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
Claude Sonnet 4.6 Model Brings ‘Much-Improved Coding Skills’, Upgraded Free Tier
Anthropic has released Claude Sonnet 4.6, the first upgrade to its mid-tier AI model since version 4.5 arrived in September 2025. The new model features a “1M token context window” and delivers a “full upgrade of the model’s skills across coding, computer use, long-context reasoning, agent planning, knowledge wor … ⌘ Read more
Apple Is Reportedly Planning To Launch AI-Powered Glasses, a Pendant, and AirPods
According to Bloomberg’s Mark Gurman (paywalled), Apple is reportedly developing AI-powered smart glasses, a wearable pendant, and camera-equipped AirPods that connect to the iPhone and use “visual context” to let Siri perform real-world actions. The Verge reports: Apple is reportedly aiming to start production … ⌘ Read more
Discord Rival Maxes Out Hosting Capacity As Players Flee Age-Verification Crackdown
Following backlash over Discord’s global rollout of strict age-verification checks, users are flocking to rival platform TeamSpeak and overwhelming its servers. According to PC Gamer, the Discord alternative said its hosting capacity has been maxed out in a number of regions including the U.S. From the report … ⌘ Read more
NPR’s Radio Host David Greene Says Google’s NotebookLM Tool Stole His Voice
An anonymous reader quotes a report from the Washington Post: David Greene had never heard of NotebookLM, Google’s buzzy artificial intelligence tool that spins up podcasts on demand, until a former colleague emailed him to ask if he’d lent it his voice. “So… I’m probably the 148th person to ask this, but did you license your … ⌘ Read more
Idea Raised For Nicer DRM Panic Screen Integration On Fedora Linux
A proposal within the Fedora Linux community suggests improving the kernel’s DRM Panic screen to a more user-friendly, BSOD-style experience. Phoronix reports: Open-source developer Jose Exposito proposed today a nicer experience for DRM Panic integration on Fedora. Rather than using DRM Panic with just the kernel log contents being encoded … ⌘ Read more
KDE Plasma 6.6 Released
Longtime Slashdot reader jrepin writes: KDE Plasma is a popular desktop (and mobile too) environment for GNU/Linux and other UNIX-like operating systems. Among other things, it also powers the desktop mode of the Steam Deck gaming handheld. The KDE community today announced the latest release: Plasma 6.6.
In this new major release, Spectacle can recognize texts from screenshots, a new on-screen keyboard and new login manager a … ⌘ Read more
Most VMware Users Still ‘Actively Reducing Their VMware Footprint,’ Survey Finds
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: More than two years after Broadcom took over VMware, the virtualization company’s customers are still grappling with higher prices, uncertainty, and the challenges of reducing vendor lock-in. Today, CloudBolt Software released a report, “The Mass Exodus That Never … ⌘ Read more
US Lawyers Fire Up Privacy Class Action Accusing Lenovo of Bulk Data Transfers To China
A US law firm has accused Lenovo of violating Justice Department strictures about the bulk transfer of data to foreign adversaries, namely China. From a report: The case filed by Almeida Law Group on behalf of San Francisco-based “Spencer Christy, individually and on behalf of all others similarly situ … ⌘ Read more
The Small English Town Swept Up in the Global AI Arms Race
Residents of Potters Bar, a small town just north of London, are trying to block what would be one of Europe’s largest data centers from being built on 85 acres of rolling farmland that separates their community from the neighboring village of South Mimms. Multinational operator Equinix acquired the land last October after the local council granted planning … ⌘ Read more
Microsoft’s AI Chief Says All White-Collar Desk Work Will Be Automated Within 18 Months
Microsoft AI CEO Mustafa Suleyman expects “human-level performance on most, if not all professional tasks” from AI, and believes most work involving “sitting down at a computer” – accounting, legal, marketing, project management – will be fully automated within the next year or 18 months. He pointed to ex … ⌘ Read more
There was an endless coming and going of sun, clouds and rain. Not to forget about the wind. I called it quits a bit earlier and went into the woods.
Towards the end I was completeley surrounded by rain curtains in all directions. This looked super cool. I thought I might make it home just in time without having to use my umbrella, but the rain clouds were way quicker than I anticipated. Just after the rain hit me, I met an acquaintance who just started his walk. The wind picked up hard and rain hammered down, mixed with snow. Holding the umbrella was a workout. Shortly after I returned, the rain stopped again.
I didn’t notice the kestrel sitting on the tree when I took the last photo. That was a nice surprise when I sorted through the nearly 300 pics.
Britain Lost 14,000 Pubs, a Quarter, in 13 Years
Britain has lost more than 14,000 pubs since 2009, a decline from roughly 54,000 registered public houses and bars to under 40,000 by 2022, according to a new analysis of UK business register data by data analyst Lauren Leek. The North East, North West, Yorkshire and the Midlands lost 25 to 30% of their stock; London saw the smallest decline.
Leek trained a random forest model on … ⌘ Read more
A YouTuber’s $3M Movie Nearly Beat Disney’s $40M Thriller at the Box Office
Mark Fischbach, the YouTube creator known as Markiplier who has spent nearly 15 years building an audience of more than 38 million subscribers by playing indie-horror video games on camera, has pulled off something that most independent filmmakers never manage – a self-financed, self-distributed debut feature that has … ⌘ Read more
Blind Listening Test Finds Audiophiles Unable To Distinguish Copper Cable From a Banana or Wet Mud
An anonymous reader shares a report: A moderator on diyAudio set up an experiment to determine whether listeners could differentiate between audio run through pro audio copper wire, a banana, and wet mud. Spoiler alert: the results indicated that users were unable to accu … ⌘ Read more
Micron’s PCIe 6.0 SSD Hits Mass Production at 28 GB/s
Micron has begun mass production of the 9650 series, the industry’s first PCIe 6.0 SSD, capable of sequential read speeds up to 28 GB/s and random read performance of 5.5 million IOPS – roughly double the throughput of the fastest PCIe 5.0 drives available today.
The drive targets AI and data center workloads and ships in E1.S and E3.S form factors across two varia … ⌘ Read more
99% of Adults Over 40 Have Shoulder ‘Abnormalities’ on an MRI, Study Finds
Up to a third of people worldwide have shoulder pain; it’s one of the most common musculoskeletal complaints. But medical imaging might not reveal the problem – in fact, it could even cloud it. From a report: In a study published in JAMA Internal Medicine this week, 99 percent of adults over 40 were found to have at least one … ⌘ Read more
China Once Stole Foreign Ideas. Now It Wants To Protect Its Own
China’s courts are now handling more than 550,000 intellectual-property cases a year – making it the world’s most litigious country for IP disputes – as the nation’s own companies, once notorious for copying foreign designs and technology, find themselves on the defensive against a domestic counterfeiting epidemic fueled by excess factory capacity.
Th … ⌘ Read more
Mazda Finally Admits Its Infotainment System Is the Worst
Mazda, the automaker that for years defended its scroll-wheel infotainment system as a safer alternative to touchscreens, is abandoning the approach entirely in the 2026 CX-5 in favor of a 15.6-inch touchscreen and zero physical buttons.
The current lineup – the CX-50 Hybrid, CX-70 and CX-90 – still relies on a console-mounted scroll wheel and dedicated act … ⌘ Read more
‘Software Isn’t Dead, But Its Cosy Business Model Might Be’
The software industry’s decades-old habit of charging companies a flat fee for every employee who uses a product is running into a fundamental problem: AI agents don’t sit in chairs, and they don’t need licences.
As autonomous agents take on tasks that human workers once handled, the per-seat pricing model that made SaaS revenue so predictable is giving way t … ⌘ Read more
Valve’s Steam Deck OLED Will Be ‘Intermittently’ Out of Stock Because of the RAM Crisis
Valve has updated the Steam Deck website to say that the Steam Deck OLED may be out of stock “intermittently in some regions due to memory and storage shortages.” From a report: The PC gaming handheld has been out of stock in the US and other parts of the world for a few days, and thanks to this update, we … ⌘ 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
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 … ⌘ Read more
Secondhand Laptop Market Goes ‘Mainstream’ Amid Memory Crunch
Sales of refurbished PCs are on the up amid shortages of key components, including memory chips, that are making brand new devices more expensive. From a report: Stats compiled by market watcher Context show sales of refurbished PCs via distribution climbed 7 percent in calendar Q4 across five of the biggest European markets – Italy, the UK, Germany, Spai … ⌘ 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
Samsung Ad Confirms Rumors of a Useful S26 ‘Privacy Display’
Samsung has all but confirmed that its upcoming Galaxy S26 will feature a built-in privacy display, releasing an ad that demonstrates a “Zero-peeking privacy” toggle capable of blacking out on-screen content for anyone peering over the user’s shoulder.
The underlying technology is reportedly Samsung Display’s Flex Magic Pixel OLED panel, first shown at MWC … ⌘ Read more
Western Digital is Sold Out of Hard Drives for 2026
Western Digital’s entire hard drive manufacturing capacity for calendar year 2026 is now fully spoken for, CEO Irving Tan disclosed during the company’s second-quarter earnings call, a stark sign of how aggressively hyperscalers are locking down storage supply to feed their AI infrastructure buildouts.
The company has firm purchase orders from its top seven customers … ⌘ Read more
Anthropic’s CEO Says AI and Software Engineers Are in ‘Centaur Phase’ - But It Won’t Last Long
Human software engineers and AI are currently in a “centaur phase” – a reference to the mythical half-human, half-horse creature, where the combination outperforms either working alone – but the window may be “very brief,” Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei said on a podcast. He drew on ches … ⌘ Read more