"Members of the CA/Browser Forum have voted to slash cert lifespans from the current one year to 47 days," reports Computerworld, "placing an added burden on enterprise IT staff who must ensure they are updated."

In a move that will likely force IT to much more aggressively use web certificate automation services, the Certification Authority Browser Forum (CA/Browser Forum), a gathering of certificate issuers and suppliers of applications that use certificates, voted [last week] to radically slash the lifespan of the certificates that verify the ownership of sites. ... [ Read it >> ]

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An anonymous reader shared this report from CNBC:

Neurotech startup Precision Neuroscience on Thursday announced that a core component of its brain implant system has been approved by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration, a major win for the four-year-old company... The company's brain-computer interface will initially be used to help patients with severe paralysis restore functions such as speech and movement, according to its website. ... [ Read it >> ]

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In NoSQL database news, Arch Linux "is the latest Linux distribution replacing its Redis packages with the Valkey fork," reports Phoronix.

Valkey is backed by the Linux Foundation, Google, Amazon Web Services, and Oracle, which the article points out is due to Redis's decision last year to shift the upstream Redis license from a BSD 3-clause to RSALv2 and SSPLv1.... [ Read it >> ]

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"Russia is automating the spread of false information to fool AI chatbots," reports the Washington Post. (When researchers checked 10 chatbots, a third of the responses repeated false pro-Russia messaging.)

The Post argues that this tactic offers "a playbook to other bad actors on how to game AI to push content meant to inflame, influence and obfuscate instead of inform," and calls it "a fundamental weakness of the AI industry."... [ Read it >> ]

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Launched in 1958, the "awkward-looking" Vanguard-1 satellite ("the size of a grapefruit") is the oldest artificial object orbiting Earth.
"A team of researchers and engineers want to retrieve the satellite for closer inspection and are currently working to find a way to bring Vanguard-1 home," writes Gizmodo:... [ Read it >> ]

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"There has never been a consensus or a 'smoking gun' to explain what started the pandemic," writes ABC News.

Yet the Associated Press reports that "A federal website that used to feature information on vaccines, testing and treatment for COVID-19 has been transformed into a page supporting the theory that the pandemic originated with a lab leak." (This despite the fact that "about 325 Americans have died from COVID per week on average over the past four weeks, according to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.")... [ Read it >> ]

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An anonymous reader quotes a report from Reuters: Twenty-one humanoid robots joined thousands of runners at the Yizhuang half-marathon in Beijing on Saturday, the first time these machines have raced alongside humans over a 21-km (13-mile) course. The robots from Chinese manufacturers such as DroidVP and Noetix Robotics came in all shapes and sizes, some shorter than 120 cm (3.9 ft), others as tall as 1.8 m (5.9 ft). One company boasted that its robot looked almost human, with feminine features and the ability to wink and smile.... [ Read it >> ]

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About one sixth of global cropland is contaminated by toxic heavy metals, researchers have estimated, with as many as 1.4 billion people living in high-risk areas worldwide. From a report: Approximately 14 to 17% of cropland globally -- roughly 242m hectares -- is contaminated by at least one toxic metal such as arsenic, cadmium, cobalt, chromium, copper, nickel or lead, at levels that exceed agricultural and human health safety thresholds. ... [ Read it >> ]

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Researchers at UC Berkeley claim to have induced a previously unseen color by using lasers to stimulate only the M cones in the retina, creating a visual experience beyond the natural limits of human perception. Called olo, the color is described as a highly saturated blue-green but is only visible through direct retinal manipulation. The Guardian reports: "We predicted from the beginning that it would look like an unprecedented color signal but we didn't know what the brain would do with it," said Ren Ng, an electrical engineer at the University of California, Berkeley. "It was jaw-dropping. It's incredibly saturated."... [ Read it >> ]

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Longtime Slashdot reader hackingbear shares a report from Interesting Engineering: A research team at Fudan University in Shanghai, China has built the fastest semiconductor storage device ever reported, a nonvolatile flash memory dubbed "PoX" that programs a single bit in 400 picoseconds (0.0000000004 s) -- roughly 25 billion operations per second. Conventional static and dynamic RAM (SRAM, DRAM) write data in 1-10 nanoseconds but lose everything when power is cut while current flash chips typically need micro to milliseconds per write -- far too slow for modern AI accelerators that shunt terabytes of parameters in real time.... [ Read it >> ]

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An anonymous reader quotes a report from Popular Mechanics: American composer Alvin Lucier was well-known for his experimental works that tested the boundaries of music and art. A longtime professor at Wesleyan University (before retiring in 2011), Alvin passed away in 2021 at the age of 90. However, that wasn't the end of his lifelong musical odyssey. Earlier this month, at the Art Gallery of Western Australia, a new art installation titled Revivification used Lucier's "brain matter" -- hooked up to an electrode mesh connected to twenty large brass plates -- to create electrical signals that triggered a mallet to strike the varying plates, creating a kind of post-mortem musical piece. Conceptualized in collaboration with Lucier himself before his death, the artists solicited the help of researchers from Harvard Medical School, who grew a mini-brain from Lucier's white blood cells. The team created stem cells from these white blood cells, and due to their pluripotency, the cells developed into cerebral organoids somewhat similar to developing human brains. "At a time when generative AI is calling into question human agency, this project explores the challenges of locating creativity and artistic originality," the team behind Revivification told The Art Newspaper. "Revivification is an attempt to shine light on the sometimes dark possibilities of extending a person's presence beyond the seemed finality of death."... [ Read it >> ]

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OpenAI's latest reasoning models, o3 and o4-mini, hallucinate more frequently than the company's previous AI systems, according to both internal testing and third-party research. On OpenAI's PersonQA benchmark, o3 hallucinated 33% of the time -- double the rate of older models o1 (16%) and o3-mini (14.8%). The o4-mini performed even worse, hallucinating 48% of the time. Nonprofit AI lab Transluce discovered o3 fabricating processes it claimed to use, including running code on a 2021 MacBook Pro "outside of ChatGPT." Stanford adjunct professor Kian Katanforoosh noted his team found o3 frequently generates broken website links. ... [ Read it >> ]

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With macOS now 24 years old and Apple officially designating all Intel-based Mac minis as "vintage" or "obsolete," The Register takes a look at new internet tools that help keep vintage Macs online and surprisingly relevant: Cameron Kaiser of Floodgap Systems is a valuable ally. His retro computing interests are broad, and we've mentioned him a few times on The Register, such as his deep dive into the revolutionary Canon Cat computer, and his evaluation of RISC-V hardware performance. Back in 2020, he revived the native Classic Mac OS port of the Lynx web browser, MacLynx. Earlier this month, he came back to it and has updated it again, including adding native Mac OS dialog boxes. His account is -- as usual -- long and detailed but it's an interesting read. He also maintains some other web browsers for elderly Macs, including TenFourFox for Mac OS X 10.4 and Classilla for Mac OS 8.6 and 9.x.... [ Read it >> ]

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Bluesky is testing a new verification system featuring blue checks issued by "Trusted Verifiers" like news organizations, rather than a centralized authority or pay-to-play model like X (formerly Twitter). "Looking at the comments on the pull request, it's clear this idea has sparked a lot of discussion and a lot of concern among the community who follow the platform's development closely," reports Neowin. "Many users voiced strong opposition to the change, arguing that the existing domain name verification is sufficient and more aligned with the decentralized ethos that Bluesky aims for." From the report: There's a general worry that adding a visual badge, especially one controlled in part by Bluesky, feels too much like the centralized systems they were trying to escape from by joining Bluesky: "Do not want. BSky is not Twitter 2.0. Do not become like Elon Musk. We came here to get AWAY from that bs." Several commenters also expressed that the current domain name system, while not perfect, is an elegant and decentralized way to build trust, and that adding this new layer feels redundant and gives too much power to centralized entities, including Bluesky itself: "Let's please not do this. Domain names as user IDs is an elegant solution as a system of trust that builds off the infrastructure of an open web."... [ Read it >> ]

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Netflix's Q1 revenue rose to $10.5 billion, a 13% increase from last year, while net income grew to $2.9 billion. The company says it expects more growth in the coming months when it sees "the full quarter benefit from recent price changes and continued growth in membership and advertising revenue." The Verge reports: Netflix raised the prices across most of its plans in January, with its premium plan hitting $24.99 per month. It also increased the price of its Extra Member option -- its solution to password sharing -- to $8.99 per month. Though Netflix already rolled out the increase in the US, UK, and Argentina, the streamer now plans to do the same in France. This is the first quarter that Netflix didn't reveal how many subscribers it gained or lost. It decided to only report "major subscriber milestones" last year, as other streams of revenue continue to grow, like advertising, continue to grow. Netflix last reported having 300 million global subscribers in January.... [ Read it >> ]

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An anonymous reader quotes a report from SecurityWeek: An October 2024 study by Software AG suggests that half of all employees are Shadow AI users, and most of them wouldn't stop even if it was banned. The problem is the ease of access to AI tools, and a work environment that increasingly advocates the use of AI to improve corporate efficiency. It is little wonder that employees seek their own AI tools to improve their personal efficiency and maximize the potential for promotion. It is frictionless, says Michael Marriott, VP of marketing at Harmonic Security. 'Using AI at work feels like second nature for many knowledge workers now. Whether it's summarizing meeting notes, drafting customer emails, exploring code, or creating content, employees are moving fast.' If the official tools aren't easy to access or if they feel too locked down, they'll use whatever's available which is often via an open tab on their browser.... [ Read it >> ]

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Some actors who sold their likenesses to AI video companies like Synthesia now regret the decision, after finding their digital avatars used in misleading, embarrassing, or politically charged content. Ars Technica reports: Among them is a 29-year-old New York-based actor, Adam Coy, who licensed rights to his face and voice to a company called MCM for one year for $1,000 without thinking, "am I crossing a line by doing this?" His partner's mother later found videos where he appeared as a doomsayer predicting disasters, he told the AFP. South Korean actor Simon Lee's AI likeness was similarly used to spook naive Internet users but in a potentially more harmful way. He told the AFP that he was "stunned" to find his AI avatar promoting "questionable health cures on TikTok and Instagram," feeling ashamed to have his face linked to obvious scams. [...]... [ Read it >> ]

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IBM is mandating that U.S. sales and Cloud employees return to the office at least three days a week, with work required at designated client sites, flagship offices, or sales hubs. According to The Register, some IBM employees argue that these policies "represent stealth layoffs because older (and presumably more highly compensated) employees tend to be less willing to uproot their lives, and families where applicable, than the 'early professional hires' IBM has been courting at some legal risk." From the report: In a staff memo seen by The Register, Adam Lawrence, general manager for IBM Americas, billed the return-to-office for most stateside sales personnel as a "return to client initiative."Citing how "remarkable it is when our teams work side by side" at IBM's swanky Manhattan flagship office, unveiled in September 2024, Lawrence added IBM is investing in an Austin, Texas, office to be occupied in 2026.... [ Read it >> ]

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An anonymous reader quotes a report from 404 Media: A judge in Nevada has ruled that "tower dumps" -- the law enforcement practice of grabbing vast troves of private personal data from cell towers -- is unconstitutional. The judge also ruled that the cops could, this one time, still use the evidence they obtained through this unconstitutional search. Cell towers record the location of phones near them about every seven seconds. When the cops request a tower dump, they ask a telecom for the numbers and personal information of every single phone connected to a tower during a set time period. Depending on the area, these tower dumps can return tens of thousands of numbers. Cops have been able to sift through this data to solve crimes. But tower dumps are also a massive privacy violation that flies in the face of the Fourth Amendment, which protects people from unlawful search and seizure. When the cops get a tower dump they're not just searching and seizing the data of a suspected criminal, they're sifting through the information of everyone who was in the location. The ruling stems from a court case involving Cory Spurlock, a Nevada man charged with drug offenses and a murder-for-hire plot. He was implicated through a cellphone tower dump that law enforcement used to place his device near the scenes of the alleged crimes.... [ Read it >> ]

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Netflix Co-CEO Ted Sarandos pushed back on director James Cameron's recent assertion that AI could slash film production costs by half, arguing instead for quality improvements over cost reduction during Netflix's first-quarter earnings call Thursday. "I read the article too about what Jim Cameron said about making movies 50% cheaper," Sarandos said. "I remain convinced that there's an even bigger opportunity to make movies 10% better." ... [ Read it >> ]

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A new report from Seagate reveals that hard drives significantly outperform solid-state drives in environmental impact metrics, challenging common industry assumptions about storage sustainability. According to Seagate's "Decarbonizing Data" report released this month [PDF], standard hard drives produce just 29.7 kg of embodied carbon dioxide compared to a staggering 4,915 kg for equivalently sized data center SSDs. ... [ Read it >> ]

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Bruce66423 shares a report: Toothpaste can be widely contaminated with lead and other dangerous heavy metals, new research shows.

Most of 51 brands of toothpaste tested for lead contained the dangerous heavy metal, including those for children or those marketed as green. The testing, conducted by Lead Safe Mama, also found concerning levels of highly toxic arsenic, mercury and cadmium in many brands. ... [ Read it >> ]

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An anonymous reader shares a report: Members of the European Parliament were offered special pouches to protect digital devices from espionage and tampering for a visit to Hungary this week, a sign of rising spying fears within Europe.

Five lawmakers from the Parliament's civil liberties committee traveled to Hungary on Monday for a three-day visit to inspect the EU member country's progress on democracy, the rule of law and fundamental rights. ... [ Read it >> ]

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A communication error between GoDaddy Registry and Markmonitor took Zoom's services offline for almost two hours on Wednesday when GoDaddy mistakenly blocked the zoom.us domain. The outage affected all services dependent on the zoom.us domain.

GoDaddy's block prevented top-level domain nameservers from maintaining proper DNS records for zoom.us. This created a classic domain resolution failure -- when users attempted to connect to any zoom.us address, their requests couldn't be routed to Zoom's servers because the domain effectively disappeared from the internet's addressing system. ... [ Read it >> ]

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Rice, the world's most consumed grain, will become increasingly toxic as the atmosphere heats and as carbon dioxide emissions rise, potentially putting billions of people at risk of cancers and other diseases, according to new research published this week in The Lancet. From a report: Eaten every day by billions of people and grown across the globe, rice is arguably the planet's most important staple crop, with half the world's population relying on it for the majority of its food needs, especially in developing countries. ... [ Read it >> ]

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Nature has published an analysis of the 21st century's most-cited scientific papers, revealing a surprising pattern: breakthrough discoveries like mRNA vaccines, CRISPR, and gravitational waves don't make the list. Instead, a 2016 Microsoft paper on "deep residual learning" networks claims the top spot, with citations ranging from 103,756 to 254,074 depending on the database. ... [ Read it >> ]

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New research suggests Oda Ujiharu, long derided as feudal Japan's most ineffective military leader, may have been mischaracterized. The Sengoku-period daimyo, who ruled from Oda Castle in present-day Ibaraki Prefecture, lost his fortress an unprecedented nine times to rival clans -- but recaptured it eight times, often with inferior forces. ... [ Read it >> ]

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A ground-breaking project to suck carbon out of the sea has started operating on England's south coast. From a report: The small pilot scheme, known as SeaCURE, is funded by the UK government as part of its search for technologies that fight climate change. [...] These projects, known as carbon capture, usually focus either on capturing emissions at source or pulling them from the air. What makes SeaCure interesting is that it is testing whether it might be more efficient to pull planet-warming carbon from the sea, since it is present in greater concentrations in water than in the air.... [ Read it >> ]

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Sage has retracted 678 more papers from the Journal of Intelligent and Fuzzy Systems (JIFS), concluding an investigation that has now purged 1,561 articles -- the most ever removed from a single journal. The publisher, which acquired JIFS from IOS Press in November 2023, began investigating the journal in early 2024 after discovering "indicators that raised concerns about the authenticity of the research and the peer review process." ... [ Read it >> ]

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An AI support bot for the code editor Cursor invented a nonexistent subscription policy, triggering user cancellations and public backlash this week. When developer "BrokenToasterOven" complained about being logged out when switching between devices, the company's AI agent "Sam" falsely claimed this was intentional: "Cursor is designed to work with one device per subscription as a core security feature." ... [ Read it >> ]

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Longtime Slashdot reader Qbertino writes: German public news outlet Tagesschau reports (source: YouTube) on an ESA video game that helps train a future moon lander's guidance AI to spot craters. Games have already helped collect visual data on millions of craters. The University Darmstadt developed the game, called IMPACT, to support ESA's efforts to establish a base on the moon. An older article from August 2024 provides further details on the project.... [ Read it >> ]

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schwit1 shares a report from Interesting Engineering: Australia's Q-CTRL developed a new system called "Ironstone Opal," which uses quantum sensors to navigate without GPS. It's passive (meaning it doesn't emit signals that could be detected or jammed) and highly accurate. Instead of relying on satellites, Q-CTRL's system can read the Earth's magnetic field, which varies slightly depending on location (like a magnetic fingerprint or map). The system can determine where you are by measuring these variations using magnetometers. This is made possible using the company's proprietary quantum sensors, which are incredibly sensitive and stable. The system also comes with special AI-based software, which filters out interference like vibrations or electromagnetic noise (what they call "software ruggedization"). The system is small and compact and could, in theory, be installed in drones or cars and, of course, aircraft.... [ Read it >> ]

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samleecole shares a report from 404 Media: American police departments near the United States-Mexico border are paying hundreds of thousands of dollars for an unproven and secretive technology that uses AI-generated online personas designed to interact with and collect intelligence on "college protesters," "radicalized" political activists, and suspected drug and human traffickers, according to internal documents, contracts, and communications 404 Media obtained via public records requests. Massive Blue, the New York-based company that is selling police departments this technology, calls its product Overwatch, which it markets as an "AI-powered force multiplier for public safety" that "deploys lifelike virtual agents, which infiltrate and engage criminal networks across various channels." According to a presentation obtained by 404 Media, Massive Blue is offering cops these virtual personas that can be deployed across the internet with the express purpose of interacting with suspects over text messages and social media. [...]... [ Read it >> ]

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Amazon plans to release its first TV streaming device powered by Vega OS later this year while courting major publishers to bring their apps to the platform, according to Lowpass, which cites sources familiar with the company's plans and multiple leaks.

Vega, a Linux-based operating system, may eventually replace Amazon's Android-based Fire OS across its device ecosystem. The company has already implemented Vega in three products: the Echo Show 5 and Echo Hub smart displays, as well as the Echo Spot smart clock/speaker. The tech giant has moved more cautiously in transitioning its TV hardware to Vega, having previously delayed a Vega-powered streaming stick originally slated for release in late 2024.... [ Read it >> ]

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databasecowgirl writes: [Liz Truss will launch an "uncensorable" social media platform this summer.] The shortest-serving prime minister, who was quickly shown the door after crashing the UK economy, claims the platform is needed to take on the Deep State. Truss has worked diligently to earn comparisons to Trump with appearances at American political rallies sporting a red MAGA cap. The effort has paid off with Trump's recent tariff announcement and resulting market meltdown, resulting in the two brands combined in the neologism Liz Trump to mark the unprecedented economic policy disasters of the two politicians.... [ Read it >> ]

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HP has agreed to a $4 million settlement over allegations of deceptive pricing practices on its website, including falsely inflating original prices for computers and accessories to create the illusion of steep discounts. Ars Technica reports: Earlier this month, Judge P. Casey Pitts for the US District Court of the San Jose Division of the Northern District of California granted preliminary approval [PDF] of a settlement agreement regarding a class-action complaint first filed against HP on October 13, 2021. The complaint accused HP's website of showing "misleading" original pricing for various computers, mice, and keyboards that was higher than how the products were recently and typically priced.... [ Read it >> ]

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Microsoft has introduced BitNet b1.58 2B4T, the largest-scale 1-bit AI model to date with 2 billion parameters and the ability to run efficiently on CPUs. It's openly available under an MIT license. TechCrunch reports: The Microsoft researchers say that BitNet b1.58 2B4T is the first bitnet with 2 billion parameters, "parameters" being largely synonymous with "weights." Trained on a dataset of 4 trillion tokens -- equivalent to about 33 million books, by one estimate -- BitNet b1.58 2B4T outperforms traditional models of similar sizes, the researchers claim.... [ Read it >> ]

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An anonymous reader quotes a report from Electrek: In its most aggressive attack against offshore wind yet, the Trump administration halted the $5 billion Empire Wind 1, already under construction off New York's coast. Norwegian developer Equinor announced yesterday that it received notice from the Bureau of Ocean Energy Management (BOEM) ordering Empire Wind 1 to halt all activities on the outer continental shelf until BOEM has completed its review. Interior Secretary Doug Burgum posted this tweet yesterday: ".@Interior, in consultation with @HowardLutnick, is directing @BOEM to immediately halt all construction activities on the Empire Wind Project until further review of information that suggests the Biden administration rushed through its approval without sufficient analysis."... [ Read it >> ]

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Google is offering all U.S. college students a free year of its Gemini Advanced AI tools through its Google One AI Premium plan, as part of a push to expand Gemini's user base and compete with ChatGPT. It includes access to the company's Pro models, Veo 2 video generation, NotebookLM, Gemini Live and 2TB of Drive storage. Ars Technica reports: Google has a new landing page for the deal, allowing eligible students to sign up for their free Google One AI Premium plan. The offer is valid from now until June 30. Anyone who takes Google up on it will enjoy the free plan through spring 2026. The company hasn't specified an end date, but we would wager it will be June of next year. Google's intention is to give students an entire school year of Gemini Advanced from now through finals next year. At the end of the term, you can bet Google will try to convert students to paying subscribers.... [ Read it >> ]

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Longtime Slashdot reader schwit1 shares a report from the Associated Press: Google has been branded an abusive monopolist by a federal judge for the second time in less than a year, this time for illegally exploiting some of its online marketing technology to boost the profits fueling an internet empire currently worth $1.8 trillion. The ruling issued Thursday by U.S. District Judge Leonie Brinkema in Virginia comes on the heels of a separate decision in August that concluded Google's namesake search engine has been illegally leveraging its dominance to stifle competition and innovation. [...] The next step in the latest case is a penalty phase that will likely begin late this year or early next year. The same so-called remedy hearings in the search monopoly case are scheduled to begin Monday in Washington D.C., where Justice Department lawyers will try to convince U.S. District Judge Amit Mehta to impose a sweeping punishment that includes a proposed requirement for Google to sell its Chrome web browser.... [ Read it >> ]

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An anonymous reader quotes a report from TechCrunch: There's a somewhat concerning new trend going viral: People are using ChatGPT to figure out the location shown in pictures. This week, OpenAI released its newest AI models, o3 and o4-mini, both of which can uniquely "reason" through uploaded images. In practice, the models can crop, rotate, and zoom in on photos -- even blurry and distorted ones -- to thoroughly analyze them. These image-analyzing capabilities, paired with the models' ability to search the web, make for a potent location-finding tool. Users on X quickly discovered that o3, in particular, is quite good at deducing cities, landmarks, and even restaurants and bars from subtle visual clues.... [ Read it >> ]

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Synology's upcoming Plus Series NAS systems will restrict full functionality to users who install the company's self-branded hard drives, Tom's Hardware is reporting, marking a significant shift in the consumer NAS market. While third-party drives will still work for basic storage, critical features including drive health monitoring, volume-wide deduplication, lifespan analysis, and automatic firmware updates will be disabled, the publication said. ... [ Read it >> ]

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During Meta's antitrust trial this week, lawyers representing Apple, Google, and Snap each expressed irritation with Meta over the slides it presented on Monday that The Verge found to contain easy-to-remove redactions. From a report: Attorneys for both Apple and Snap called the errors "egregious," with Apple's representative indicating that it may not be able to trust Meta with its internal information in the future. Google's attorney also blamed Meta for jeopardizing the search giant's data with the mistake. ... [ Read it >> ]

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Canonical today released Ubuntu 25.04 "Plucky Puffin," bringing significant upgrades to the non-LTS distribution including Linux kernel 6.14, GNOME 48 with triple buffering, and expanded hardware support.

For the first time, Ubuntu ships an official generic ARM64 desktop ISO targeting virtual machines and Snapdragon-based devices, with initial enablement for the Snapdragon X Elite platform. The release also adds full support for Intel Core Ultra Xe2 integrated graphics and "Battlemage" discrete GPUs, delivering improved ray tracing performance and hardware-accelerated video encoding. ... [ Read it >> ]

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Fraud rings using fake "bot" students have infiltrated America's community colleges, stealing over $11 million from California's system alone in 2024. The nationwide scheme, which began in 2021, targets open-admission institutions where scammers enroll fictitious students in online courses to collect financial aid disbursements. ... [ Read it >> ]

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Meta has disabled Apple Intelligence features across its iOS applications, including Facebook, WhatsApp, and Threads, according to Brazilian tech blog Sorcererhat Tech. The block affects Writing Tools, which enable text creation and editing via Apple's AI, as well as Genmoji generation. Users cannot access these features via the standard text field interface in Meta apps. Instagram Stories have also lost previously available keyboard stickers and Memoji functionality. ... [ Read it >> ]

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A global gambling syndicate led by secretive Tasmanian gambler Zeljko Ranogajec and London bookmaker Bernard Marantelli successfully executed an unprecedented operation to claim a $57.8 million Texas lottery jackpot in 2023.

The group, operating through a limited partnership called Rook TX, purchased 99.3% of all possible number combinations, printing over 25 million tickets across four makeshift workshops in Texas. Using dozens of official lottery terminals and working nearly around the clock for three days, the team systematically printed hundreds of tickets per second. ... [ Read it >> ]

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India's three largest IT services companies are facing their steepest growth slowdown in years as corporations curtail large technology projects amid global economic uncertainty and geopolitical challenges. From a report: Infosys, the country's second-largest IT services provider, on Thursday forecast revenue growth of just 0-3% for the fiscal year through March 2026, far below analysts' expectations of 6.3%. The guidance follows a quarter where net income fell 12% to $823 million, though this exceeded analyst estimates of $780 million. The disappointing outlook echoes similar concerns from rivals Tata Consultancy Services and Wipro, as US President Donald Trump's tariff policies add fresh headwinds to an industry already struggling with cautious client spending.... [ Read it >> ]

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China is banning automakers from using the terms "smart driving" and "autonomous driving" when they advertise driving assistance features, and it will tighten scrutiny of such technology upgrades. From a report: The mandate on vehicle advertising was delivered by the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology in its meeting with nearly 60 representatives from automakers on Wednesday, according to a transcript seen by Reuters and confirmed by one of the attendees. The move follows a fatal accident involving Xiaomi's best-selling SU7 sedan in March that triggered widespread concerns over vehicle safety.... [ Read it >> ]

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Nintendo's lawyers systematically dismantled Atari Games in a landmark 1989 legal battle that reshaped the gaming industry, killing off the Tengen brand until its surprise resurrection recently.

When Atari Games (operating as Tengen) attempted to circumvent Nintendo's control by reverse-engineering the NES security system, Nintendo's legal team discovered a fatal flaw in their rival's approach: Atari had fraudulently obtained Nintendo's proprietary code from the Copyright Office by falsely claiming they were defendants in a nonexistent lawsuit. ... [ Read it >> ]

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