Tech Firms Aren’t Just Encouraging Their Workers To Use AI. They’re Enforcing It.
Tech companies ranging from 300-person startups to giants like Amazon, Google, Meta, Microsoft and Salesforce have moved beyond encouraging employees to use AI tools and are now actively tracking adoption and, in several cases, tying it to performance reviews. Google is factoring AI use into some software engineer re … ⌘ Read more

Americans Are Destroying Flock Surveillance Cameras
An anonymous reader shares a report: Brian Merchant, writing for Blood in the Machine, reports that people across the United States are dismantling and destroying Flock surveillance cameras, amid rising public anger that the license plate readers aid U.S. immigration authorities and deportations.

Flock is the Atlanta-based surveillance startup valued at $7.5 billion a yea … ⌘ Read more

Xbox Co-founder Says Microsoft is Quietly Sunsetting the Platform
Seamus Blackley, one of the original founders of Xbox who helped convince Bill Gates and Steve Ballmer to back a console project more than 26 years ago, told GamesBeat in an interview that he believes Microsoft is quietly sunsetting the platform under the guise of an AI-driven leadership transition.

Microsoft recently announced that Asha Shar … ⌘ Read more

Hacker Used Anthropic’s Claude To Steal Sensitive Mexican Data
A hacker exploited Anthropic’s AI chatbot to carry out a series of attacks against Mexican government agencies, resulting in the theft of a huge trove of sensitive tax and voter information, according to cybersecurity researchers. From a report: The unknown Claude user wrote Spanish-language prompts for the chatbot to act as an elite hacker, finding vu … ⌘ Read more

DVD Sales Decline Slows Sharply as Gen Z Discovers the Appeal of Physical Media
DVD and Blu-ray sales have been in freefall for years, but the decline is slowing considerably as Gen Z buyers turn to physical media and drive a measurable uptick at video rental stores and retailers across the U.S.

Overall disc sales fell just 9% last year after dropping more than 20% in both 2023 and 202 … ⌘ Read more

Scientists Crack the Case of ‘Screeching’ Scotch Tape
The screeching sound that Scotch tape makes when you rip it off a surface – that fingernails-on-a-chalkboard noise most people try not to think about – is produced by shock waves from micro-cracks that travel across the peeling tape at supersonic speeds, according to a new paper published in Physical Review E.

Researchers led by Sigurdur Thoroddsen of King Abdulla … ⌘ Read more

Mesa 26.0.1 Released With Important Security Fix For OOB Memory Access From WebGPU
Mesa 26.0.1 is now available as the first point release of this quarter’s Mesa 26.0 series. Besides the usual bug fixing, Mesa 26.0.1 is more pressing than usual since it contains a security fix for possible out-of-bounds memory access in WebGPU contexts from web browsers… ⌘ Read more

Microsoft Japan Raided Over Suspected Violation of Anti-Monopoly Law
An anonymous reader shares a report: Japan’s Fair Trade Commission raided Microsoft Japan’s offices on Wednesday as part of an investigation into whether it improperly restricted customers of its Azure platform from using rival cloud services, a source with direct knowledge of the matter told Reuters.

The source said Japan’s antitrust authori … ⌘ Read more

Uber Previews Its Dubai Air Taxi Service
An anonymous reader shares a report: Uber is one step closer to going airborne. On Wednesday, the company previewed its air taxi booking service ahead of an expected launch in Dubai later this year. The inaugural Uber Air program will let travelers book Joby Aviation’s electric air taxis through a familiar process in the Uber app.

The experience of booking an air taxi will be much like reserv … ⌘ Read more

Anthropic Drops Flagship Safety Pledge
Anthropic, the AI company that has long positioned itself as the industry’s most safety-conscious research lab, is dropping the central commitment of its Responsible Scaling Policy – a 2023 pledge to never train an AI system unless it could guarantee beforehand that its safety measures were adequate. “We didn’t really feel, with the rapid advance of AI, that it made sense for us to make unilateral com … ⌘ Read more

HP Says Memory’s Contribution To PC Costs Just Doubled To 35%
HP has revealed that memory now accounts for 35% of the cost of materials it needs to build a PC, up from between 15 and 18% last quarter. And the company expects RAM’s contribution will rise through the year. From a report: Speaking on the company’s Q1 2026 earnings call, interim CEO Bruce Broussard said the company has secured long-term supply agreemen … ⌘ Read more

Apple’s Touch-Screen MacBook Pro To Have Dynamic Island, New Interface
Apple’s forthcoming touch-screen MacBook Pro models – the company’s first-ever laptops to support touch input – will feature the iPhone’s Dynamic Island at the center top of their OLED displays and a new interface that dynamically adjusts between touch and point-and-click controls, according to a Bloomberg report citing people famili … ⌘ Read more

The US Had a Big Battery Boom Last Year
The United States installed a record 57 gigawatt hours of new battery storage on its electric grids in 2025, a nearly 30% increase over the prior year that arrived even as the Trump administration cut tax credits for wind and solar in last summer’s One Big Beautiful Bill.

The figures come from a Solar Energy Industries Association report published Monday, which also projects the market will … ⌘ Read more

First British Baby Born Using Transplanted Womb From Dead Donor
A 10-week-old boy named Hugo has become the first baby born in the UK from a womb transplanted from a deceased donor, after his mother Grace Bell – who was born without a viable womb due to a condition called MRKH syndrome, which affects one in every 5,000 women – underwent a 10-hour transplant operation at The Churchill Hospital in Oxford in J … ⌘ Read more

Meta AI Security Researcher Said an OpenClaw Agent Ran Amok on Her Inbox
Meta AI security researcher Summer Yue posted a now-viral account on X describing how an OpenClaw agent she had tasked with sorting through her overstuffed email inbox went rogue, deleting messages in what she called a “speed run” while ignoring her repeated commands from her phone to stop.

“I had to RUN to my Mac mini like I was d … ⌘ Read more

New Datacentres Risk Doubling Great Britain’s Electricity Use, Regulator Says
The amount of power being sought by new datacentre projects in Great Britain would exceed the national current peak electricity consumption, according to an industry watchdog. From a report: Ofgem said about 140 proposed datacentre schemes, driven by use of artificial intelligence, could require 50 gigawatts of electricity … ⌘ Read more

CrowdStrike Says Attackers Are Moving Through Networks in Under 30 Minutes
An anonymous reader shares a report: Cyberattacks reached victims faster and came from a wider range of threat groups than ever last year, CrowdStrike said in its annual global threat report released Tuesday, adding that cybercriminals and nation-states increasingly relied on predictable tactics to evade detection by exploiting … ⌘ Read more

Hegseth Gives Anthropic Until Friday To Back Down on AI Safeguards
Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth gave Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei until Friday evening to give the military unfettered access to its AI model or face harsh penalties, Axios has learned. Hegseth told Amodei in a tense meeting on Tuesday that the Pentagon will either cut ties and declare Anthropic a “supply chain risk,” or invoke the Defense Produ … ⌘ 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

Microsoft Execs Worry AI Will Eat Entry Level Coding Jobs
An anonymous reader shares a report: Microsoft Azure CTO Mark Russinovich and VP of Developer Community Scott Hanselman have written a paper arguing that senior software engineers must mentor junior developers to prevent AI coding agents from hollowing out the profession’s future skills base.

The paper, Redefining the Engineering Profession for AI, is b … ⌘ Read more

Billions of Dollars Later and Still Nobody Knows What an Xbox Is
Microsoft has spent more than $76 billion acquiring game studios and publishers over the past few years in an attempt to turn Xbox into a Netflix-like subscription platform, and the result is that nobody – possibly not even Microsoft – can clearly articulate what Xbox actually is anymore, The Verge writes.

The brand started as a powerful video … ⌘ Read more

Discord Distances Itself From Persona Age Verification After User Backlash
Discord is attempting to distance itself from the age verification provider Persona following a steady stream of user backlash. From a report: In an emailed statement to The Verge, Discord’s head of product policy, Savannah Badalich, confirms the company “ran a limited test of Persona in the UK where age assurance had previous … ⌘ Read more

Russia Targets Telegram as Rift With Founder Pavel Durov Deepens
Russia has opened an investigation into Telegram founder Pavel Durov for “abetting terrorist activities,” [non-paywalled source] in the latest sign that his uneasy relationship with the Kremlin has broken down. From a report: Two Russian newspapers, including the state-run Rossiiskaya Gazeta and Kremlin-friendly tabloid Komsomolskaya Pravda, all … ⌘ Read more

Firefox 148 Now Available With The New AI Controls, AI Kill Switches
Firefox 148 introduces granular AI controls and a global “AI kill switch” that allows users to disable or selectively manage the browser’s AI features. Phoronix reports: Among the AI features that can be toggled individually are around translations, image alt text in the Firefox PDF viewer, tab group suggestions, key points in link preview … ⌘ Read more

Quantum Algorithm Beats Classical Tools On Complement Sampling Tasks
alternative_right shares a report from Phys.org: A team of researchers working at Quantinuum in the United Kingdom and QuSoft in the Netherlands has now developed a quantum algorithm that solves a specific sampling task – known as complement sampling – dramatically more efficiently than any classical algorithm. Their paper, published i … ⌘ Read more

Texas Is About To Overtake California In Battery Storage
U.S. battery storage installations hit a record 57.6 GWh in 2025, and Texas is now poised to surpass California as the nationâ™s largest storage market in 2026. Electrek reports: According to the US Energy Storage Market Outlook Q1 2026 from the Solar Energy Industries Association (SEIA) and Benchmark Mineral Intelligence, installations are now four times … ⌘ Read more

US Farmers Are Rejecting Multimillion-Dollar Datacenter Bids For Their Land
An anonymous reader quotes a report from the Guardian: When two men knocked on Ida Huddleston’s door last May, they carried a contract worth more than $33m in exchange for the Kentucky farm that had fed her family for centuries. According to Huddleston, the men’s client, an unnamed “Fortune 100 company,” sought her 650 acres … ⌘ Read more

New Microsoft Gaming CEO Has ‘No Tolerance For Bad AI’
In her first major interview as Microsoft’s new gaming chief, Asha Sharma said that “great games” must deliver emotional resonance and a distinct creative voice, while making clear that she has “no tolerance for bad AI.” Stepping in after Phil Spencer’s retirement, she’s pledging consistency, community trust, and a human-first approach to storytelling as Xbox enters … ⌘ Read more

Microsoft Says Bug In Classic Outlook Hides the Mouse Pointer
joshuark quotes a report from BleepingComputer: Microsoft is investigating a known issue that causes the mouse pointer to disappear in the classic Outlook desktop email client for some users. This bug has been acknowledged almost two months after the first reports started surfacing online, with users saying that Outlook became unusable after the mouse po … ⌘ Read more

Mesa PanVK Driver Seeing Up To 25.7x Speedup For MSAA
The open-source PanVK driver providing Vulkan support for modern Arm Mali graphics hardware is seeing big speed-ups in the multi-sample anti-aliasing (MSAA) performance in Vulkan tests as a result of new code merged today to Mesa 26.1… ⌘ Read more

Viral Doomsday Report Lays Bare Wall Street’s Deep Anxiety About AI Future
A 7,000-word “doomsday” thought experiment from Citrini Research helped trigger an 800-point drop in the Dow, “painting a dark portrait of a future in which technological change inspires a race to the bottom in white-collar knowledge work,” reports the Wall Street Journal. From the report: Concerns of hyperscalers overspending are o … ⌘ Read more

Trump’s ‘Board of Peace’ Explores Stablecoin For Gaza
An anonymous reader quotes a report from the Financial Times: Officials working with Donald Trump’s “Board of Peace” are exploring setting up a stablecoin for Gaza as part of efforts to reshape the devastated Palestinian enclave’s economy, according to five people familiar with the discussions. The talks around introducing a stablecoin – a type of cryptocurrency whose v … ⌘ Read more

OpenAI Calls In the Consultants For Its Enterprise Push
OpenAI has formed a multi-year “Frontier Alliance” with four consulting heavyweights to accelerate enterprise adoption of its no-code AI agent platform, OpenAI Frontier. TechCrunch reports: The alliance includes multi-year partnerships between OpenAI and four major consulting firms, Boston Consulting Group (BCG), McKinsey, Accenture and Capgemini, to sell its enterpris … ⌘ Read more

Panasonic Will No Longer Make Its Own TVs
Panasonic is handing over the manufacturing, marketing, and sales of its TVs to Shenzhen-based Skyworth, effectively exiting in-house TV production. Ars Technica reports: Skyworth is a Shenzhen-headquartered TV brand. The company claims to be “a top three global provider of the Android TV platform.” In July, research firm Omdia reported that Skyworth was one of the top-five TV brands … ⌘ Read more

ASML Unveils EUV Light Source Advance That Could Yield 50% More Chips By 2030
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Reuters: Researchers at ASML Holding say they have found a way to boost the power of the light source in a key chip making machine to turn out up to 50% more chips by decade’s end, to help retain the Dutch company’s edge over emerging U.S. and Chinese rivals. ASML is the world’ … ⌘ Read more

IBM Shares Crater 13% After Anthropic Says Claude Code Can Tackle COBOL Modernization
IBM shares plunged nearly 13% on Monday after Anthropic published a blog post arguing that its Claude Code tool could automate much of the complex analysis work involved in modernizing COBOL, the decades-old programming language that still underpins an estimated 95% of ATM transactions in the United States and … ⌘ Read more

Linus Torvalds: Someone ‘More Competent Who Isn’t Afraid of Numbers Past the Teens’ Will Take Over Linux One Day
Linus Torvalds has pondered his professional mortality in a self-deprecating post to mark the release of the first release candidate for version 7.0 of the Linux kernel. From a report: “You all know the drill by now: two weeks have passed, and the kernel … ⌘ Read more

‘How Many AIs Does It Take To Read a PDF?’
Despite AI’s progress in building complex software, the ubiquitous PDF remains something of a grand challenge – a format Adobe developed in the early 1990s to preserve the precise visual appearance of documents. PDFs consist of character codes, coordinates, and rendering instructions rather than logically ordered text, and even state-of-the-art models asked to extract information from them wil … ⌘ Read more

Anthropic Accuses Chinese Companies of Siphoning Data From Claude
U.S. artificial-intelligence startup Anthropic said three Chinese AI companies set up more than 24,000 fraudulent accounts with its Claude AI model to help their own systems catch up. From a report: The three companies – DeepSeek, Moonshot AI and MiniMax – prompted Claude more than 16 million times, siphoning information from Anthropic’s system to … ⌘ Read more

Say Goodbye to the Undersea Cable That Made the Global Internet Possible
The first fiber-optic cable ever laid across an ocean – TAT-8, a nearly 6,000-kilometer line between the United States, United Kingdom, and France that carried its first traffic on December 14, 1988 – is now being pulled off the Atlantic seabed after more than two decades of sitting dormant, bound for recycling in South Africa.
… ⌘ Read more

PayPal Attracts Takeover Interest After Stock Slump
An anonymous reader shares a report: PayPal, the digital payments pioneer, is attracting takeover interest from potential buyers after a stock slide wiped out almost half of its value, according to people familiar with the matter.

The San Jose, California-based company has fielded meetings with banks amid unsolicited interest from suitors, the people said. At least one large … ⌘ Read more

Linux 7.0 Features Include More Preparations For AMD Zen 6 & Intel Nova Lake
While the version bump to 7.0 is driven solely by Linus Torvalds’ versioning preferences, with Linux 7.0 there are many great changes to be found in this upcoming stable kernel version to power the likes of Ubuntu 26.04 LTS. Here is a recap of all the interesting changes with Linux 7.0. ⌘ Read more

Climate Physicists Face the Ghosts in Their Machines: Clouds
Climate scientists trying to predict how much hotter the planet will get have long grappled with a surprisingly stubborn problem – clouds, which both reflect sunlight and trap heat, account for more than half the variation between climate predictions and are the main reason warming projections for the next 50 years range from 2 to 6 degrees Celsius.

Two … ⌘ Read more

Stressful People in Your Life Could Be Adding Months To Your Biological Age
A study published last week in PNAS found that people who regularly cause problems or make life difficult – whom the researchers call “hasslers” – are associated with measurably faster biological aging in those around them, at a rate of roughly 1.5% per additional hassler and about nine months of additional biological a … ⌘ Read more

Sam Altman Would Like To Remind You That Humans Use a Lot of Energy, Too
OpenAI CEO Sam Altman is pushing back on growing concerns about AI’s environmental footprint, dismissing claims about ChatGPT’s water consumption as “totally fake” and arguing that the fairer way to measure AI’s energy use is to compare it against humans.

In an interview with Indian Express, Altman acknowledged that evaporative cooling … ⌘ Read more

Goldman Sachs, Morgan Stanley Calculate AI’s Contribution To U.S. Growth May Be Basically Zero
The narrative that AI spending has been singlehandedly propping up the U.S. economy – a claim that captivated Silicon Valley, Wall Street and Washington over the past year – is facing serious pushback from economists [non-paywalled source] at Goldman Sachs, Morgan Stanley and JPMorgan Ch … ⌘ Read more

Intel ANV Driver Sees Several Vulkan Video H.265 Encode Fixes
For those interested in Vulkan Video on the Intel “ANV” open-source Linux driver, merged last week to Mesa 26.1-devel were some H.265 encode fixes… ⌘ Read more

Is AI Impacting Which Programming Language Projects Use?
“In August 2025, TypeScript surpassed both Python and JavaScript to become the most-used language on GitHub for the first time ever…” writes GitHub’s senior developer advocate.

They point to this as proof that “AI isn’t just speeding up coding. It’s reshaping which languages, frameworks, and tools developers choose in the first place.”

Eighty percent of … ⌘ 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

Should Job-Seekers Stop Using AI to Write Their Resumes?
When one company asked job applicants to submit a video where they answer a question, most of the 300 responses were “eerily similar,” reports the Washington Post (with a company executive saying it was “abundantly clear” they’d used AI.)

Job seekers are turning to AI to help them land jobs more quickly in a tough labor market…. Employers say that’s having an un … ⌘ Read more