New York Drops Plan To Legalize Robotaxis Outside NYC
New York Governor Kathy Hochul has dropped a proposal that would have allowed limited commercial robotaxi deployments outside New York City, citing a lack of support among state legislators. “The move is a blow to Waymo and other robotaxi companies who saw New York, and especially New York City, as a potential goldmine,” reports The Verge. From the report: The plan, wh … ⌘ Read more

NASA Chief Classifies Starliner Flight As ‘Type A’ Mishap, Says Agency Made Mistakes
NASA has officially classified Boeing Starliner’s 2024 crewed flight as a “Type A” mishap, acknowledging serious technical failures and leadership shortcomings that nearly left astronauts unable to safely return. Administrator Jared Isaacman released (PDF) a 311-page internal report citing flawed decision-m … ⌘ Read more

Trump Directs US Government To Prepare Release of Files on Aliens and UFOs
US President Donald Trump says he will direct US agencies, including the defence department, to “begin the process of identifying and releasing” government files on aliens and extraterrestrial life. From a report: Trump made the declaration in a post on Truth Social, after he accused Barack Obama earlier in the day of revealin … ⌘ Read more

Newborn Chicks Connect Sounds With Shapes Just Like Humans, Study Finds
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Scientific American: Why does “bouba” sound round and “kiki” sound spiky? This intuition that ties certain sounds to shapes is oddly reliable all over the world, and for at least a century, scientists have considered it a clue to the origin of language, theorizing that maybe our ancestors b … ⌘ Read more

US Plans Online Portal To Bypass Content Bans In Europe and Elsewhere
The U.S. State Department is reportedly developing a site called freedom.gov that would let users in Europe and elsewhere access content restricted under local laws, “including alleged hate speech and terrorist propaganda,” reports Reuters. Washington views the move as a way to counter censorship. Reuters reports: One source said officia … ⌘ Read more

California’s New Bill Requires DOJ-Approved 3D Printers That Report on Themselves
California’s recently-proposed AB-2047 would require 3D printers sold in the state to be DOJ-approved models equipped with “firearm blocking technology,” banning non-certified machines after 2029 and criminalizing efforts to bypass the software. Adafruit notes that unlike similar legislation proposed in Washin … ⌘ Read more

Google Announces Gemini 3.1 Pro For ‘Complex Problem-Solving’
Google has introduced Gemini 3.1 Pro, a reasoning-focused upgrade aimed at more complex problem-solving. 9to5Google reports: This .1 increment is a first for Google, with the past two generations seeing .5 as the mid-year model update. (2.5 Pro was first announced in March and saw further updates in May for I/O.) Google says Gemini 3.1 Pro “represents a st … ⌘ Read more

OpenClaw Security Fears Lead Meta, Other AI Firms To Restrict Its Use
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Wired: Last month, Jason Grad issued a late-night warning to the 20 employees at his tech startup. “You’ve likely seen Clawdbot trending on X/LinkedIn. While cool, it is currently unvetted and high-risk for our environment,” he wrote in a Slack message with a red siren emoji. “Please keep Clawdbot of … ⌘ Read more

Minecraft Java Is Switching From OpenGL To Vulkan
Minecraft: Java Edition is switching its rendering backend from OpenGL to Vulkan as part of the upcoming Vibrant Visuals update, aiming for both better performance and modern graphics features across platforms like Linux and macOS (via translation layers). GamingOnLinux reports: For modders, they’re suggesting they start making preparations to move away from OpenGL: “Sw … ⌘ Read more

IRS Loses 40% of IT Staff, 80% of Tech Leaders In ‘Efficiency’ Shakeup
The IRS’s IT division has reportedly lost 40% of its staff and nearly 80% of its tech leadership amid a federal “efficiency” overhaul, the agency’s CIO revealed yesterday. The Register reports: Kaschit Pandya detailed the extent of the tech reorganization during a panel at the Association of Government Accountants yesterday, describing it as … ⌘ Read more

Mark Zuckerberg Grilled On Usage Goals and Underage Users At California Trial
An anonymous reader quotes a report from the Wall Street Journal: Meta Chief Executive Mark Zuckerberg faced a barrage of questions about his social-media company’s efforts to secure ever more of its users’ time and attention at a landmark trial in Los Angeles on Wednesday. In sworn testimony, Zuckerberg said Meta’s grow … ⌘ Read more

China’s Hottest App of 2026 Just Asks If You’re Still Alive
A bare-bones Chinese app called “Are You Dead?” – whose entire premise is that solo-living users tap daily to confirm they’re still alive, triggering an alert to an emergency contact after two missed check-ins – has rocketed to the top of China’s app store charts and gone viral globally without spending a dime on advertising.

The app wasn’t built for the elder … ⌘ Read more

Microsoft’s New 10,000-Year Data Storage Medium: Glass
Microsoft Research has published a paper in Nature detailing Project Silica, a working demonstration that uses femtosecond lasers to etch data into small slabs of glass at a density of over a Gigabit per cubic millimeter and a maximum capacity of 4.84 terabytes per slab. The slabs themselves are 12 cm by 12 cm and just 2 mm thick, and Microsoft’s accelerated aging … ⌘ Read more

Europe’s Labor Laws Are Strangling Its Ability To Innovate, New Analysis Argues
A new essay in Works in Progress Magazine argues that Europe’s failure to produce a Tesla or a Waymo stems not from insufficient research spending or high taxes – problems California shares in abundance – but from labor laws that make it devastatingly expensive for companies to unwind failed bets. According to estima … ⌘ Read more

Bafta To Reward ‘Human Creativity’ as Film and TV Grapples With AI
Bafta has brought in “human achievement” as a guiding principle for its annual awards as the film and television industry grapples with the rapid adoption of AI tools in many parts of production. From a report: In an interview with the FT, Bafta chair Sara Putt, who is nearing the end of her three-year tenure, said artificial intellige … ⌘ Read more

LLM-Generated Passwords Look Strong but Crack in Hours, Researchers Find
AI security firm Irregular has found that passwords generated by major large language models – Claude, ChatGPT and Gemini – appear complex but follow predictable patterns that make them crackable in hours, even on decades-old hardware. When researchers prompted Anthropic’s Claude Opus 4.6 fifty times in separate conversations, only … ⌘ Read more

A Half-Century of US Labor Data Shows Steady Retreat From Evening and Night Work
Despite the popular notion that the modern economy runs around the clock, a new NBER working paper analyzing fifty years of U.S. labor data from 1973 to 2023 finds that Americans have been steadily and consistently moving away from evening and night work toward traditional daytime hours [PDF].

The share of the wo … ⌘ Read more

New Study Tracks How Businesses Quietly Replaced Freelancers With AI Tools
A new study [PDF] from Ramp’s economics lab has found that businesses are steadily replacing freelance workers hired through platforms like Upwork and Fiverr with AI tools from OpenAI and Anthropic, and the substitution is happening at a fraction of the cost.

The paper, authored by Ryan Stevens, Ramp’s Director of Applied Scienc … ⌘ Read more

Accenture Links Staff Promotions To Use of AI Tools
Accenture has reportedly started tracking staff use of its AI tools and will take this into consideration when deciding on top promotions, as the consulting company tries to increase uptake of the technology by its workforce. From a report: The company told senior managers and associate directors that being promoted to leadership roles would require “regular adoption” of artif … ⌘ Read more

HR Teams Are Drowning in Slop Grievances
Workplace grievances that once fit in a single email are now ballooning into 30-page documents stuffed with irrelevant historical detail, made-up legal precedents, and citations to laws from the wrong country – and UK employment lawyers say generative AI is the likely culprit. Anna Bond, legal director at Lewis Silkin, says the complaints she now sees sometimes cite Canadian legislation or fabrica … ⌘ Read more

The RAM Crunch Could Kill Products and Even Entire Companies, Memory Exec Admits
Phison CEO Pua Khein-Seng, whose company is one of the leading makers of controller chips for SSDs and other flash memory devices, admitted in a televised interview that the ongoing global RAM shortage could force companies to cut back their product lines in the second half of 2026 – and that some may not survive at … ⌘ Read more

Amazon Dethrones Walmart as World’s Biggest Company by Sales
An anonymous reader shares a report: Amazon has officially dethroned Walmart as the biggest global company by revenue, a milestone attesting to the massive scale the e-commerce and cloud-computing giant has achieved since its humble beginnings in 1994 as an online bookseller in Jeff Bezos’ Seattle-area garage.

Walmart, which had been the largest company by rev … ⌘ Read more

A $10 Plastic Speaker is the Most Durable Revenue Line in Indian Digital Payments
India’s digital payment platforms process trillions of dollars a year through UPI, the government-built real-time payments rail that handles more than 90% of all payment transactions in the country, but one of their largest net revenue line items is not a payment product at all: it’s a cheap plastic speaker that sits o … ⌘ Read more

EV Sales Boom As Ethiopia Bans Fossil-Fuel Car Imports
An anonymous reader quotes a report from the Financial Post: In 2024, the Ethiopian government banned the import of fossil fuel-powered vehicles and slashed tariffs on their electric equivalents. It was a policy driven less by the country’s climate ambitions and more by fiscal pressures. For years, subsidizing gasoline for consumers has been a major drag on Ethiopia … ⌘ Read more

A $10 Plastic Speaker is the Most Durable Revenue Line in Indian Digital Payments
India’s digital payment platforms process trillions of dollars a year through UPI, the government-built real-time payments rail that handles more than 90% of all payment transactions in the country, but one of their largest net revenue line items is not a payment product at all: it’s a cheap plastic speaker that sits o … ⌘ Read more

Claims That AI Can Help Fix Climate Dismissed As Greenwashing
An anonymous reader quotes a report from the Guardian: Tech companies are conflating traditional artificial intelligence with generative AI when claiming the energy-hungry technology could help avert climate breakdown, according to a report. Most claims that AI can help avert climate breakdown refer to machine learning and not the energy-hungry chatbot … ⌘ Read more

Trump Has Prepared Speech On Extraterrestrial Life
According to Lara Trump, Donald Trump has prepared but not yet delivered a speech about extraterrestrial life, though the White House says such a speech would be “news to me.” White House Spokesperson Karoline Leavitt continued: “I’ll have to check in with our speech writing team. Uh, and that would be of great interest to me personally, and I’m sure all of you in t … ⌘ Read more

EPA Faces First Lawsuit Over Its Killing of Major Climate Rule
An anonymous reader quotes a report from the New York Times: The first shot has been fired in the legal war over the Environmental Protection Agency’s rollback of its “endangerment finding,” which had been the foundation for federal climate regulations. Environmental and health groups filed a lawsuit on Wednesday morning in the U.S. Court of Appeals f … ⌘ Read more

Uber Putting $100 Million into EV Charging for Robotaxis
Uber plans to invest $100 million in EV charging infrastructure to support current and future robotaxi fleets in cities like Los Angeles, the Bay Area, and Dallas, “eventually partner[ing] with multiple robotaxi companies on actual robotaxi deployment – WeRide, Waabi, Lucid, Nuro, May Mobility, Momenta, and Waymo of course,” reports CleanTechnica. From the rep … ⌘ Read more

Google’s Pixel 10a Is the Same Damn Phone As the Pixel 9a
Google’s Pixel 10a is essentially a flatter version of last year’s Pixel 9a, keeping the same Tensor G4 chip, camera hardware, RAM, storage, and $500 price while dropping features like Pixelsnap Qi2 charging and advanced Gemini AI capabilities found in higher-end models. Gizmodo reports: We use words like “candy bar” or “slab” to describe our full-screen smartp … ⌘ Read more

Meta Begins $65 Million Election Push To Advance AI Agenda
An anonymous reader quotes a report from the New York Times: Meta is preparing to spend $65 million this year to boost state politicians who are friendly to the artificial intelligence industry, beginning this week in Texas and Illinois, according to company representatives. The sum is the biggest election investment by Meta, which owns Facebook, Instagra … ⌘ Read more

Mark Zuckerberg Testifies During Landmark Trial On Social Media Addiction
Mark Zuckerberg is testifying in a landmark Los Angeles trial examining whether Meta and other social media firms can be held liable for designing platforms that allegedly addict and harm children. NBC News reports: It’s the first of a consolidated group of cases – from more than 1,600 plaintiffs, including over 350 families and … ⌘ Read more

Google’s AI Music Maker Is Coming To the Gemini App
Google is bringing its Lyria 3 AI music model into the Gemini app, allowing users to generate 30-second songs from text, images, or video prompts directly within the chatbot. The Verge reports: Lyria 3’s text-to-music capabilities allow Gemini app users to make songs by describing specific genres, moods, or memories, such as asking for an “Afrobeat track for my mot … ⌘ Read more

GameHub Will Give Mac Owners Another Imperfect Way To Play Windows Games
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: For a while now, Mac owners have been able to use tools like CrossOver and Game Porting Toolkit to get many Windows games running on their operating system of choice. Now, GameSir plans to add its own potential solution to the mix, announcing that a version of its existing Wi … ⌘ Read more

Texas Sues TP-Link Over China Links and Security Vulnerabilities
TP-Link is facing legal action from the state of Texas for allegedly misleading consumers with “Made in Vietnam” claims despite China-dominated manufacturing and supply chains, and for marketing its devices as secure despite reported firmware vulnerabilities exploited by Chinese state-sponsored actors. The Register: The Lone Star State’s Attorney … ⌘ Read more

Study of 12,000 EU Firms Finds AI’s Productivity Gains Are Real
A study of more than 12,000 European firms found that AI adoption causally increases labour productivity by 4% on average across the EU, and that it does so without reducing employment in the short run.

Researchers from the Bank for International Settlements and the European Investment Bank used an instrumental variable strategy that matched EU firms … ⌘ Read more

Ohio Newspaper Removes Writing From Reporters’ Jobs, Hands It To an ‘AI Rewrite Specialist’
Cleveland.com, the digital arm of Ohio’s Plain Dealer newspaper, has removed writing from the workloads of certain reporters and handed that job to what editor Chris Quinn calls an “AI rewrite specialist” who turns reporter-gathered material into article drafts.

The reporters on these beats – co … ⌘ Read more

Andrew Yang Warns AI Will Displace Millions of White-Collar Workers Within 18 Months
Andrew Yang, the former presidential candidate and longtime Universal Basic Income advocate, published a blog post this week warning that AI is about to displace millions of white-collar workers in the U.S. over the next 12 to 18 months, a wave he has taken to calling “the Fuckening.”

Yang cited a conversa … ⌘ Read more

Linus Torvalds on How Linux Went From One-Man Show To Group Effort
Linus Torvalds has told The Register how Linux went from a solo hobby project on a single 386 PC in Helsinki to a genuinely collaborative effort, and the path involved crowdsourced checks, an FTP mirror at MIT, and a licensing decision that opened the floodgates.

Torvalds released the first public snapshot, Linux 0.02, on October 5, 1991, o … ⌘ Read more

Vermont EV Buses Prove Unreliable For Transportation This Winter
An anonymous reader writes: Electric buses are proving unreliable this winter for Vermont’s Green Mountain Transit, as it needs to be over 41 degrees for the buses to charge, but due to a battery recall the buses are a fire hazard and can’t be charged in a garage.

Spokesman for energy workers advocacy group Power the Future Larry Behrens told th … ⌘ Read more

Microsoft Says Bug Causes Copilot To Summarize Confidential Emails
Microsoft says a Microsoft 365 Copilot bug has been causing the AI assistant to summarize confidential emails since late January, bypassing data loss prevention (DLP) policies that organizations rely on to protect sensitive information. From a report: According to a service alert seen by BleepingComputer, this bug (tracked under CW1226324 and f … ⌘ Read more

Leaked Email Suggests Ring Plans To Expand ‘Search Party’ Surveillance Beyond Dogs
Ring’s AI-powered “Search Party” feature, which links neighborhood cameras into a networked surveillance system to find lost dogs, was never intended to stop at pets, according to an internal email from founder Jamie Siminoff obtained by 404 Media.

Siminoff told employees in early October, shortly after the featu … ⌘ Read more

WordPress Gets AI Assistant That Can Edit Text, Generate Images and Tweak Your Site
WordPress has started rolling out an AI assistant built into its site editor and media library that can edit and translate text, generate and edit images through Google’s Nano Banana model, and make structural changes to sites like creating new pages or swapping fonts.

Users can also invoke the assistant by taggin … ⌘ Read more

Lab-Grown Meat Exists (But Nobody Wants To Eat It)
An anonymous reader shares a report: In 2013, scientists unveiled the first lab-grown burger at a cost of $330,000. By 2023, the FDA approved cultivated chicken for sale. The price had dropped to around $10-$30 per pound, and over $3 billion in investor money had poured into more than 175 companies developing meat grown from animal cells instead of slaughtered animals.

The … ⌘ Read more

FDA Reverses Decision and Agrees To Review Moderna’s Flu Vaccine
The Food and Drug Administration has reversed its decision on Moderna’s flu vaccine and has agreed to review it for possible approval, Moderna announced on Wednesday. From a report: Last week, the agency rejected Moderna’s application for review of a new flu vaccine, saying the company’s research design was flawed. But in subsequent discussions … ⌘ Read more

India Tells University To Leave AI Summit After Presenting Chinese Robot as Its Own
An anonymous reader shares a report: An Indian university has been asked to vacate its stall at the country’s flagship AI summit after a staff member was caught presenting a commercially available robotic dog made in China as its own creation, two government sources said.

“You need to meet Orion. This has been de … ⌘ Read more

Thousands of CEOs Just Admitted AI Had No Impact On Employment Or Productivity
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Fortune: In 1987, economist and Nobel laureate Robert Solow made a stark observation about the stalling evolution of the Information Age: Following the advent of transistors, microprocessors, integrated circuits, and memory chips of the 1960s, economists and companies expected t … ⌘ Read more

Single Dose of DMT Rapidly Reduces Symptoms of Major Depression
In a small double-blind clinical trial, a single intravenous dose of DMT produced rapid and clinically meaningful reductions in symptoms of major depressive disorder within a week, with effects lasting up to three months in some patients. “Unlike psilocybin and lysergic acid diethylamide ( LSD), whose effects can last for hours, intravenous DMT h … ⌘ Read more

Air Pollution Emerges As a Direct Risk Factor For Alzheimer’s Disease
Longtime Slashdot reader walterbyrd shares a report from ABC News: In a study of nearly 28 million older Americans, long-term exposure to fine particle air pollution raised the risk of Alzheimer’s disease. That link held even after researchers accounted for common conditions like high blood pressure, stroke and depression. Fine particl … ⌘ Read more

Bayer Agrees To $7.25 Billion Proposed Settlement Over Thousands of Roundup Cancer Lawsuits
An anonymous reader quotes a report from the Associated Press: Agrochemical maker Bayer and attorneys for cancer patients announced a proposed $7.25 billion settlement Tuesday to resolve thousands of U.S. lawsuits alleging the company failed to warn people that its popular weedkiller Roundup coul … ⌘ Read more