An anonymous reader shares a report: In less than three months' time, almost no civil servant, police officer or judge in Schleswig-Holstein will be using any of Microsoft's ubiquitous programs at work. Instead, the northern state will turn to open-source software to "take back control" over data storage and ensure "digital sovereignty," its digitalisation minister, Dirk Schroedter, told AFP. "We're done with Teams!" he said, referring to Microsoft's messaging and collaboration tool and speaking on a video call -- via an open-source German program, of course. ... [ Read it >> ]

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Scientists have successfully grown beating human hearts inside pig embryos for the first time, marking a significant advance in developing human-animal chimeras for potential organ transplantation. The hybrid embryos survived for 21 days, during which the fingertip-sized hearts began beating, according to findings presented at the International Society for Stem Cell Research meeting in Hong Kong. ... [ Read it >> ]

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An anonymous reader shares a report: Slack, an instant-messaging service popular with businesses, recently blocked other software firms from searching or storing Slack messages even if their customers permit them to do so, according to a public disclosure from Slack's owner, Salesforce. ... [ Read it >> ]

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Google will discontinue its Android Instant Apps feature in December 2025, ending a nearly decade-long experiment that allowed users to try portions of mobile apps without installing them. The feature, rolled out in early 2017, enabled developers to create lightweight app versions under 15 megabytes that could run temporarily on users' devices when they tapped specific links. ... [ Read it >> ]

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An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Register: US Navy Secretary John Phelan has told the Senate the service needs the right to repair its own gear, and will rethink how it writes contracts to keep control of intellectual property and ensure sailors can fix hardware, especially in a fight. Speaking to the Senate Armed Services Committee on Tuesday, Phelan cited the case of the USS Gerald R. Ford, America's largest and most expensive nuclear-powered aircraft carrier, which carried a price tag of $13 billion. The ship was struggling to feed its crew of over 4,500 because six of its eight ovens were out of action, and sailors were barred by contract from fixing them themselves.... [ Read it >> ]

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Meta has struck a new deal with geothermal startup XGS Energy to supply 150 megawatts of carbon-free electricity for its New Mexico data center. "Advances in AI require continued energy to support infrastructure development," Urvi Parekh, global head of energy at Meta, said in a press release. "With next-generation geothermal technologies like XGS ready for scale, geothermal can be a major player in supporting the advancement of technologies like AI as well as domestic data center development." The Verge reports: Geothermal plants generate electricity using Earth's heat; typically drawing up hot fluids or steam from natural reservoirs to turn turbines. That tactic is limited by natural geography, however, and the US gets around half a percent of its electricity from geothermal sources. Startups including XGS are trying to change that by making geothermal energy more accessible. Last year, Meta made a separate 150MW deal with Sage Geosystems to develop new geothermal power plants. Sage is developing technologies to harness energy from hot, dry rock formations by drilling and pumping water underground, essentially creating artificial reservoirs. Google has its own partnership with another startup called Fervo developing similar technology.... [ Read it >> ]

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"Spaceballs 2" is officially in development nearly 40 years after the original parody hit theaters. The sequel, produced by Amazon MGM Studios and set for a 2027 release, will see Rick Moranis returning as Dark Helmet, Mel Brooks reprising his role as Yogurt, and Bill Pullman returning as Lone Starr. You can watch the teaser trailer on YouTube. IGN reports: A trailer for the sequel to the classic '80s sci-fi Star Wars parody arrived today. Although it mostly comes with a special message from Brooks himself and a familiar text crawl that pokes fun at the long, long list of sequels that have come to theaters in the last 38 years, this is the most official look at Spaceballs 2 we've seen yet.... [ Read it >> ]

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Meta's standalone AI app is broadcasting users' supposedly private conversations with the chatbot to the public, creating what could amount to a widespread privacy breach. Users appear largely unaware that hitting the app's share button publishes their text exchanges, audio recordings, and images for anyone to see. ... [ Read it >> ]

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An anonymous reader quotes a report from TechCrunch: Two European journalists were hacked using government spyware made by Israeli surveillance tech provider Paragon, new research has confirmed. On Thursday, digital rights group The Citizen Lab published a new report detailing the results of a new forensic investigation into the iPhones of Italian journalist Ciro Pellegrino and an unnamed "prominent" European journalist. The researchers said both journalists were hacked by the same Paragon customer, based on evidence found on the two journalists' devices.... [ Read it >> ]

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Meta has invested $14.3 billion in Scale AI while recruiting the startup's CEO to join its AI team, marking an aggressive move by the social media giant to accelerate its AI development efforts. The unusual deal gives Meta a 49% non-voting stake in Scale, valuing the company at more than $29 billion. Scale co-founder Alexandr Wang will join Meta's "superintelligence" unit, which focuses on building AI systems that perform as well as humans -- a theoretical milestone known as artificial general intelligence. ... [ Read it >> ]

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Japan must stop being overly optimistic about how quickly its population is going to shrink, economists have warned, as births plunge at a pace far ahead of core estimates. From a report: Japan this month said there were a total of 686,000 Japanese births in 2024, falling below 700,000 for the first time since records began in the 19th century and defying years of policy efforts to halt population decline. The total represented the ninth straight year of decline and pushed the country's total fertility rate -- the average number of children born per woman over her lifetime -- to a record low of 1.15. ... [ Read it >> ]

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During this week's Worldwide Developers Conference, Apple unveiled a secure import/export feature for passkeys that addresses one of their biggest limitations: lack of interoperability across platforms and credential managers. The feature, built in collaboration with the FIDO Alliance, enables encrypted, user-initiated passkey transfers between apps and systems. Ars Technica's Dan Goodin says it "provides the strongest indication yet that passkey developers are making meaningful progress in improving usability." From the report: "People own their credentials and should have the flexibility to manage them where they choose," the narrator of the Apple video says. "This gives people more control over their data and the choice of which credential manager they use." The transfer feature, which will also work with passwords and verification codes, provides an industry-standard means for apps and OSes to more securely sync these credentials.... [ Read it >> ]

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Shopify is launching stablecoin payments for its merchants later this year, starting with USDC in collaboration with Coinbase and Stripe. Fortune reports: The publicly traded tech company lets merchants -- including vintage clothes sellers, cosmetics businesses, and electronics companies -- set up their own online marketplaces. By late June, Shopify will let a select group of users accept payments in USDC, a stablecoin issued by the crypto company Circle, which recently had one of the year's hottest IPOs. "In our own philosophical framework, we are extremely aligned with everything that crypto stands for," Tobias Lutke, the CEO of Shopify and a Coinbase board member, said onstage at a Coinbase conference on Thursday.... [ Read it >> ]

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Amazon has quietly doubled the ad load on Prime Video to 4-6 minutes per hour, up from the 2-3.5 minutes initially discussed when ads launched in 2024. AdWeek reports: According to six ad buyers and documents reviewed by ADWEEK, the current ad load on Prime Video now ranges from four to six minutes per hour. And while that could bring down CPMs, buyers will be watching whether this impacts user experience. "Prime Video ad load has gradually increased to four to six minutes per hour," an Amazon representative wrote to an ad buyer in an email obtained by ADWEEK. The exchange occurred earlier this month.... [ Read it >> ]

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An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Register: The US Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency has lost another senior leader: executive director Bridget Bean departed on Wednesday. Bean, who served as the de facto agency boss for five months between former CISA director Jen Easterly's departure in January and Madhu Gottumukkala's appointment to the deputy director post last month, said she was "officially retiring from Federal service once again" in a LinkedIn post. "My time at CISA has been truly remarkable," she wrote. "Having had the privilege to serve as the Senior Official Performing the Duties of Director of CISA for 5 months has been a profound honor."... [ Read it >> ]

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The PCI-SIG, which oversees the development of the PCIe specification, has officially released the final spec for PCI Express 7.0. "The PCIe 7.0 specification increases the per-lane data transfer rate to 128 GT/s in each direction, which is twice as fast as PCIe 6.0 supports and four times faster than PCIe 5.0," reports Tom's Hardware. "Such a significant performance increase enables devices with 16 PCIe 7.0 lanes to transfer up to 256 GB/s in each direction, not accounting for protocol overhead. The new version of the interface continues to use PAM4 signaling while maintaining the 1b/1b FLIT encoding method first introduced in PCIe 6.0." From the report: To achieve PCIe 7.0's 128 GT/s record data transfer rate, developers of PCIe 7.0 had to increase the physical signaling rate to 32 GHz or beyond. Keep in mind that both PCIe 5.0 and 6.0 use a physical signaling rate of 16 GHz to enable 32 GT/s using NRZ signaling and 64 GT/s using PAM4 signaling (which allows transfers of two bits per symbol). With PCIe 7.0, developers had to boost the physical frequency for the first time since 2017, which required tremendous work at various levels, as maintaining signal integrity at 32 GHz over long distances using copper wires is extremely challenging.... [ Read it >> ]

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Microsoft quietly teased its next-generation Xbox by showcasing its collaboration with Asus "to bring two Xbox Ally handhelds to the market later this year," writes The Verge's Tom Warren. From the report: The Xbox Ally handhelds run Windows, but the Xbox team has worked with Windows engineers to boot these PC handhelds into a full-screen Xbox UI. The Windows desktop doesn't even fully load, and you use the Xbox app UI as a launcher to get to all your games (even Steam titles) and apps like Discord. While the combination of Windows and Xbox here is intriguing, it's the way that Microsoft is positioning these devices that really caught my attention.... [ Read it >> ]

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An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: Last week, electronics engineer Lorentio Brodesco announced the completion of a mock-up for nsOne, reportedly the first custom PlayStation 1 motherboard created outside of Sony in the console's 30-year history. The fully functional board accepts original PlayStation 1 chips and fits directly into the original console case, marking a milestone in reverse-engineering for the classic console released in 1994. Brodesco's motherboard isn't an emulator or FPGA-based re-creation -- it's a genuine circuit board designed to work with authentic PlayStation 1 components, including the CPU, GPU, SPU, RAM, oscillators, and voltage regulators. The board represents over a year of reverse-engineering work that began in March 2024 when Brodesco discovered incomplete documentation while repairing a PlayStation 1.... [ Read it >> ]

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Multiple popular services -- including Google, Google Cloud, AWS, Spotify, Discord, Cloudflare, Google Nest, Azure, Box and Shopify -- are experiencing at least a partial outage globally that began around 2:25pm ET Friday, according to user complaints with reports flooding in across social media and outage tracking sites. Cloudflare has confirmed ongoing issues that started within the past hour. It remains unclear what prompted the outage. ... [ Read it >> ]

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BrianFagioli writes: Barbie is getting a brain upgrade. Mattel has officially partnered with OpenAI in a move that brings artificial intelligence to the toy aisle. Yes, you read that right, folks. Barbie might soon be chatting with your kids in full sentences, powered by ChatGPT. ... [ Read it >> ]

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More than a dozen private browsing apps on Apple and Google's app stores have undisclosed ties to Chinese companies, leaving user data at risk of exposure to the Chinese government, according to a new report from the Tech Transparency Project. From a report: Thirteen virtual private network (VPN) apps on Apple's App Store and 11 apps on Google's Play Store have ties to Chinese companies, the tech watchdog group said in the report released Thursday. ... [ Read it >> ]

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Anker has issued a recall for its PowerCore 10000 power bank (model A1263) due to a "potential issue with the lithium-ion battery" that could pose a fire safety risk. An anonymous reader adds: The company has received 19 reports of fires and explosions that have caused minor burn injuries and resulted in property damage totaling over $60,700, according to the US Consumer Product Safety Commission (USCPSC). ... [ Read it >> ]

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Agriculture equipment giant Deere must face a lawsuit by the U.S. Federal Trade Commission accusing the company of forcing farmers to use its authorized dealer network and driving up their costs for parts and repairs, a U.S. judge has ruled. From a report: U.S. District Judge Iain Johnston in the federal court in Rockford, Illinois on Monday ruled for now to reject, opens new tab Deere's effort to end the lawsuit, which was filed at the end of Democratic President Joe Biden's administration in January. ... [ Read it >> ]

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The abstract of a study on NBER: We examine the performance of startups co-founded by immigrant and native teams. Leveraging unique data linking startups to founders' and employees' employment and education histories, we find native-migrant teams outperform native-only and migrant-only teams. ... [ Read it >> ]

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The World Bank is lifting its decades-long ban on financing nuclear energy, in a policy shift aimed at accelerating development of the low-emissions technology to meet surging electricity demand in the developing world. From a report: In an email to staff on Wednesday, Ajay Banga, the World Bank president, said it would "begin to re-enter the nuclear energy space" [non-paywalled source] in partnership with the International Atomic Energy Agency, the UN nuclear watchdog which works to prevent proliferation of nuclear weapons. ... [ Read it >> ]

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Google has removed device trees and driver binaries for Pixel phones from the Android 16 source code release, significantly complicating custom ROM development for those devices. The Android-maker intentionally omitted these resources as it shifts its Android Open Source Project reference target from Pixel hardware to a virtual device called "Cuttlefish." ... [ Read it >> ]

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Flying to London, a Boeing 787 aircraft operated by Air India "crashed shortly after taking off..." reports Bloomberg, "in what stands to be the worst accident involving the U.S. planemaker's most advanced widebody airliner."

Flight AI171 was carrying 242 passengers and crew. Video footage shared on social media showed a giant plume of smoke engulfing the crash site, with no reports of survivors. ... [ Read it >> ]

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An anonymous reader quotes a report from ZDNet: Denmark's Minister of Digitalization, Caroline Stage, has announced that the Danish government will start moving away from Microsoft Office to LibreOffice. Why? It's not because open-source is better, although I would argue that it is, but because Denmark wants to claim "digital sovereignty." In the States, you probably haven't heard that phrase, but in the European Union, digital sovereignty is a big deal and getting bigger.... [ Read it >> ]

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The European Space Agency's Solar Orbiter has captured the first-ever images of the sun's poles by tilting its orbit out of the ecliptic plane. Space.com reports: The captured images of the solar south pole were taken between March 16 and 17, 2025, with the Solar Orbiter's Polarimetric and Helioseismic Imager (PHI), Extreme Ultraviolet Imager (EUI), and Spectral Imaging of the Coronal Environment (SPICE) instruments. They constitute humanity's first ever look at the sun's poles. This was the Solar Orbiter mission's first high-angle observation campaign of the sun, conducted at an angle of 15 degrees below the solar equator. Just a few days after snapping these images, the ESA spacecraft reached a maximum viewing angle of 17 degrees, which it sits in currently as it performs its first "pole-to-pole" orbit of our star. [...]... [ Read it >> ]

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Shubhanshu Shukla will become the first Indian astronaut to visit the International Space Station as part of a four-person mission by Axiom Space launching from the U.S.. The mission will include 14 days aboard the ISS and over 60 scientific studies. The Guardian reports: He will be the third astronaut of Indian origin to reach orbit, following Rakesh Sharma, who was part of a 1984 flight onboard a Soviet Soyuz spacecraft, and Kalpana Chawla, who was born in India but became a US citizen and flew on two space shuttle missions, including the 2003 Columbia flight that ended in disaster when the spacecraft disintegrated, killing all seven astronauts onboard. "I truly believe that even though, as an individual, I am traveling to space, this is the journey of 1.4 billion people," Shukla was quoted as saying by the Hindu newspaper this year. Shukla said he hoped to "ignite the curiosity of an entire generation in my country."... [ Read it >> ]

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An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Register: Australian SaaS-y graphic design service Canva now requires candidates for developer jobs to use AI coding assistants during the interview process. [...] Canva's hiring process previously included an interview focused on computer science fundamentals, during which it required candidates to write code using only their actual human brains. The company now expects candidates for frontend, backend, and machine learning engineering roles to demonstrate skill with tools like Copilot, Cursor, and Claude during technical interviews, Canva head of platforms Simon Newton wrote in a Tuesday blog post.... [ Read it >> ]

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A coordinated spam operation has infiltrated abandoned subdomains belonging to major institutions including Nvidia, Stanford University, NPR, and the U.S. government's vaccines.gov site, flooding them with AI-generated content that subsequently appears in search results and Google's AI Overview feature. ... [ Read it >> ]

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The abstract of a study featured on NBER: We examine the labor market effects of AI chatbots using two large-scale adoption surveys (late 2023 and 2024) covering 11 exposed occupations (25,000 workers, 7,000 workplaces), linked to matched employer-employee data in Denmark.

AI chatbots are now widespread -- most employers encourage their use, many deploy in-house models, and training initiatives are common. These firm-led investments boost adoption, narrow demographic gaps in take-up, enhance workplace utility, and create new job tasks. Yet, despite substantial investments, economic impacts remain minimal. Using difference-in-differences and employer policies as quasi-experimental variation, we estimate precise zeros: AI chatbots have had no significant impact on earnings or recorded hours in any occupation, with confidence intervals ruling out effects larger than 1%. Modest productivity gains (average time savings of 3%), combined with weak wage pass-through, help explain these limited labor market effects. Our findings challenge narratives of imminent labor market transformation due to Generative AI.... [ Read it >> ]

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A dating site launched last week by Belgian artist Dries Depoorter matches potential partners based on their internet browsing histories rather than curated profiles or photos. Browser Dating requires users to download a Chrome or Firefox extension that exports and uploads their recent search data, creating matches based on shared online behaviors and interests rather than traditional dating app metrics. ... [ Read it >> ]

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Amazon Web Services has signed a long-term deal with Talen Energy to receive up to 1,920 megawatts of carbon-free electricity from the Susquehanna nuclear plant through 2042 to support AWS's AI and cloud operations. The partnership also includes plans to explore new Small Modular Reactors and expand nuclear capacity amid rising U.S. energy demand. Utility Drive reports: Under the PPA, Talen's existing 300-MW co-location arrangement with AWS will shift to a "front of the meter" framework that doesn't require Federal Energy Regulatory Commission approval, according to Houston-based Talen. The company expects the transition will occur next spring after transmission upgrades are finished. FERC in November rejected an amended interconnection service agreement that would have facilitated expanded power sales to a co-located AWS data center at the Susquehanna plant. The agency is considering potential rules for co-located loads in PJM.... [ Read it >> ]

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BrianFagioli shares a report from NERDS.xyz: Apple has released a new developer tool on GitHub called Container, offering a fresh approach to running Linux containers directly on macOS. Unlike Docker or Podman, this tool is designed to feel at home in the Apple ecosystem and hooks into frameworks already built into the operating system. Container runs standard OCI images, but it doesn't use a single shared Linux VM. Instead, it creates a small Linux virtual machine for every container you spin up. That sounds heavy at first, but the VMs are lightweight and boot quickly. Each one is isolated, which Apple claims improves both security and privacy. Developers can run containerized workloads locally with native macOS support and without needing to install third-party container platforms.... [ Read it >> ]

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Since filing for bankruptcy in March, 23andMe has received data deletion requests from 1.9 million users -- around 15% of its customer base. That number was revealed by 23andMe's interim chief executive Joseph Selsavage during a House Oversight Committee hearing, during which lawmakers scrutinized the company's sale following an earlier bankruptcy auction. "The bankruptcy sparked concerns that the data of millions of Americans who used 23andMe could end up in the hands of an unscrupulous buyer, prompting customers to ask the company to delete their data," adds TechCrunch. From the report: Pharmaceutical giant Regeneron won the court-approved auction in May, offering $256 million for 23andMe and its banks of customers' DNA and genetic data. Regeneron said it would use the 23andMe data to aid the discovery of new drugs, and committed to maintain 23andMe's privacy practices. Truly deleting your personal genetic information from the DNA testing company is easier said than done. But if you were a 23andMe customer and are interested, MIT Technology Review outlines that steps you can take.... [ Read it >> ]

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An anonymous reader quotes a report from Polygon: Nintendo Switch 2 is off to a roaring start. Early on Wednesday, Nintendo announced that it had sold 3.5 million units of its new console in just four days, making it Nintendo's fastest-selling console ever. In fact, this is likely the biggest console launch of all time -- by quite some margin. For comparison, PlayStation 5 shipped 4.5 million units in its first seven weeks, PlayStation 4 sold 2.1 million in a little over two weeks, and Nintendo Switch sold 2.74 million in its first month. [...]... [ Read it >> ]

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Amazon has launched its AI-powered Video Generator tool in the U.S., allowing sellers to quickly create photorealistic, motion-enhanced video ads often with a single click. "We'll likely see Amazon retailers utilizing AI-generated video ads in the wild now that the tool is generally available in the U.S. and costs nothing to use -- unless the ads are so convincing that we don't notice anything at all," says The Verge. From the report: New capabilities include motion improvements to show items in action, which Amazon says is best for showcasing products like toys, tools, and worn accessories. For example, Video Generator can now create clips that show someone wearing a watch on their wrist and checking the time, instead of simply displaying the watch on a table. The tool generates six different videos to choose from, and allows brands to add their logos to the finished results.... [ Read it >> ]

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Hong Kong authorities have invoked national security laws for the first time to ban the Taiwan-made video game Reversed Front: Bonfire, accusing it of promoting "secessionist agendas, such as 'Taiwan independence' and 'Hong Kong independence.'" Engadget reports: Reversed Front: Bonfire was developed by a group known as ESC Taiwan, who are outspoken critics of the China's Communist Party. The game disappeared from the Apple App Store in Hong Kong less than 24 hours after authorities issued the warning. Google already removed the game from the Play Store back in May, because players were using hate speech as part of their usernames. ESC Taiwan told The New York Times that that the game's removal shows that apps like theirs are subject to censorship in mainland China. The group also thanked authorities for the free publicity on Facebook, as the game experienced a surge in Google searches.... [ Read it >> ]

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An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: The robot built by [Yuntao Ma and his team at ETH Zurich] was called ANYmal and resembled a miniature giraffe that plays badminton by holding a racket in its teeth. It was a quadruped platform developed by ANYbotics, an ETH Zurich spinoff company that mainly builds robots for the oil and gas industries. "It was an industry-grade robot," Ma said. The robot had elastic actuators in its legs, weighed roughly 50 kilograms, and was half a meter wide and under a meter long. On top of the robot, Ma's team fitted an arm with several degrees of freedom produced by another ETH Zurich spinoff called Duatic. This is what would hold and swing a badminton racket. Shuttlecock tracking and sensing the environment were done with a stereoscopic camera. "We've been working to integrate the hardware for five years," Ma said.... [ Read it >> ]

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An anonymous reader quotes a report from Reuters: Indirect carbon emissions from the operations of four of the leading AI-focused tech companies rose on average by 150% from 2020-2023, due to the demands of power-hungry data centers, a United Nations report (PDF) said on Thursday. The use of artificial intelligence by Amazon, Microsoft, Alphabet and Meta drove up their global indirect emissions because of the vast amounts of energy required to power data centers, the report by the International Telecommunication Union (ITU), the U.N. agency for digital technologies, said.... [ Read it >> ]

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An anonymous reader shares a report: A data broker owned by the country's major airlines, including Delta, American Airlines, and United, collected U.S. travellers' domestic flight records, sold access to them to Customs and Border Protection (CBP), and then as part of the contract told CBP to not reveal where the data came from, according to internal CBP documents obtained by 404 Media. The data includes passenger names, their full flight itineraries, and financial details. ... [ Read it >> ]

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The Wikimedia Foundation halted an experiment that would have displayed AI-generated summaries atop Wikipedia articles after the platform's volunteer editor community delivered an overwhelmingly negative response to the proposal. The foundation announced the two-week mobile trial on June 2 and suspended it just one day later following dozens of critical comments from editors. ... [ Read it >> ]

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HP has unveiled the first commercial hardware for Google Beam, the Android-maker's 3D video conferencing technology formerly known as Project Starline, with a price tag of $24,999. The HP Dimension features a 65-inch light field display paired with six high-speed cameras positioned around the screen to capture speakers from multiple angles, creating what the companies describe as a lifelike 3D representation without requiring headsets or glasses. ... [ Read it >> ]

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The Vera C. Rubin Observatory in Chile will begin full operations in the coming months with the world's largest digital camera, capturing 3,200-megapixel images that would require several hundred HD television screens to display at full resolution. The $810 million facility will map the entire southern sky every three to four nights, observing each location approximately 800 times over its planned decade of operations. ... [ Read it >> ]

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Disney and NBCUniversal have filed a copyright infringement lawsuit against AI image generator firm Midjourney in U.S. District Court in Los Angeles, marking the first time major Hollywood studios have taken legal action against a generative AI company.

The entertainment giants accuse Midjourney, founded in 2021, of training its software on "countless" copyrighted works without permission and enabling users to create images that "blatantly incorporate and copy" famous characters including Darth Vader, the Minions, Frozen's Elsa, Shrek, and Homer Simpson. ... [ Read it >> ]

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WhatsApp has applied to submit evidence in Apple's legal battle against the UK Home Office over government demands for access to encrypted user data. The messaging platform's boss Will Cathcart told the BBC the case "could set a dangerous precedent" by "emboldening other nations" to seek to break encryption protections. ... [ Read it >> ]

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Apple executives defended the company's AI strategy this week after acknowledging that major Siri features announced at last year's Worldwide Developers Conference remain undelivered and were quietly pulled from development plans. Craig Federighi, Apple's senior vice president of software engineering, told the Wall Street Journal that the company is rebuilding Siri from the ground up, admitting that while Apple had working software for the promised features, "it didn't converge in the way quality-wise that we needed it to." ... [ Read it >> ]

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An anonymous reader quotes a report from TorrentFreak: Fresh data released by piracy tracking outfit MUSO shows that pirate sites remain popular. In a report released today, MUSO reveals that there were 216 billion pirate site visits globally in 2024, a slight decrease compared to the 229 billion visits recorded a year earlier. TV piracy remains by far the most popular category, representing over 44.6% of all website visits. This is followed by the publishing category with 30.7%, with film, software and music all at a respectable distance. Pirate site visitors originate from all over the world, but one country stands tall above all the rest: America. The United States remains the top driver of pirate site traffic accounting for more than 12% of all traffic globally, good for 26.7 billion visits in 2024. India has been steadily climbing the ranks for years and currently sits in second place with 17.6 billion annual visits, with Russia, Indonesia, and Vietnam completing the top five. As a country with one of the largest populations worldwide, it's not a complete surprise that the U.S. tops the list. If we counted visits per internet user, Canada and Ukraine would top the list.... [ Read it >> ]

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