Metacritic Will Kick Out Media Attempting To Submit AI Generated Reviews
An anonymous reader shares a report: While some see AI as a tool to be used, its specific use and how it is deployed responsibly is being heavily debated online across a wide range of industries. In terms of journalistic content, and in this particular instance, reviews, review aggregator Metacritic has taken a firm stance on con … ⌘ Read more

Genode OS 26.02 Halfway Done Migrating From GitHub To Codeberg
Genode OS 26.02 is out as the latest feature update to this open-source operating system framework that also serves as the basis for their Sculpt general purpose OS… ⌘ Read more

Google Launches Nano Banana 2 Model With Faster Image Generation
Google has launched Nano Banana 2 (Gemini 3.1 Flash Image), a faster, more realistic image generation model that becomes the default across Gemini, Search, Lens, and Flow. TechCrunch reports: The new Nano Banana 2 retains some of the high-fidelity characteristics of the Pro model but produces images faster. The company says you can create images … ⌘ Read more

The US Spent $30 Billion on Classroom Laptops and Got the First Generation Less Capable Than Its Parents
More than two decades after Maine became the first state to hand laptops to middle schoolers – distributing 17,000 Apple machines across 243 schools in 2002 â” neuroscientist Jared Cooney Horvath told a U.S. Senate committee earlier this year that Gen Z is the first g … ⌘ Read more

Google Cloud N4 Series Benchmarks: Google Axion vs. Intel Xeon vs. AMD EPYC Performance
Google Cloud recently launched their N4A series powered by their in-house Axion ARM64 processors. In that launch-day benchmarking last month was looking at how the N4A with Axion compared to their prior-generation ARM64 VMs powered by Ampere Altra. There were dramatic generational gains, but how does the N4A stand up to the AMD EPYC and Intel Xeon instances? Here are some follow-up benchmarks I had done to explore the … ⌘ Read more

Rule-Breaking Black Hole Growing At 13x the Cosmic ‘Speed Limit’ Challenges Theories
“A surprisingly ravenous black hole from the dawn of the universe is breaking two big rules,” reports Live Science. “It’s not only exceeding the ‘speed limit’ of black hole growth but also generating extreme X-ray and radio wave emissions — two features that are not predicted to coexist…”

“How is this r … ⌘ Read more

AOMedia Open Audio Codec “OAC” Aims To Be The Successor To Opus
While the Alliance For Open Media “AOMedia” is most known for developing the AV1 open video codec, the associated AV1 Image File Format (AVIF), and the next-generation AV2, they are now working on the Open Audio Codec (AOC)… ⌘ Read more

Linux 7.0 Further Prepares For Intel Diamond Rapids With NTB Driver Support
The upstream Linux kernel appears largely ready for Intel’s next-generation Xeon Diamond Rapids processors as the successor to Granite Rapids. Most of the driver support appears to have been settled for a while with just some stragglers remaining. With the ongoing Linux 7.0 kernel one new addition for Diamond Rapids is NTB driver support… ⌘ Read more

Hit Piece-Writing AI Deleted. But Is This a Warning About AI-Generated Harassment?
Last week an AI agent wrote a blog post attacking the maintainer who’d rejected the code it wrote. But that AI agent’s human operator has now come forward, revealing their agent was an OpenClaw instance with its own accounts, switching between multiple models from multiple providers. (So “No one company had … ⌘ Read more

US Particle Accelerators Turn Nuclear Waste Into Electricity, Cut Radioactive Life By 99.7%
Researchers at the Thomas Jefferson National Accelerator Facility are advancing Accelerator-Driven Systems (ADS) that use high-energy proton beams to transmute long-lived nuclear waste into shorter-lived isotopes. “The process also generates significant heat, which can be harnessed to produce … ⌘ Read more

Pinterest Is Drowning in a Sea of AI Slop and Auto-Moderation
Users say Pinterest has become flooded with AI-generated images and heavy-handed automated moderation, with artists reporting wrongful takedowns and their hand-drawn work mislabeled as “AI modified.” As the company doubles down on AI features and layoffs, longtime users argue the platform’s creative ecosystem is being undermined. 404 Media reports: “I … ⌘ 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

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

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

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

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

Linux 7.0 Showing Some Early Performance Regressions On Intel Panther Lake
With the Linux 7.0 merge window beginning to calm down ahead of the 7.0-rc1 release due out on Sunday, one of the areas I was most excited about benchmarking on Linux 7.0 was looking for any performance gains with the new Intel Core Ultra Series 3 “Panther Lake” given ongoing Intel Xe graphics driver improvements and other general kernel optimizations. Unfortunately, at large the Intel Panther Lake performance is moving in the wrong directio … ⌘ Read more

System76 Preparing To Introduce Redesigned Thelio Hardware
Linux hardware vendor System76 has begun teasing a redesign of their Thelio chassis that is used by their modern desktops and workstations. Helping distinguish System76 from other Linux desktop/PC vendors has been their custom-engineered, built-in-the-USA enclosures and now they are preparing to launch a next-generation design… ⌘ 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

Sony Tech Can Identify Original Music in AI-Generated Songs
Sony Group has developed a technology that can identify the underlying music used in tunes generated by AI, making it possible for songwriters to seek compensation from AI developers if their music was used. From a report: Sony Group’s technology analyzes which musicians’ songs were used in learning and generating music. It can quantify the contri … ⌘ Read more

DNF 5.4 Released With Some New Options & AI Contributions Policy
DNF 5.4 is out today as the latest release for this next-generation RPM package management solution used by Fedora, Red Hat Enterprise Linux, and various other RPM-based Linux distributions… ⌘ Read more

The Music Industry Enters Its Less-Is-More Era
The music industry’s long romance with an ever-expanding catalog of songs appears to be souring, as streaming platforms and rights holders confront a daily deluge that now includes 60,000 wholly AI-generated tracks uploaded to Deezer alone – roughly 39% of the French service’s daily intake, a statistic the company shared during Grammys week last month.

Streaming services … ⌘ Read more

@movq@www.uninformativ.de Our ads are one of these rubbish ones, unfortunately. They just speak about “an attractive salary”. I reckon I will tell my boss about this talk tomorrow (even though I doubt that any of them are from our department).

I’ve got the impression that salary is amongst the most top secret topics in Germany in general. My conspiracy theory is that companies don’t put any numbers in job ads because that would just reveal that most employees are underpaid.

Will Tech Giants Just Use AI Interactions to Create More Effective Ads?
Google never asked its users before adding AI Overviews to its search results and AI-generated email summaries to Gmail, notes the New York Times. And Meta didn’t ask before making “Meta AI” an unremovable part of its tool in Instagram, WhatsApp and Messenger.

“The insistence on AI everywhere — with little or no option to turn it off — r … ⌘ Read more

Ars Technica’s AI Reporter Apologizes For Mistakenly Publishing Fake AI-Generated Quotes
Sunday Ars Technica apologized for making Scott Shambaugh’s week a little weirder. Last week Shambaugh learned an AI agent published a “hit piece” about him after he’d rejected the AI agent’s pull request. (And that incident was covered by Ars Technica.)

But then Shambaugh realized their article att … ⌘ Read more

India’s New Social Media Rules: Remove Unlawful Content in Three Hours, Detect Illegal AI Content Automatically
Bloomberg reports:

India tightened rules governing social media content and platforms, particularly targeting artificially generated and manipulated material, in a bid to crack down on the rapid spread of misinformation and deepfakes. The government on Tu … ⌘ Read more

Vim 9.2 Released
“More than two years after the last major 9.1 release, the Vim project has announced Vim 9.2,” reports the blog Linuxiac:

A big part of this update focuses on improving Vim9 Script as Vim 9.2 adds support for enums, generic functions, and tuple types.

On top of that, you can now use built-in functions as methods, and class handling includes features like protected constructors with _new(). The :defcompile command has also been impro … ⌘ Read more

Dates with AI Companions Plagued by Lag, Miscommunications - and General Creepiness
To celebrate Valentine’s Day, EVA AI created a temporary “pop-up” restaurant at a wine bar in Manhattan’s “Hell’s Kitchen” district where patrons can date AI personas.

The Verge notes that looking around the restaurant, “Of the 30-some-odd people in attendance, only two or three are organic users. The rest are EVA … ⌘ Read more

ByteDance’s Seedance 2 Criticized Over AI-Generated Video of Tom Cruise Fighting Brad Pitt
1.5 million people have now viewed a slick 15-second video imagining Tom Cruise fighting Brad Pitt that was generated by ByteDance’s new AI video generation tool Seedance 2.0.
But while ByteDance gushes their tool “delivers cinematic output aligned with industry standards,” the cinema industry isn’t h … ⌘ Read more

Detroit Automakers Take $50 Billion Hit
The Detroit Big Three – General Motors, Ford and Stellantis – have collectively announced more than $50 billion in write-downs on their electric-vehicle businesses after years of aggressive investment into a transition that, even before Republican lawmakers abolished a $7,500 federal tax credit last fall, was already running below expectations.

U.S. EV sales fell more than 30% in the fourth qua … ⌘ Read more

OpenAI Claims DeepSeek Distilled US Models To Gain an Edge
An anonymous reader shares a report: OpenAI has warned US lawmakers that its Chinese rival DeepSeek is using unfair and increasingly sophisticated methods to extract results from leading US AI models to train the next generation of its breakthrough R1 chatbot, according to a memo reviewed by Bloomberg News.

In the memo, sent Thursday to the House Select Committe … ⌘ Read more

CIA Makes New Push To Recruit Chinese Military Officers as Informants
An anonymous reader shares a report: Just weeks after a dramatic purge of China’s top general, the CIA is moving to capitalize on any resulting discord with a new public video targeting potential informants in the Chinese military. The U.S. spy agency on Thursday rolled out the video depicting a disillusioned mid-level Chinese military o … ⌘ Read more

Anthropic To Cover Costs of Electricity Price Increases From Its Data Centers
AI startup Anthropic says it will ensure consumer electricity costs remain steady as it expands its data center footprint. From a report: Anthropic said it would work with utility companies to “estimate and cover” consumer electricity price increases in places where it is not able to sufficiently generate new power and pay fo … ⌘ Read more

Linux 7.0 Performance Events Prep For Intel Xeon Diamond Rapids
The performance “perf” events changes for the Linux 7.0 kernel are continuing to prepare for next-generation Xeon Diamond Rapids processors as the successor to current Xeon 6 Granite Rapids… ⌘ Read more

US Hacking Tool Boss Stole and Sold Exploits To Russian Broker That Could Target Millions of Devices, DOJ Says
Federal prosecutors have revealed that Peter Williams, the former general manager of U.S. defense contractor L3Harris’s hacking tools division Trenchant, sold eight stolen software exploits to a Russian broker whose customers – including the Russian govern … ⌘ Read more

Intel Arc B390 Panther Lake Generational Performance Since The Gen9 Graphics Era
Last week on Phoronix we provided initial Linux graphics benchmarks for the new Xe3-based Arc B390 graphics found with the higher-end Panther Lake SoCs with 12 Xe cores. Those benchmarks showed great gains over recent generations of Intel graphics like with Lunar Lake, Meteor Lake, and even Alder/Raptor Lake… But what if you hold onto your laptop for even longer? In this article is an Intel integrated graphics comparison look … ⌘ Read more

ByteDance Suspends Seedance 2 Feature That Turns Facial Photos Into Personal Voices Over Potential Risks
hackingbear writes: China’s Bytedance has released Seedance 2.0, an AI video generator which handles up to four types of input at once: images, videos, audio, and text. Users can combine up to nine images, three videos, and three audio files, up to a total of twelve fi … ⌘ Read more

Intel CPU Microcode 20260210 Brings Security Updates & Functional Fixes
Intel today for Patch Tuesday released several generations worth of CPU microcode updates for addressing multiple security issues and functional issues… ⌘ Read more

Linux 7.0 VFS Changes: Non-Blocking Timestamps, Standardized Generic I/O Error Reporting
In addition to introducing nullfs and the OPEN_TREE_NAMESPACE support for containers, there were also a number of other interesting VFS updates merged on Monday for the Linux 7.0 kernel… ⌘ Read more

The Big Money in Today’s Economy Is Going To Capital, Not Labor
The American economy’s most valuable companies are now worth trillions of dollars more than their predecessors were a generation ago, yet they employ a fraction of the workers – and a new analysis by the Wall Street Journal argues that this widening gap between capital and labor is the defining economic story of our time.

Labor received 58% of gross dom … ⌘ Read more

Romance Publishing Has an AI Problem and Most Readers Don’t Know It Yet
The romance genre – long the publishing industry’s earliest adopter of technological shifts, from e-books to self-publishing to serial releases – has become the front line for AI-generated fiction, and the results as you can imagine are messy. Coral Hart, a Cape Town-based novelist previously published by Harlequin and Mills & Boon, … ⌘ Read more

Debian’s tag2upload Reaches GA For Improving Packaging Workflow
Debian’s tag2upload has finally reached general availability “GA” status for helping Debian developers/maintainers with an improved Git-based packaging workflow… ⌘ Read more

Do Super Bowl Ads For AI Signal a Bubble About to Burst?
It’s the first “AI” Super Bowl, argues the tech/business writer at Slate, with AI company advertisements taking center stage, even while consumers insist to surveyors that they’re “mostly negative” about AI-generated ads.

Last year AI companies spent over $1.7 billion on AI-related ads, notes the Washington Post, adding the blitz this year will be “inescapable” — even … ⌘ Read more

Initial AMD Zen 6 “znver6” Support Merged For LLVM/Clang
Merged overnight to the LLVM/Clang compiler’s codebase was initial targeting for next-generation AMD Zen 6 processors using the znver6 target… ⌘ Read more

Initial AMD Zen 6 “znver6” Support Merged For LLVM/Clang
Merged overnight to the LLVM/Clang compiler’s codebase was initial targeting for next-generation AMD Zen 6 processors using the znver6 target… ⌘ Read more

New Bill in New York Would Require Disclaimers on AI-Generated News Content
An anonymous reader shares a report: A new bill in the New York state legislature would require news organizations to label AI-generated material and mandate that humans review any such content before publication. On Monday, Senator Patricia Fahy (D-Albany) and Assemblymember Nily Rozic (D-NYC) introduced the bill, called Th … ⌘ Read more

Amazon’s Tax Bill Plunges 87% After Tax Cuts
An anonymous reader shares a report: Republicans’ tax cuts shaved billions off Amazon’s tax bill, new government filings show. The company says it ran a $1.2 billion tax bill last year, down from $9 billion the previous year, and even as its profits jumped by 45% to nearly $90 billion.

That’s largely because of the generous new depreciation breaks GOP lawmakers included in their One Big Beau … ⌘ Read more

Pushing The Intel Panther Lake CPU Performance Further On Linux
Earlier this week I published the first Linux benchmarks of Intel’s much anticipated Panther Lake with the Core Ultra X7 358H 16-core 18A processor. The Panther Lake SoC showed very nice generational gains especially with much better performance-per-Watt and the Intel Arc B390 graphics are also fascinatingly fast while continuing to be backed by open-source drivers. In today’s article are more Panther Lake Linux benchmarks on the CPU side in … ⌘ Read more

‘Vibe Coding Kills Open Source’
Four economists across Central European University, Bielefeld University and the Kiel Institute have built a general equilibrium model of the open-source software ecosystem and concluded that vibe coding – the increasingly common practice of letting AI agents select, assemble and modify packages on a developer’s behalf – erodes the very funding mechanism that keeps open-source projects alive.

The core problem … ⌘ Read more

Loongson 3B6000 Benchmarks: How China’s LoongArch CPU Compares To AMD Zen 5, Intel Arrow Lake & Raspberry Pi 5
Recently I finally got my hands on a LoongArch processor, the ISA developed by China’s Loongson Technology as an evolution from their earlier use of the MIPS64 ISA and inspired by RISC-V and other modern ISAs. The Loongson-3B6000 features 12 cores / 24 threads with dual channel DDR4 ECC memory support. Here is a look at how that latest-generation LoongArch desktop processor compares to the current gen … ⌘ Read more