European Union regulators are investigating Apple's revised app store fees amid concerns they may increase costs for developers, according to Bloomberg News.

The European Commission sent questionnaires to developers in December focusing on Apple's new "core technology fee" of $0.51 per app installation, part of its compliance with EU's Digital Markets Act. Under Apple's revised structure, developers can maintain existing terms with commissions up to 30% on app sales, or choose a new model with lower commission rates but additional charges.... [ Read it >> ]

0 Replies

The USB Implementers Forum has simplified its labeling system for USB docking stations and cables, dropping technical terms like "USB4v2" in favor of straightforward speed ratings such as "USB 80Gbps" or "USB 40Gbps."

The move follows criticism of previous complex naming conventions like "USB 3.2 Gen 2." The new logos will also display power transmission capabilities for cables, addressing consumer confusion over USB standards.... [ Read it >> ]

0 Replies

Microsoft is raising Microsoft 365 subscription prices by up to 46% across six Asian markets to fund AI features. In Australia, annual Microsoft 365 Family subscriptions will increase to AU$179 ($110) from AU$139, while Personal subscriptions will jump to AU$159 ($98) from AU$109. The price hikes also affect New Zealand, Malaysia, Singapore, Taiwan and Thailand customers.... [ Read it >> ]

0 Replies

U.S. companies are increasingly using AI to curb hiring plans, citing "cost avoidance" as a key metric to justify AI investments amid pressure to show returns. At software firm TS Imagine, AI-powered email sorting saves 4,000 work hours annually at 3% of employee costs, while Palantir reported AI reduced future headcount needs by 10-15%, according to company executives. ... [ Read it >> ]

0 Replies

One in five online job postings may be "ghost jobs" that companies never intend to fill, according to new data from hiring platform Greenhouse examining its clients' recruitment patterns in 2024. The analysis found that 18-22% of advertised positions across technology, finance, and healthcare sectors went unfilled, while nearly 70% of companies posted at least one ghost job in the second quarter of 2024. ... [ Read it >> ]

0 Replies

Nvidia has hit back at the outgoing Biden administration's AI chip tech export restrictions designed to tighten America's stranglehold on supply chains and maintain market dominance. From a report: The White House today unveiled what it calls the Final Rule on Artificial Intelligence Diffusion from the Biden-Harris government, placing limits on the number of AI-focused chips that can be exported to most countries, but allowing exemptions for key allies and partners. ... [ Read it >> ]

0 Replies

FBI Director Christopher Wray, in his final interview before stepping down, warned that China poses the greatest long-term threat to U.S. national security, calling it "the defining threat of our generation." China's cyber program has stolen more American personal and corporate data than all other nations combined, Wray told CBS News. He said Chinese government hackers have infiltrated U.S. civilian infrastructure, including water treatment facilities, transportation systems and telecommunications networks, positioning themselves to potentially cause widespread disruption. ... [ Read it >> ]

0 Replies

"We're standing down on today's launch attempt," Blue Origin posted late last night, "to troubleshoot a vehicle subsystem issue that will take us beyond our launch window. We're reviewing opportunities for our next launch attempt."

But soon Blue Origin will again attempt its very first orbital flight. And they'll also attempt to land their reusable Stage 1 on a drone in the Atlantic ocean... ... [ Read it >> ]

0 Replies

Sonos Chief Executive Patrick Spence stepped down on Monday, following a tumultuous period marked by a botched app rollout that angered customers and hurt sales of its new headphones. Board member Tom Conrad, a former Pandora chief technology officer, will serve as interim CEO while the audio equipment maker searches for a permanent replacement, the company said. ... [ Read it >> ]

0 Replies

"Neuralink Corp.'s brain-computer device has been implanted in a third patient," reports Bloomberg, "and the company has plans for about 20 to 30 more implants in 2025, founder Elon Musk said."

In an interview streamed on X.com, Musk says "We've got now three humans with Neuralinks implanted and they're all working well," according to The Times of India:... [ Read it >> ]

0 Replies

"Oracle has informed us they won't voluntarily withdraw their trademark on 'JavaScript'." That's the word coming from the company behind Deno, the alternative JavaScript/TypeScript/WebAssembly runtime, which is pursuing a formal cancellation with the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office. ... [ Read it >> ]

0 Replies

Blue Origin is attempting its very first orbital flight tonight. And they'll also attempt to land their reusable Stage 1 on a drone in the Atlantic ocean.

The rocket is fueled on its launch pad at Cape Canaveral, Florida, awaiting ignition. Its three-hour launch window has just opened. And Blue Origin is webcasting it all live on their web page... ... [ Read it >> ]

0 Replies

"In at least five of the 16 African countries where the service is available, a monthly Starlink subscription is cheaper than the leading fixed internet service provider," reports Rest of World.
"Starlink, launched in 2019 by Elon Musk's SpaceX, has become the leading satellite internet provider in the world."... [ Read it >> ]

0 Replies

"I know, I know: 'Year of the Linux desktop ... yadda, yadda'," writes Steven Vaughan-Nichols, a ZDNet senior contributing editor. "You've heard it all before. But now there's a Linux-powered PC that many people will want..."

He's talking about Nvidia's newly-announced Project Digits, describing it as "a desktop with AI supercomputer power that runs DGX OS, a customized Ubuntu Linux 22.04 distro."... [ Read it >> ]

0 Replies

"The U.K is looking to build a homegrown challenger to OpenAI and drastically increase national computing infrastructure," reports CNBC, "as Prime Minister Keir Starmer's government sets its sights on becoming a global leader in artificial intelligence."

The government is primarily seeking to expand data center capacity across the U.K. to boost developers of powerful AI models which rely on high-performance computing equipment hosted in remote locations to train and run their systems. A target of increasing "sovereign," or public sector, compute capacity in the U.K. by twentyfold by 2030 has been set...... [ Read it >> ]

0 Replies

Due to a "rapid expansion of solar capacity," Germany generated 72.2 TWh of solar power in 2024, reports PV magazine, "accounting for 14% of its total electricity output, according to Germany's Fraunhofer Institute for Solar Energy Systems.

"Wind power remained Germany's largest source of electricity in 2024, generating 136.4 TWh..."... [ Read it >> ]

0 Replies

The University of Colorado Boulder's magazine recently wrote:
What happened during the "Snowball Earth" period is perplexing: Just as the planet endured about 100 million years of deep freeze, with a thick layer of ice covering most of Earth and with low levels of atmospheric oxygen, forms of multicellular life emerged. Why? The prevailing scientific view is that such frigid temperatures would slow rather than speed evolution. But fossil records from 720 to 635 million years ago show an evolutionary spurt preceding the development of animals... ... [ Read it >> ]

0 Replies

SC Media reports on a new jailbreak method for large language models (LLMs) that "takes advantage of models' ability to identify and score harmful content in order to trick the models into generating content related to malware, illegal activity, harassment and more.

"The 'Bad Likert Judge' multi-step jailbreak technique was developed and tested by Palo Alto Networks Unit 42, and was found to increase the success rate of jailbreak attempts by more than 60% when compared with direct single-turn attack attempts..."... [ Read it >> ]

0 Replies

"This year, superconductivity — the flow of electric current with zero resistance — was discovered in three distinct materials," reports Quanta magazine. "Two instances stretch the textbook understanding of the phenomenon. The third shreds it completely...."

After four years of reserch a team at Columbia assembled a "two-sheet device, cooled it down, and watched it superconduct..." A lab at Cornell found "a species of superconductivity that no one had seen coming." And then "Over the summer, a graphene device produced a mythical form of superconductivity:... [ Read it >> ]

0 Replies

As an ecological disaster devastated two coastal California cities, more than 7,500 firefighters pushed back against the wildfires. 900 of them are inmates, reports NPR. That's about 12%:

California is one of more than a dozen states that operates conservation camps, commonly known as fire camps, for incarcerated people to train to fight fires and respond to other disasters... There are now 35 such camps in California, all of which are minimum-security facilities... When they are not fighting fires, they also respond to floods and other disasters and emergencies. Otherwise, the crews do community service work in areas close to their camp, according to the state corrections department... ... [ Read it >> ]

0 Replies

Slashdot reader rzack writes:
Since 1999, I've written a huge amount of PHP code, for dozens of applications and websites. Most of it has been continually updated, and remains active and in-production, in one form or another.

Here's the thing. It's all hand-written using vi, even to this day. ... [ Read it >> ]

0 Replies

An anonymous reader shared this report from the New York Times:

Russia fined TikTok for not removing prohibited content. The results of a presidential election in Romania were thrown out over concerns the app had been used to spread foreign influence. Albania banned TikTok for a year following the stabbing death of a teenager by another one after the two quarreled online... That was all in just the last month... ... [ Read it >> ]

0 Replies

"Every Ford EV model set a new sales record in 2024 with double-digit growth," reports Electrek, with Ford's total U.S. electric vehicle sales jumping to 97,865, an increase of 34.8% from 2023.
And in the last three months of 2024 Ford sold 30,176 EVs — which is also a new record.... [ Read it >> ]

0 Replies

Google is reintroducing "digital fingerprinting" in five weeks, reports Mashable, describing it as "a data collection process that ingests all of your online signals (from IP address to complex browser information) and pinpoints unique users or devices." Or, to put it another way, Google "is tracking your online behavior in the name of advertising." ... [ Read it >> ]

0 Replies

Unanimous AI's founder Louis Rosenberg predicts a "wave" of new superhuman abilities is coming soon that we experience profoundly "as self-embodied skills that we carry around with us throughout our lives"...

"[B]y 2030, a majority of us will live our lives with context-aware AI agents bringing digital superpowers into our daily experiences."... [ Read it >> ]

0 Replies

"JPMorgan Chase shut down comments on an internal webpage announcing the bank's return-to-office policy," reports the Wall Street Journal, "after dozens of them criticized the move and at least one suggested that affected employees should unionize, according to people familiar with the matter."... [ Read it >> ]

0 Replies

"Nuclear you can trust," reads the web page promoting "The Egg, an at home nuclear reactor."
Yes, Enron.com is now announcing "a micro-nuclear reactor made to power your home." (A quick reminder from CNN in December. "A company that makes T-shirts bought the Enron trademark and appears to be trying to sell some merch on behalf of the guy behind the satirical conspiracy theory "Birds Aren't Real....") ... [ Read it >> ]

0 Replies

Richard Stallman founded the Free Software Foundation as a nonprofit in 1985 with four other directors (including MIT computer science professor Gerald Jay Sussman). Sussman remains on the Board of directors, along with EFF co-founder John Gilmore and five others.

Friday the eight directors published a new article explaining how their goal and principles are protected by the nonprofit's governance structure:... [ Read it >> ]

0 Replies

WordPress co-creator (and Automattic CEO) Matt Mullenweg "has deactivated the accounts of several WordPress.org community members," reports TechCrunch, "some of whom have been spearheading a push to create a new fork of the open source WordPress project."

Joost de Valk — creator of WordPress-focused SEO tool Yoast (and former marketing and communications' lead for the WordPress Foundation) — last month published his "vision for a new WordPress era," alluding to a potential fork in the form of "federated and independent repositories." Karim Marucchi, CEO of enterprise web consulting firm Crowd Favorite, echoed these thoughts in a separate blog post. WP Engine indicated it was on standby to lend a corporate hand. Mullenweg, for his part, has publicly supported the notion of a new WordPress fork. ... [ Read it >> ]

0 Replies

Friday America's consumer watchdog agency "proposed a rule to give virtual video game currencies protections similar to those of real-world bank accounts..." reports the Washington Post, "so players can receive refunds or compensation for unauthorized transactions, similar to how banks are required to respond to claims of fraudulent activity."... [ Read it >> ]

0 Replies

As the ecological disaster continues, CNN reports the Palisades Fire near Malibu, California has burned at least 22,660 acres, left 100,000 peope under evacuation orders, left at least 11 people dead and "destroyed thousands of homes and other structures." From the last reports it was only 11% contained, and "flames are now spreading east in the Mandeville Canyon area, approaching Interstate 405, one of LA's busiest freeways." ... [ Read it >> ]

0 Replies

While CES wraps up this week, "Not all innovation is good innovation," warns Elizabeth Chamberlain, iFixit's Director of Sustainability (heading their Right to Repair advocacy team). So this year the group held its fourth annual "anti-awards ceremony" to call out CES's "least repairable, least private, and least sustainable products..." (iFixit co-founder Kyle Wiens mocked a $2,200 "smart ring" with a battery that only lasts for 500 charges. "Wanna open it up and change the battery? Well you can't! Trying to open it will completely destroy this device...") There's also a category for the worst in security — plus a special award titled "Who asked for this?" — and then a final inglorious prize declaring "the Overall Worst in Show..." ... [ Read it >> ]

0 Replies

An anonymous reader shared this report from CNN:

New intelligence has led two US intelligence agencies to conclude that it's possible a small number of mysterious health ailments colloquially termed as Havana Syndrome impacting spies, soldiers and diplomats around the world may have been caused by a "novel weapon" wielded by a foreign actor, according to intelligence officials and a new unclassified summary report released on Friday. However, the two agencies are in the minority and the broader intelligence community assessment remains that it is very unlikely that the symptoms were caused by a foreign actor, according to the unclassified report summary issued Friday — even as an official with the Office of the Director of National Intelligence [ODNI] emphasized that analysts cannot "rule out" the possibility in some small number of cases. ... [ Read it >> ]

0 Replies

"Microsoft's Digital Crimes Unit is taking legal action to ensure the safety and integrity of our AI services," according to a Friday blog post by the unit's assistant general counsel. Microsoft blames "a foreign-based threat-actor group" for "tools specifically designed to bypass the safety guardrails of generative AI services, including Microsoft's, to create offensive and harmful content. ... [ Read it >> ]

0 Replies

"What if they ban TikTok and people keep using it anyway?" asks the New York Times, saying a pending ban in America "is vague on how it would be enforced"

Some experts say that even if TikTok is actually banned this month or soon, there may be so many legal and technical loopholes that millions of Americans could find ways to keep TikTok'ing. The law is "Swiss cheese with lots of holes in it," said Glenn Gerstell, a former top lawyer at the National Security Agency and a senior adviser at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, a policy research organization. "There are obviously ways around it...." When other countries ban apps, the government typically orders internet providers and mobile carriers to block web traffic to and from the blocked website or app. That's probably not how a ban on TikTok in the United States would work. Two lawyers who reviewed the law said the text as written doesn't appear to order internet and mobile carriers to stop people from using TikTok. ... [ Read it >> ]

0 Replies

An anonymous reader quotes a report from TechCrunch: On Saturday, Triplegangers CEO Oleksandr Tomchuk was alerted that his company's e-commerce site was down. It looked to be some kind of distributed denial-of-service attack. He soon discovered the culprit was a bot from OpenAI that was relentlessly attempting to scrape his entire, enormous site. "We have over 65,000 products, each product has a page," Tomchuk told TechCrunch. "Each page has at least three photos." OpenAI was sending "tens of thousands" of server requests trying to download all of it, hundreds of thousands of photos, along with their detailed descriptions. "OpenAI used 600 IPs to scrape data, and we are still analyzing logs from last week, perhaps it's way more," he said of the IP addresses the bot used to attempt to consume his site. "Their crawlers were crushing our site," he said "It was basically a DDoS attack."... [ Read it >> ]

0 Replies

Wikipedia's massive dataset helped researchers identify three styles of curiosity -- "busybody," "hunter," and "dancer" -- based on how users navigate its pages (see: wiki rabbit hole). These curiosity styles reflect broader social trends and highlight curiosity's role in connecting information rather than merely acquiring it. Scientific American reports: In this lexicon, a busybody traces a zigzagging route through many often distantly related topics. A hunter, in contrast, searches with sustained focus, moving among a relatively small number of closely related articles. A dancer links together highly disparate topics to try to synthesize new ideas. "Curiosity actually works by connecting pieces of information, not just acquiring them," says University of Pennsylvania network scientist Dani Bassett, cosenior author on a recent study of these curiosity types in Science Advances. "It's not as if we go through the world and pick up a piece of information and put it in our pockets like a stone. Instead we gather information and connect it to stuff that we already know."... [ Read it >> ]

0 Replies

SysEngineer shares a report from the Associated Press: A spacecraft has beamed back some of the best close-up photos yet of Mercury's north pole. The European and Japanese robotic explorer swooped as close as 183 miles (295 kilometers) above Mercury's night side before passing directly over the planet's north pole. The European Space Agency released the stunning snapshots Thursday, showing the permanently shadowed craters at the top of of our solar system's smallest, innermost planet. Cameras also captured views of neighboring volcanic plains and Mercury's largest impact crater, which spans more than 930 miles (1,500 kilometers).... [ Read it >> ]

0 Replies

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Axios: Meta's Mark Zuckerberg, in an appearance on the "Joe Rogan Experience" podcast, criticized the Biden administration for pushing for censorship around COVID-19 vaccines, the media for hounding Facebook to clamp down on misinformation after the 2016 election, and his own company for complying. Zuckerberg's three-hour interview with Rogan gives a clear window into his thinking during a remarkable week in which Meta loosened its content moderation policies and shut down its DEI programs.... [ Read it >> ]

0 Replies

Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg criticized Apple's innovation record and business practices in a Joe Rogan podcast interview on January 10, claiming the iPhone maker has not "invented anything great in a while" and is "just sitting" on its flagship product 20 years after Steve Jobs created it. ... [ Read it >> ]

0 Replies

Amazon said it is halting some of its diversity and inclusion initiatives, joining a growing list of major corporations that have made similar moves in the face of increasing public and legal scrutiny. From a report: In a Dec. 16 internal note to staffers that was obtained by CNBC, Candi Castleberry, Amazon's VP of inclusive experiences and technology, said the company was in the process of "winding down outdated programs and materials" as part of a broader review of hundreds of initiatives.... [ Read it >> ]

0 Replies

TechCrunch's Rebecca Szkutak reports: TechCrunch recently surveyed 20 VCs who back startups building for enterprises about what gives an AI startup a moat, or what makes it different compared to its peers. More than half of the respondents said that the thing that will give AI startups an edge is the quality or rarity of their proprietary data. Paul Drews, a managing partner at Salesforce Ventures, told TechCrunch that it's really hard for AI startups to have a moat because the landscape is changing so quickly. He added that he looks for startups that have a combination of differentiated data, technical research innovation, and a compelling user experience.... [ Read it >> ]

0 Replies

Amazon is shutting down its "Prime Try Before You Buy" service on January 31, according to a notice on its website. The offering operated similarly to apparel subscription services like Stitch Fix and Rent the Runway, allowing Prime members to try out apparel-related products and only pay for items they wanted to keep. CNBC reports: An Amazon spokesperson confirmed the move, which was first reported by The Information. "Given the combination of Try Before You Buy only scaling to a limited number of items and customers increasingly using our new AI-powered features like virtual try-on, personalized size recommendations, review highlights, and improved size charts to make sure they find the right fit, we're phasing out the Try Before You Buy option, effective January 31, 2025," the spokesperson told CNBC in a statement.... [ Read it >> ]

0 Replies

An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Register: A leading education software maker has admitted its IT environment was compromised in a cyberattack, with students and teachers' personal data -- including some Social Security Numbers and medical info -- stolen. PowerSchool says its cloud-based student information system is used by 18,000 customers around the globe, including the US and Canada, to handle grading, attendance records, and personal information of more than 60 million K-12 students and teachers. On December 28 someone managed to get into its systems and access their contents "using a compromised credential," the California-based biz told its clients in an email seen by Register this week.... [ Read it >> ]

0 Replies

ESPN, Fox, and Warner Bros. Discovery announced today that it will not launch the Venu live sports streaming service. "After careful consideration, we have collectively agreed to discontinue the Venu Sports joint venture and not launch the streaming service," the companies said in a joint statement. "In an ever-changing marketplace, we determined that it was best to meet the evolving demands of sports fans by focusing on existing products and distribution channels. We are proud of the work that has been done on Venu to date and grateful to the Venu staff, whom we will support through this transition period." The Verge reports: ESPN, Fox, and Warner Bros. Discovery first announced Venu last year, and it was supposed to launch in the fall of 2024. The service would've given viewers access to a swath of live games from the NFL, NBA, NHL, NCAA, and more from several linear channels, including ESPN, ABC, Fox, Fox Sports 1, Fox Sports 2, TNT, and others.... [ Read it >> ]

0 Replies

Los Angeles authorities have vowed to prosecute illegal drone operators after a civilian drone collided with a Canadian CL-415 firefighting plane combating the Palisades Fire, causing damage that grounded the aircraft and temporarily halted all aerial firefighting operations. CNN reports: The specifically designed CL-415 firefighting planes are used to scoop up more than 1,500 gallons of ocean water to drop on active fires. The plane in question, Quebec 1, "sustained wing damage and remains grounded and out of service," Los Angeles Fire Department spokesperson Erik Scott said, adding that there were no reported injuries. The damaged plane will be prioritized for repair and should be back up flying by Monday, L.A. County Fire Chief Anthony C. Marrone said Friday. The collision caused the temporary grounding of all aircraft responding to the Palisades Fire, The War Zone reported, citing Cal Fire. It was one of the two such planes deployed to the site, The War Zone said. "You will be arrested, you will be prosecuted, and you will be punished to the full extent of the law," said Los Angeles County District Attorney Nathan Hochman in a statement.... [ Read it >> ]

0 Replies

An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Guardian: JPMorgan Chase is summoning all staff back to the office, becoming the latest corporate giant to call time on era of remote and hybrid working sparked by the Covid-19 pandemic. The US's largest bank, which has some 316,000 employees worldwide, announced on Friday that all workers on hybrid work schedules will be required to return to the office five days a week from March. [...] Few top executives have been more vocal in making the case for working from the office than Jamie Dimon, the veteran CEO of JPMorgan, who -- as early as 2021 -- sought to restore pre-pandemic working habits. "And everyone is going to be happy with it," he told a Wall Street Journal event that year. "And yes, the commute -- you know, people don't like commuting. But so what?"... [ Read it >> ]

0 Replies

An anonymous reader shares a report: YouTubers and other digital content creators are selling their unused video footage to AI companies seeking exclusive videos to better train their AI algorithms, oftentimes netting thousands of dollars per deal. OpenAI, Alphabet's Google, AI media company Moonvalley and several other AI companies are collectively paying hundreds of content creators for access to their unpublished videos, according to people familiar with the negotiations. ... [ Read it >> ]

0 Replies

Automattic is cutting its weekly contributions to WordPress.org from 3,988 hours to 45 hours, escalating tensions with rival WP Engine amid their ongoing legal dispute. The dramatic reduction comes after a federal court granted WP Engine an injunction over Automattic's handling of a disputed plugin. ... [ Read it >> ]

0 Replies

Mark Zuckerberg's Meta is terminating major DEI programs, effective immediately -- including for hiring, training and picking suppliers. Axios: Meta said it was changing course because the "legal and policy landscape surrounding diversity, equity and inclusion efforts in the United States is changing," per a memo by Janelle Gale, vice president of human resources.... [ Read it >> ]

0 Replies