Motherboard Sales ‘Collapse’ By More Than 25%
Motherboard sales are sharply declining as AI demand drives shortages and price hikes for memory, storage, CPUs, and other PC components. “Because of this, users who don’t have deep pockets are putting off upgrading their PCs and holding on to their current devices longer,” reports Tom’s Hardware. From the report: Asus, which sold 15 million motherboards in 2025, has only shipped a … ⌘ Read more

Morgan Stanley Undercuts Rivals On Pricing In Crypto Trading Debut
Morgan Stanley is adding crypto trading to E*Trade, with a pilot now underway and a broader rollout planned for the platform’s 8.6 million customers later this year. The bank is reportedly undercutting rivals with a 50-basis-point trading fee as it bets traditional finance and DeFi will converge.

“By contrast, Robinhood Markets’ (HOOD) fees … ⌘ Read more

Silicon Valley Bets $200 Million On AI Data Centers Floating In the Ocean
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: Silicon Valley investors such as Palantir co-founder Peter Thiel have bet hundreds of millions of dollars on deploying AI data centers powered by waves in the middle of the world’s oceans – a move that coincides with tech companies facing mounting challenges in building AI d … ⌘ Read more

CO2 Levels In the Atmosphere Hit ‘Depressing’ New Record
Atmospheric carbon dioxide hit a new record in April, averaging about 431 parts per million at NOAA’s Mauna Loa Observatory. That’s up from under 320 ppm when the site began measurements in 1958. Scientific American reports: Greenhouse gases, such as carbon dioxide, are measured as a proportion of the total atmosphere. The numbers are presented as the number of mo … ⌘ Read more

Apple Agrees To Pay iPhone Owners $250 Million For Not Delivering AI Siri
Apple has agreed to a proposed $250 million settlement over claims that it misled iPhone buyers about the availability of Apple Intelligence and its upgraded Siri features. The settlement would cover U.S. buyers of the iPhone 16 lineup and iPhone 15 Pro models between June 10, 2024, and March 29, 2025. The Verge reports: The settl … ⌘ Read more

Linux 7.1 Features: New NTFS Driver, New Intel + AMD Hardware, Performance Optimizations & Modernization
The Linux 7.1 development kernel that amounts to nearly 40 million lines has a lot of new features and changes in tow. While Linux 7.1 stable won’t be out until mid-June, here is a look at the interesting changes coming with this next stable version of the Linux kernel. ⌘ Read more

Can Investors Trust AI Sales Figures? Asks Wall Street Journal Opinion Piece
A Wall Street Journal opinion piece warns of “a troubling trend” in AI’s growth. “Rather than selling software, some AI companies are paying their partners to use it.”

It cites OpenAI’s $1.5 billion joint venture with private-equity firms, Anthropic’s $200 million contribution to a private-equity firm joint venture, and Google’ … ⌘ Read more

Roblox Blames Age-Verification Rollout for Lowered Growth. Stock Tumbles 22%
Age verification became mandatory for chat access on Roblox in January — and Friday morning Quartz reported it’s apparently impacted the company’s financials:

Roblox cut its full-year 2026 bookings forecast by roughly $900 million at the midpoint on Thursday, blaming stronger-than-expected headwinds from its mandatory age-ve … ⌘ Read more

It’s Goodbye Time for Jeeves and Ask.com - Relics of Yesterday’s Internet
A 1999 press release bragged “Jeeves” answered 92.3 million questions in just three months. “In the digital wilds of Y2K, we came to him with our most probing questions,” remembers the New York Times — whether it was Britney Spears or tamagotchis:

We asked, and he answered: Jeeves, the digital butler of information, the online va … ⌘ Read more

Using Drones for Cloud-Seeding Can Trigger Rain, Company Claims
Monday a company called Rainmaker announced their rain-triggering technology had produced 143 million gallons of freshwater for Utah and Oregon residents — making them “the first private company in history to validate the results of cloud seeding operations.”

The Deseret News reports:

Founded in 2023, Rainmaker uses drones to disperse silver iodid … ⌘ Read more

Hackers Are Actively Exploiting a Bug In cPanel, Used By Millions of Websites
Hackers are actively exploiting a critical cPanel and WHM vulnerability, tracked as CVE-2026-41940, that allows remote attackers to bypass the login screen and gain full administrative access to affected web servers. Major hosts including Namecheap, HostGator, and KnownHost have taken mitigation steps or patched systems, bu … ⌘ Read more

French Prosecutors Link 15-Year-Old To Mega-Breach At State’s Secure Document Agency
French prosecutors say police detained a 15-year-old suspected of using the alias “breach3d” in connection with a cyberattack on France Titres (ANTS), the state agency that handles passports, ID cards, and other secure documents. The breach allegedly involved 12 million to 18 million lines of data offered for … ⌘ Read more

Most Swiss Back Initiative To Cap Population At 10 Million
A new poll shows a slim majority of Swiss voters now support a June 14 referendum to cap the country’s population at 10 million by 2050. Under the proposal backed by the right-wing Swiss People’s Party (SVP), “the permanent resident population must not exceed 10 million before 2050, and Switzerland should abandon its freedom of movement agreement with the EU … ⌘ Read more

Trump Administration Will Pay More Energy Firms to Cancel Wind Farms
The Trump administration says it will reimburse energy companies $885 million to cancel two planned offshore wind farms, with the firms in turn agreeing to put money into oil and gas projects instead. “The deals are modeled after a similar agreement last month with the French energy giant TotalEnergies,” notes the New York Times. “Tota … ⌘ Read more

California’s Billionaire Tax Has the Signatures to Make the Ballot
California’s proposed billionaire tax appears headed for the November ballot after backers said they gathered more than 1.5 million signatures, well above the threshold needed to qualify. SF Standard reports: Backers of the initiative announced this weekend that more than 1.5 million people signed a petition to bring the one-time, 5% wealth ta … ⌘ Read more

The Linux Kernel Tree About To Hit 40 Million Lines, AMD Driver Above 6 Million Lines
Ahead of the Linux 7.1-rc1 kernel release due out later today for closing the Linux 7.1 merge window, I was curious if all the code removals would lead to a negative change in line count over Linux 7.0. The removals were not enough and Linux 7.1 Git is fast approaching 40 million lines… ⌘ Read more

Deezer Says 44% of Songs Uploaded To Its Platform Daily Are AI-Generated
Deezer says AI-generated songs now make up 44% of all new uploads to its platform, with nearly 75,000 arriving each day and more than two million per month. The company notes that consumption of these tracks is still very low, “between 1-3% of the total streams,” and 85% are flagged as fraudulent. TechCrunch reports: The l … ⌘ Read more

Nobel Prize-Winning Physicist Predicts Humankind Won’t Survive Another 50 Years
Live Science spoke with physicist David Gross, who today received the $3 million “Special Breakthrough Prize in Fundamental Physics”. He was part of a trio that won the 2004 physics Nobel prize for research that helped complete the Standard Model of particle physics. But when asked if physics will reach a unified theo … ⌘ Read more

Duolingo CEO Says They’ve Stopped Tracking Employees’ AI Use for Performance Reviews
Last May Duolingo’s stock peaked at $529.05. But while the learning app passed $1 billion in revenue in 2025 and 50 million daily active users, today its stock price has dropped more than 81%, to $100.51.

And there’s been other changes, reports Entrepreneur:

In April 2025, Duolingo CEO Luis von Ahn made headline … ⌘ Read more

Sperm Whales’ Communication Closely Parallels Human Language, Study Finds
An anonymous reader quotes a report from the Guardian: We may appear to have little in common with sperm whales – enormous, ocean-dwelling animals that last shared a common ancestor with humans more than 90 million years ago. But the whales’ vocalized communications are remarkably similar to our own, researchers have discovered … ⌘ Read more

US Jobs Too Important To Risk Chinese Car Imports, Says Ford CEO
In an interview with Fox News, Ford CEO Jim Farley warned that allowing Chinese vehicle imports could put nearly a million U.S. jobs at risk. He said China’s heavily subsidized auto industry has enough excess capacity to supply the entire U.S. market, while also raising serious cybersecurity concerns given how much data modern connected cars colle … ⌘ Read more

Anna’s Archive Loses $322 Million Spotify Piracy Case Without a Fight
An anonymous reader quotes a report from TorrentFreak: Spotify and several major record labels, including UMG, Sony, and Warner, secured a $322 million default judgment against the unknown operators of Anna’s Archive. The shadow library failed to appear in court and briefly released millions of tracks that were scraped from Spotify via Bit … ⌘ Read more

‘Super Mario Galaxy Movie’ and ‘Project Hail Mary’ Combine for Best Box Office in 7 Years
The Super Mario Galaxy Movie “is officially the year’s highest-grossing film to date with $629 million at the global box office,” reports Variety — and it will likely earn over $1 billion. Project Hail Mary now becomes the year’s second highest-grossing movie, with four-week ticket sales over … ⌘ Read more

Botched IT Upgrade Ended Liquor Sales for the Entire State of Mississippi
Mississippi has one warehouse — run by a contractor — that sells all the liquor for the entire state of 2.9 million people. “If a restaurant or store anywhere in Mississippi wanted a bottle of Jim Beam, they had to order it from the wholesale warehouse,” reports the Washington Post.

But then Mississippi’s warehouse-managing con … ⌘ Read more

Latin America’s Central Banks Establish Digital Payments Used By Hundreds of Millions
175 million people in Brazil now use its instant-payment system “Pix”, developed by the country’s central bank for real-time payments using QR codes or keys, and American Banker notes that the central banks of Argentina and Costa Rica also have developed their own widely used digital systems for instant pa … ⌘ Read more

EFF Is Leaving X
After nearly 20 years on the platform, The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) says it is leaving X. “This isn’t a decision we made lightly, but it might be overdue,” the digital rights group said. “The math hasn’t worked out for a while now.” From the report: We posted to Twitter (now known as X) five to ten times a day in 2018. Those tweets garnered somewhere between 50 and 100 million impressions per month. By 2024, our 2,500 X posts gen … ⌘ Read more

SiFive Raises $400M To Double Down On High Performance RISC-V For Data Centers
RISC-V processor IP purveyor SiFive just announced they have raised $400 million USD in an over-subscribed Series G financing round. This latest funding is so they can further focus on delivering high performance RISC-V designs for the data center… ⌘ Read more

John Deere To Pay $99 Million In Monumental Right-To-Repair Settlement
An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Drive: Farmers have been fighting John Deere for years over the right to repair their equipment, and this week, they finally reached a landmark settlement. While the agricultural manufacturing giant pointed out in a statement that this is no admission of wrongdoing, it agreed to pay $99 milli … ⌘ Read more

Testing Suggests Google’s AI Overviews Tells Millions of Lies Per Hour
A New York Times analysis found Google’s AI Overviews now answer questions correctly about 90% of the time, which might sound impressive until you realize that roughly 1 in 10 answers is wrong. “[F]or Google, that means hundreds of thousands of lies going out every minute of the day,” reports Ars Technica. From the report: The Times … ⌘ Read more

New Revelations Reignite Crypto Scandal Involving Argentina’s President Milei
An anonymous reader quotes a report from the New York Times: President Javier Milei of Argentina promoted a cryptocurrency last year that quickly skyrocketed in value then cratered just as fast, costing investors millions of dollars and setting off a scandal and an investigation. Mr. Milei said he was simply highlighting a … ⌘ Read more

Peter Thiel Is Betting Big On Solar-Powered Cow Collars
Halter, a New Zealand agtech startup now valued at $2 billion, has raised $220 million to expand its AI-powered cattle management system. “Halter is now valued at $2 billion following the Series E, which was led by Peter Thiel’s Founders Fund with participation from Blackbird, DCVC, Bond, Bessemer, and several others,” reports Inc. From the report: alter plans to … ⌘ Read more

Russia’s VPN Crackdown Caused Bank Outages, Telegram Founder Says
Russia’s “great crackdown” on VPNs — and a clampdown on Telegram’s messaging platform — had an unintended side effect, reports Bloomberg. It “triggered the widespread banking outage seen across the country this week, Telegram’s billionaire founder Pavel Durov said.”

“Telegram was banned in Russia, yet 65 million Russians still use it daily via VP … ⌘ Read more

Crooks Behind $27M in ‘Refund’ Scams Busted By YouTube Pranksters After Being Lured to Fake Funeral
One crime ring scammed 2,000 elderly people of more than $27 million between 2021 and 2023 using tech support/bank impersonation/refund scams. “Victims were in their 70s and 80s,” reports the U.S. Attorney’s office for California’s southern district. Victims were first told they’d r … ⌘ Read more

Microsoft To Invest $10 Billion In Japan For AI, Cyber Defense Expansion
Microsoft plans to invest $10 billion in Japan from 2026 to 2029 to expand AI infrastructure, boost local cloud capacity, train 1 million engineers and developers, and deepen cybersecurity cooperation with the Japanese government. Reuters reports: The investment includes the training of 1 million engineers and developers by 2030, Microso … ⌘ Read more

College Student, Cat Meme Helped Crack Massive Botnet Case
The Wall Street Journal shares the “wild behind-the-scenes story” of how the world’s largest and most destructive botnet was uncovered and taken down, writes Slashdot reader sturgeon. “At times, the network known as Kimwolf included more than a million compromised home Android devices and digital photo frames – enough DDoS firepower to disrupt internet traffic … ⌘ Read more

Russia Goes After VPNs As ‘Great Crackdown’ Gathers Pace
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Reuters: Russia is going to further clamp down Virtual Private Networks (VPNs), which are used by millions of Russians to get around internet controls and censorship, Russia’s digital minister said. In what has been cast by diplomats as Russia’s “great crackdown,” the authorities have repeatedly blocked mobile internet and … ⌘ Read more

Microsoft Copilot Is Now Injecting Ads Into Pull Requests On GitHub
Microsoft Copilot is reportedly injecting promotional “tips” into GitHub pull requests, with Neowin claiming more than 1.5 million PRs have been affected by messages advertising integrations like Raycast, Slack, Teams, and various IDEs. From the report: According to Melbourne-based software developer Zach Manson, a team member used the AI to fix … ⌘ Read more

‘Project Hail Mary’: Real Space Science, Real Astrophotography
Project Hail Mary has now grossed $300.8 million globally after earning another $54.1 million this weekend from 86 markets, reports Variety, noting that after just nine days it’s now Amazon MGM’s highest-grossing film ever. And last weekend it had the best opening for a “non-franchise” movie in three years, adds the Associated Press — the best … ⌘ Read more

OpenAI’s US Ad Pilot Exceeds $100 Million In Annualized Revenue In Six Weeks
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Reuters: OpenAI’s ChatGPT ads pilot in the United States has crossed the $100 million annualized revenue mark within six weeks of launch, a company spokesperson said on Thursday, pointing to robust early demand for the AI startup’s nascent advertising business. […] While roughly 8 … ⌘ Read more

Meta and YouTube Found Negligent in Landmark Social Media Addiction Case
A jury found Meta and YouTube negligent in a landmark social media addiction case, ruling that addictive design features such as infinite scroll and algorithmic recommendations harmed a young user and contributed to her mental health distress. The verdict awards $3 million in compensatory damages so far and could pave the way for … ⌘ Read more

Meta Loses Trial After Arguing Child Exploitation Was ‘Inevitable’
Meta lost a child safety trial in New Mexico after the court found its platforms failed to adequately protect kids from exploitation and misled parents about app safety. According to Ars Technica, the jury on Tuesday “deliberated for only one day before agreeing that Meta should pay $375 million in civil damages…” It’s From the report: The tri … ⌘ Read more

Epic Games To Cut More Than 1,000 Jobs As Fortnite Usage Falls
Epic Games is cutting more than 1,000 jobs as usage of its flagship title, Fortnite, falls. “The layoffs aren’t related to AI,” CEO Tim Sweeney noted. Reuters reports: The cuts, along with more than $500 million in savings from lower contracting and marketing spending and unfilled roles would put the company in “a more stable place,” Sweeney said in … ⌘ Read more

Millions Face Mobile Internet Outages in Moscow. ‘Digital Crackdown’ Feared
13 million people live in Moscow, reports CNN.

But since early March the city “has experienced internet and mobile service outages on a level previously unseen.” (Though Wi-Fi access to the internet is still available…) Russian social media “is flooded with jokes and memes about sending letters by carrier pigeons or using sma … ⌘ Read more

Chuck Norris Dies At 86
Longtime Slashdot reader SchroedingersCat writes: Chuck Norris, known for his roles in action films and as Texas Ranger Cordell Walker on the TV show “Walker, Texas Ranger,” passed away on March 19, leaving behind a legacy of inspiring millions around the world. He was 86.

He became Internet phenomenon after “Chuck Norris Facts” went viral online with such wildly hyperbolic statements as, “Chuck Norris had a staring contest w … ⌘ Read more

OpenAI Acquires Developer Tooling Startup Astral
OpenAI announced it’s acquiring developer tooling startup Astral to strengthen its Codex AI coding assistant, which has over 2 million weekly users and has seen a three-fold increase in user growth since the start of the year. CNBC reports: “Through it all, though, our goal remains the same: to make programming more productive. To build tools that radically change what it … ⌘ Read more

Cloudflare Appeals Piracy Shield Fine, Hopes To Kill Italy’s Site-Blocking Law
Cloudflare is appealing a 14.2 million-euro fine from Italy for refusing to comply with its “Piracy Shield” law, which requires blocking access to websites on its 1.1.1.1 DNS service within 30 minutes. The company argues the system lacks oversight, risks widespread overblocking, and could undermine core Internet infrastru … ⌘ Read more

Apple Can Delist Apps ‘With Or Without Cause,’ Judge Says In Loss For Musi App
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: Musi, a free music streaming app that had tens of millions of iPhone downloads and garnered plenty of controversy over its method of acquiring music, has lost an attempt to get back on Apple’s App Store. A federal judge dismissed Musi’s lawsuit against Apple with preju … ⌘ Read more

Microsoft, OpenAI & Others Pony Up $12.5M To Strengthen Open-Source Security
The Linux Foundation announced today that $12.5 million USD in grants from the likes of OpenAI, Anthropic, AWS, GitHub, Google, and Microsoft have been collected to invest in strengthening the security of the open-source software ecosystem… ⌘ Read more

Hydropower Line From Quebec Could Power a Million NYC Homes
The Champlain Hudson Power Express, a $6 billion, 339-mile buried transmission line, will soon deliver Canadian hydropower from Hydro-Quebec to New York City. The project could supply up to 20% of the city’s electricity and power roughly one million homes throughout the year. “This is far and away the largest project I have ever worked on,” said Bob Ha … ⌘ Read more

Does Canada Need Nationalized, Public AI?
While AI CEOs worry governments might nationalize AI, others are advocating for something similar. Canadian security professional Bruce Schneier and Harvard data scientist Nathan Sanders published this call to action in Canada’s most widely-read newspaper (with a readership over 6 million): “Canada Needs Nationalized, Public AI.”

While there are Canadian AI companies, they remain for-profit e … ⌘ Read more