruling stated Wynn-Williams should stop promoting the book and, to the extent she could, stop further publication... Wynn-Williams has not spoken in public since appearing at the Senate hearing in April.
Wynn-Williams "remains silenced" according to her lawyer, who tells the Guardian that Meta's arbitration proceedings in the U.K. "threaten to bankrupt" the whistleblower.
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2025-09-21 18:17:00 UTC

America's Space Force is Preparing for a New Kind of War
A July combat training exercise involved a satellite dish-style antenna that "could fire enough electromagnetic energy to fry the satellite 22,000 miles away," reports the Washington Post. But "Instead, the salvo would be more covert — millisecond pulses of energy that would subtly disrupt the satellite's signals, which U.S. military forces were using to communicate in the Pacific Ocean."
The goal was to disguise the strike as a garbled connection that could be easily remedied by securing a loose cable or a simple reboot, leaving U.S. service members frustrated without raising their suspicions. [And using less power "would make it harder for the Blue Team to track where the interference was coming from."] This is how the next war could start: invisible shots fired in space on the electromagnetic spectrum that could render U.S. fighter jets and aircraft carriers deaf and blind, unable to communicate. In this case, the "aggressors" targeting the U.S. satellite were not from China or Russia, but rather an elite squadron of U.S. Space Force Guardians mimicking how potential adversaries would act in a conflict that begins in orbit... Involving more than 700 service members and spanning 50 million square miles and six time zones, the training exercise, called Resolute Space, was observed firsthand exclusively by The Washington Post.
The article describes leadership at the U.S. Space Force "still honing their mission while jousting with adversaries, such as China, that are moving quickly and conducting combat-like operations in orbit... While the Space Force continues to evolve, many defense analysts and some members of Congress fear the United States has already ceded its dominance in space to China and others."
With a budget of just $40 billion, the relatively tiny Space Force makes up just about 4 percent of the Defense Department's budget and less than 1 percent of its personnel. It has more than 15,000 Guardians, which also includes several thousand civilians. By comparison, the Army has nearly 1 million soldiers. The Space Force has been squeezed under the department of the Air Force and struggled to distinguish itself from the other branches...
China, Russia and others have demonstrated that they can take out or interfere with the satellites operated by the Pentagon and intelligence agencies that provide the nation's missile warning and tracking, reconnaissance and communications. China in particular has moved rapidly to build an arsenal of space-based weapons... [R]ecently, several of China's satellites have engaged in what Space Force officials have called "dogfighting," jousting with U.S. satellites at high speeds and close ranges.
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2025-09-21 16:34:00 UTC

Hundreds of Google AI Workers Were Fired Amid Fight Over Working Conditions
Last week the Guardian reported on "thousands of AI workers contracted for Google through Japanese conglomerate Hitachi's GlobalLogic to rate and moderate the output of Google's AI products, including its flagship chatbot Gemini... and its summaries of search results, AI Overviews."
"AI isn't magic; it's a pyramid scheme of human labor," said Adio Dinika, a researcher at the Distributed AI Research Institute based in Bremen, Germany. "These raters are the middle rung: invisible, essential and expendable...." Ten of Google's AI trainers the Guardian spoke to said they have grown disillusioned with their jobs because they work in siloes, face tighter and tighter deadlines, and feel they are putting out a product that's not safe for users... In May 2023, a contract worker for Appen submitted a letter to the US Congress that the pace imposed on him and others would make Google Bard, Gemini's predecessor, a "faulty" and "dangerous" product
This week Google laid off 200 of those moderating contractors, reports Wired. "These workers, who often are hired because of their specialist knowledge, had to have either a master's or a PhD to join the super rater program, and typically include writers, teachers, and people from creative fields."
Workers still at the company claim they are increasingly concerned that they are being set up to replace themselves. According to internal documents viewed by WIRED, GlobalLogic seems to be using these human raters to train the Google AI system that could automatically rate the responses, with the aim of replacing them with AI. At the same time, the company is also finding ways to get rid of current employees as it continues to hire new workers. In July, GlobalLogic made it mandatory for its workers in Austin, Texas, to return to office, according to a notice seen by WIRED...
Some contractors attempted to unionize earlier this year but claim those efforts were quashed. Now they allege that the company has retaliated against them. Two workers have filed a complaint with the National Labor Relations Board, alleging they were unfairly fired, one due to bringing up wage transparency issues, and the other for advocating for himself and his coworkers. "These individuals are employees of GlobalLogic or their subcontractors, not Alphabet," Courtenay Mencini, a Google spokesperson, said in a statement...
"Globally, other AI contract workers are fighting back and organizing for better treatment and pay," the article points out, noting that content moderators from around the world facing similar issues formed the Global Trade Union Alliance of Content Moderators which includes workers from Kenya, Turkey, and Colombia.
Thanks to long-time Slashdot reader mspohr for sharing the news.
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2025-09-21 14:34:00 UTC

Tech Boomtown Seattle Grapples with Fewer Tech Jobs
Near Microsoft's headquarters in Redmond, the Five Stones coffee shop advertised for a barista a few months ago — and started getting resumes from "people who listed Microsoft and other tech companies," writes the Wall Street Journal:
The applicants typically had master's degrees and experience in graphic design or marketing roles, Andrews said — sometimes senior ones. They were applying to jobs at Five Stones that would pay Redmond's minimum wage, $16.66 an hour. Five Stones hasn't yet hired such candidates because the coffee shop gives priority to more traditional entry-level baristas, like high-schoolers...
[Microsoft and Amazon] have laid off more than 46,000 employees since 2023, according to Layoffs.fyi, which tracks workforce reductions. That represents 85% of layoffs by Seattle-area tech companies... As Amazon and Microsoft have made cuts — and other local tech firms including Expedia and Redfin have followed suit — the effects have rippled through Seattle's other business sectors. Weakness in payroll and sales tax contributed to a projected $146 million shortfall in revenue over the next two years. Restaurant and retail spending is down in the business and shopping districts surrounding Amazon's and Microsoft's campuses, with total transactions falling by as much as 7% in some popular areas in the past year, according to data from Square. In the first half of 2025, around 450 restaurants closed in Seattle, or about 16% of its total. "At the halfway point of the year, we've already seen as many closures as we'd usually see in a full year," said Anthony Anton, chief executive officer of the Washington Hospitality Association.
Uber driver Juan Prado made six figures in 2021, often shuttling passengers in town for job interviews and doing frequent drop-offs near downtown tech offices. Now, he said, demand is much lower. "There are moments where you can be online, and in certain areas, it shows nothing...." Seattle tech firms are asking for significantly fewer job placements than years ago, said Noelle McDonald, senior vice president at recruiting company Aquent, which counts Amazon and Microsoft as clients. Hiring windows have lengthened and open roles receive around 10 times as many applications.
And of course, "Commercial real-estate vacancies stand at a record high as offices built to accommodate a boom sit empty... "
While some laid-off employees launched their own startups, "the outlook for many tech workers is dour as companies invest in software tools they can use to streamline teams," the article points out. Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella "has said the company is increasingly looking to AI to perform coding and other tasks once done by people," while in June, Amazon "said its workforce would shrink going forward."
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2025-09-21 11:34:00 UTC

Disney Sued by Law Firm Wanting to Use 'Steamboat Willie' in Its Ads
Mickey Mouse's first movie Steamboat Willie entered the public domain in 2024.
Now one of America's largest personal injury firms is suing Disney, reports the Associated Press, "in an effort to get a ruling that would allow it to use Steamboat Willie in advertisements..."
[The law firm said] it had reached out to Disney to make sure the entertainment company wouldn't sue them if they used images from the animated film for their TV and online ads. Disney's lawyers responded by saying they didn't offer legal advice to third parties, according to the lawsuit. Morgan & Morgan said it was filing the lawsuit to get a decision because it otherwise feared being sued by Disney for trademark infringement if it used Steamboat Willie.
"Without waiver of any of its rights, Disney will not provide such advice in response to your letter," Disney's attorneys wrote in their letter (adding "Very truly yours..."). A local newscast showed a glimpse of the letter, along with a few seconds of the ad (which ends with Minnie Mouse pulling out a cellphone to call for a lawyer...)
Attorney John Morgan tells the newscast that Disney's legal team "is playing cute, and so we're just trying to get a yes or no answer.. They wrote us back a bunch of mumbo-jumbo that made no sense, didn't answer the question. We tried it again, they didn't answer the question..." (The newscast adds that the case isn't expected to go to court for at least a year.)
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2025-09-21 03:44:00 UTC

PIRG, Other Groups Criticize Microsoft's Plan to Discontinue Support for Windows 11
The consumer advocacy nonprofit PIRG (Public Interest Research Group) is now petitioning Microsoft to reconsider pulling support for Windows 10 in 2025, since "as many as 400 million perfectly good computers that can't upgrade to Windows 11 will be thrown out." In a petition addressed to Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella, the group warned the October 14 end of free support could cause "the single biggest jump in junked computers ever, and make it impossible for Microsoft to hit their sustainability goals."
About 40% of PCs currently in use can't upgrade to Windows 11, even if users want to... Less than a quarter of electronic waste is recycled, so most of those computers will end up in landfills.
Consumer Reports recently also urged Microsoft to not to "strand millions of customers.". And now more groups are also pushing back, according to a post from the blog Windows: Central
The Restart Project co-developed the "End of 10" toolkit, which is designed to support Windows 10 users who can't upgrade to Windows 11 after the operating system hits its end-of-support date.
They also note that a Paris-based company called Back Market plans to sell Windows 10 laptops refurbished with Ubuntu Linux or ChromeOS Flex. ("We refuse to watch hundreds of millions of perfectly good computers end up in the trash as e-waste," explains their web site.) Back Market's ad promises an "up-to-date, secure operating system — so instead of paying for a new computer you don't need, you can help us give this one a brand new life."
Right now Windows 10 holds 71.9% of Microsoft's market share, with Windows 11 at 22.95%, according to figures from StatCounter cited by the blog Windows Central. And HP and Dell "recently indicated that half of the global PCs are still running Windows 10," according to another Windows Central post...
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2025-09-20 21:22:00 UTC

Cyberattack Delays Flights at Several of Europe's Major Airports
"A cyberattack targeting check-in and boarding systems disrupted air traffic and caused delays at several of Europe's major airports on Saturday," reports the Associated Press.
"While the impact on travelers appeared to be limited, experts said the intrusion exposed vulnerabilities in security systems."
The disruptions to electronic systems initially reported at Brussels, Berlin's Brandenburg and London's Heathrow airports meant that only manual check-in and boarding was possible. Many other European airports said their operations were unaffected... Airports said the issue centered around a provider of check-in and boarding systems — not airlines or the airports themselves. Collins Aerospace, whose systems help passengers check themselves in, print boarding passes and bag tags and dispatch their luggage from a kiosk, cited a "cyber-related disruption" to its MUSE (Multi-User System Environment) software at "select airports."
Brussels Airport initially reported a "large impact" on flight schedules," according to the article, with a spokesperson telling broadcaster VTM that by mid-morning nine flights had been canceled, with four more redirected to another airport and 15 delayed an hour or more. The airport later told Reuters there were "delays on most of the departing flights."
Reuters notes it's "the latest in a string of hacks targeting governments and companies across the world, hitting sectors from healthcare and defence to retail and autos.:
A recent breach at luxury carmaker Jaguar Land Rover brought its production to a halt...
At Heathrow, Berlin and Brussels, 29 flight departures and arrivals had been cancelled as of 1130 GMT, aviation data provider Cirium said. In total, 651 departures were scheduled from Heathrow, 228 from Brussels and 226 from Berlin on Saturday... Brussels Airport said it had asked airlines to cancel half of their scheduled departing flights on Sunday to avoid long queues and late cancellations, signalling that the disruption would continue through the weekend.
A European Commission spokesperson said there were currently no indications of a "widespread or severe attack" and that the origin of the incident was still under investigation.
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2025-09-20 02:31:00 UTC

Sold on Walmart, Sent by Amazon: The Weird New World of Online Retail
Amazon's logistics network will now fulfill orders placed on Walmart.com, the company announced at its Accelerate seller conference, creating a surreal arrangement where the e-commerce giant directly supports its biggest retail rival's online operations. Third-party sellers can now use Amazon's Multichannel Fulfillment service to automatically process Walmart orders through direct integration. The packages arrive in unbranded boxes since Walmart prohibits Amazon-branded deliveries to its customers.
Amazon VP Dharmesh Mehta told GeekWire the system automatically routes any Walmart order through Amazon's fulfillment network. The service expansion includes upcoming Shein integration and existing support for eBay, Etsy, and Temu. Amazon's third-party seller services generated $156 billion in 2024 revenue. The company now competes directly against ShipBob, FedEx, UPS, and ironically Walmart's own fulfillment services while positioning itself as an end-to-end logistics provider regardless of where the sale originates.
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2025-09-19 22:00:00 UTC

Record-Low 35% in US Satisfied With K-12 Education Quality
Gallup: A record-low 35% of Americans are satisfied with the quality of education that K-12 students receive in the U.S. today, marking an eight-percentage-point decline since last year. This is one point below the previous historical low recorded in 2000 and 2023 for this Gallup question that dates back to 1999.
Several other ratings of the U.S. K-12 education system provide a similarly bleak assessment. Only about one-quarter of Americans think K-12 schools are headed in the right direction, while just one in five rate them as "excellent" or "good" at preparing students for today's jobs and one in three say the same for college.
Yet, parents of current K-12 students are nearly twice as satisfied with their own child's education as they are with education in the U.S. K-12 parents are also slightly more likely than U.S. adults in general to rate different aspects of education positively, including the direction of education in the U.S. and schools' preparation of students for the workforce and for college. Still, none of these ratings is near the majority level.
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2025-09-19 17:10:00 UTC

China's Xiaomi To Remotely Fix Assisted Driving Flaw in 110,000 SU7 Cars
Chinese consumer tech giant Xiaomi will remotely fix a flaw in the assisted driving system on over 110,000 of its popular SU7 electric cars, the firm and regulators said Friday, months after a deadly crash involving the model. From a report: China's tech companies and automakers have poured billions of dollars into smart-driving technology, a new battleground in the country's cutthroat domestic car market. But Beijing has moved to tighten safety rules after a Xiaomi SU7 in assisted driving mode crashed and killed three college students this year. It also raised concerns over the advertising of cars as being capable of autonomous driving. On Friday, the State Administration for Market Regulation said Xiaomi's highway assisted driving system showed insufficient recognition, warning and handling ability in some extreme driving conditions.
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2025-09-19 15:01:00 UTC

Austria's Armed Forces Switch To LibreOffice
alternative_right writes: Austria's armed forces have switched from Microsoft's Office programs to the open-source LibreOffice package. The reason for this is not to save on software license fees for around 16,000 workstations. "It was very important for us to show that we are doing this primarily (...) to strengthen our digital sovereignty, to maintain our independence in terms of ICT infrastructure and (...) to ensure that data is only processed in-house," emphasizes Michael Hillebrand from the Austrian Armed Forces' Directorate 6 ICT and Cyber.
This is because processing data in external clouds is out of the question for the Austrian Armed Forces, as Hillebrand explained on ORF radio station O1. It was already apparent five years ago that Microsoft Office would move to the cloud. Back then, in 2020, the decision-making process for the switch began and was completed in 2021.
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2025-09-19 02:00:00 UTC

China's Future Rests on 200 Million Precarious Workers
China's economy increasingly relies on 200 million "flexible workers" who lack formal employment contracts, pensions and urban residency permits despite comprising 25% of the national workforce and 40% of urban workers. The demographic includes 40 million day-wage factory workers and 84 million platform economy workers performing deliveries and ride-share driving. Factory gig workers average 26 years old, are 80% male, and 75-80% single and childless. These workers face systemic exclusions from urban benefits including healthcare, schooling and property ownership due to lacking urban hukou residency permits.
China's Supreme Court ruled in August that workers can claim compensation from employers denying benefits, though enforcement mechanisms remain unclear. Economic data shows retail sales growth at yearly lows, continuing property price declines, and rising urban unemployment. Analysts project GDP growth potentially falling to 3% in the third quarter. Manufacturing hubs report increasing numbers of young workers sleeping in parks and under overpasses between temporary jobs.
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2025-09-19 01:09:00 UTC

Intel Says Blockbuster Nvidia Deal Doesn't Change Its Own Roadmap
If you're wondering what effect Intel's blockbuster deal with Nvidia will have on its existing product roadmaps, Intel has one message for you: it won't. PCWorld: "We're not discussing specific roadmaps at this time, but the collaboration is complementary to Intel's roadmap and Intel will continue to have GPU product offerings," an Intel spokesman told my colleague, Brad Chacos, earlier today. I heard similar messaging from other Intel representatives.
Nvidia's $5 billion investment in Intel, as well as Nvidia's plans to supply RTX graphics chiplets to Intel for use in Intel's CPUs, have two major potential effects: first, it could rewrite Intel's mobile roadmap for laptop chips, because of the additional capabilities provided by those RTX chiplets. Second, the move threatens Intel's ongoing development of its Arc graphics cores, including standalone discrete GPUs as well as integrated chips. We're still not convinced that Arc's future will be left unscathed, in part because Intel's claim that it will "continue" to have GPU product offerings sounds a bit wishy-washy. But Intel sounds much more definitive on the former point, in that the mobile roadmap that you're familiar with will remain in place.
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2025-09-18 20:01:00 UTC

FTC and Seven States Sue Ticketmaster Over Alleged Coordination With Scalpers
The Federal Trade Commission and attorneys general from seven states filed an 84-page lawsuit Thursday in federal court in California against Live Nation Entertainment and its Ticketmaster subsidiary. The suit alleges the companies knowingly allow ticket brokers to use multiple accounts to circumvent purchase limits and acquire thousands of tickets per event for resale at higher prices.
The FTC claims this practice violates the Better Online Ticket Sales Act and generates hundreds of millions in revenue through a "triple dip" fee structure -- collecting fees on initial broker purchases, then from both brokers and consumers on secondary market sales. FTC Chairman Andrew Ferguson cited President Trump's March executive order requiring federal protection against ticketing practices. The lawsuit arrives one month after the FTC sued Maryland broker Key Investment Group over Taylor Swift tour price-gouging and follows the Department of Justice's 2024 monopoly suit against Live Nation.
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