Wednesday marked the end of support for the last and final version of HP-UX, writes OSNews.

They call it "the end of another vestige of the heyday of the commercial UNIX variants, a reign ended by cheap x86 hardware and the increasing popularisation of Linux."

I have two HP-UX 11i v1 PA-RISC workstations, one of them being my pride and joy: an HP c8000, the last and fastest PA-RISC workstation HP ever made, back in 2005. It's a behemoth of a machine with two dual-core PA-8900 processors running at 1Ghz, 8 GB of RAM, a FireGL X3 graphics card, and a few other fun upgrades like an internal LTO3 tape drive that I use for keeping a bootable recovery backup of the entire system. It runs HP-UX 11i v1, fully updated and patched as best one can do considering how many patches have either vanished from the web or have never "leaked" from HPE (most patches from 2009 onwards are not available anywhere without an expensive enterprise support contract)...

Over the past few years, I've been trying to get into contact with HPE about the state of HP-UX' patches, software, and drivers, which are slowly but surely disappearing from the web. A decent chunk is archived on various websites, but a lot of it isn't, which is a real shame. Most patches from 2009 onwards are unavailable, various software packages and programs for HP-UX are lost to time, HP-UX installation discs and ISOs later than 2006-2009 are not available anywhere, and everything that is available is only available via non-sanctioned means, if you know what I mean.

Sadly, I never managed to get into contact with anyone at HPE, and my concerns about HP-UX preservation seem to have fallen on deaf ears. With the end-of-life date now here, I'm deeply concerned even more will go missing, and the odds of making the already missing stuff available are only decreasing. I've come to accept that very few people seem to hold any love for or special attachment to HP-UX, and that very few people care as much about its preservation as I do. HP-UX doesn't carry the movie star status of IRIX, nor the benefits of being available as both open source and on commodity hardware as Solaris, so far fewer people have any experience with it or have developed a fondness for it. ... [>>>]

While California's residents have had the right to demand companies stop collecting/selling their data since 2020, doing so used to require a laborious opting out with each individual company," reports TechCrunch.
But now Californians can make "a single request that more than 500 registered data brokers delete their information" — using the Delete Requests and Opt-Out Platform (or DROP):

Once DROP users verify that they are California residents, they can submit a deletion request that will go to all current and future data brokers registered with the state...

Brokers are supposed to start processing requests in August 2026, then they have 90 days to actually process requests and report back. If they don't delete your data, you'll have the option to submit additional information that may help them locate your records. Companies will also be able to keep first-party data that they've collected from users. It's only brokers who seek to buy or sell that data — which can include your social security number, browsing history, email address, phone number, and more — who will be required to delete it...

The California Privacy Protection Agency says that in addition to giving residents more control over their data, the tool could result in fewer "unwanted texts, calls, or emails" and also decrease the "risk of identity theft, fraud, AI impersonations, or that your data is leaked or hacked."

[ Read more of this story ]( https://yro.slashdot.org/story/26/01/05/0224249/39-million-californians-can-now-legally-demand-data-brokers-delete-their-personal-data?utm_source=atom1.0moreanon&utm_medium=feed ) at Slashdot.

North Dakota passed a law last May to promote development of rare earth minerals in the state. But the law's language apparently also includes two fake mineral names, according to the Bismarck Tribune, "that appear to be inspired by coal company lawyers who worked on the bill."

The inclusion of fictional substances is being called an embarrassment by one state official, a possible practical joke by coal industry leaders and mystifying by the lawmakers who worked on the bill, the North Dakota Monitor reported.

The fake minerals are friezium and stralium, apparent references to Christopher Friez and David Straley, attorneys for North American Coal who were closely involved in drafting the bill and its amendments. Straley said they were not responsible for adding the fake names. "I assume it was put in to embarrass us, or to make light of it, or have a practical joke," Straley said, adding it could have been a clerical error.

Agriculture Commissioner Doug Goehring questioned the two substances listed in state law during a recent meeting of the North Dakota Industrial Commission, which is poised to adopt rules based on the legislation... Friezium and stralium first appeared in the bill on the last afternoon of the legislative session as lawmakers hurried to pass several final bills... The amended bill is labeled as prepared by Legislative Council for Rep. Dick Anderson, R-Willow City, the prime sponsor and chair of the conference committee. Anderson said the amendments were prepared by a group of attorneys and legislators, including representatives from the coal industry...

Jonathan Fortner, president of the Lignite Energy Council that represents the coal industry, said it's unfortunate this happened in such an important bill. "From the president on down, everyone's interested in developing domestic critical minerals for national security reasons," Fortner said. "While this may have been a legislative joke between some people that somehow got through, the bigger picture is one that is important and is a very serious matter." ... [>>>]

America's electric car subsidies expired at the end of September, notes Bloomberg. Yet in those last three months, "while fully electric cars and trucks made up 10% of all auto sales in the US... another 15% of transactions were for hybrid vehicles."

The EV market is slowing in the U.S., but analysts expect hybrid sales to continue accelerating. CarGurus Inc., a digital listings platform that covers most of the US auto market, predicts nearly one in six new cars next year will be a hybrid, as automakers green-light more and better machines with the technology. And though these cars and trucks will still burn gas, they will quietly move the needle on both transportation emissions and the transition to fully electric cars and trucks... CarGurus calls hybrids the success story of 2025. Indeed, the fastest-selling car in the country this year has been the Hyundai Palisade Hybrid; it sat on lots for fewer than 14 days on average...

While carmakers have struggled to turn a profit on fully electric vehicles, analysts say their investments in batteries and electric motors are helping them sell more and better hybrid machines. It's also increasingly difficult to discern a hybrid from a solely gas-powered model, said Scott Hardman, assistant director of the Electric Vehicle Research Center at the University of California at Davis. Carmakers today often don't even label a hybrid as such. Consider Toyota's RAV4, one of the best-selling vehicles in America. The 2026 version of the SUV comes in six different variants, all of which include an electric motor and a gas tank. "A hybrid is just a regular car now," Hardman said. "You can buy one by accident...."

While not as clean as an electric vehicle, hybrids offer sneaky carbon cuts as well. Americans, on average, drive about 38 miles a day, which requires about one gallon of gas in most basic hybrids. Contemporary plug-in hybrids, which can run on all-battery power, can cover almost that entire range without the gas engine kicking in. And a small crowd of cars will do even better, stretching their batteries well over 40 miles per charge. All told, hybridization can reduce the carbon dioxide emissions of a vehicle by roughly 20% to 30%, according to the International Council on Clean Transportation. ... [>>>]

Here it is — Betty Boop's first appearance, which became public domain on Thursday. It's a 60-second song halfway through a longer cartoon about a restaurant titled Dizzy Dishes. (The first scene makes it clear this is a restaurant of anthropomorphized animals — which explains why the as-yet-unnamed character has floppy dog ears...)

So Fleischer Studios has now warned that claiming Betty Boop is public domain "is actually not true."

Very often, different versions of a character that have been developed later can independently enjoy copyright protection. Also, names and depictions of a character very frequently will remain separately protected by trademark and other laws, regardless of whether the copyright has expired.

But is that really true? Fleischer Studios went out of business in 1946, notes Los Angeles Times columnist Michael Hiltzik:

By then it had sold the rights to its cartoons and the Betty Boop character. A new Fleischer Studios was formed in the 1970s by Fleischer descendants, including Max's grandson Mark Fleischer, and set about repurchasing the rights that had been sold. Whether it reacquired the rights to Betty Boop is up for discussion... According to a federal appeals court ruling in 2011, the answer is no. Having navigated its way through the three or four copyright transfers that followed the original rights sale, the appeals court concluded that the original Fleischer studios sold the rights to Betty Boop and the related cartoons to Paramount in 1941 but couldn't verify that the rights to the character had been sold in an unbroken chain placing them with the new studio. The "chain of title" was broken, the appellate judges found — but they didn't say who ended up with Betty Boop.

And last month Cory Doctorow pointed out that "while the Fleischer studio (where Betty Boop was created) renewed the copyright on Dizzy Dishes, there were many other shorts that entered the public domain years ago."

That means that all the aspects of Betty Boop that were developed for Dizzy Dishes are about to enter the public domain. But also, all the aspects of Betty Boop from those non-renewed shorts are already in the public domain. But some of the remaining aspects of Betty Boop's character design — those developed in subsequent shorts that were also renewed — are also in the public domain, because they aren't copyrightable in the first place, because they're "generic," or "trivial," constitute "minuscule variations," or be so standard or indispensable as to be a "scène à faire...." But we're not done yet! Just because some later aspects of the Betty Boop character design are still in copyright, it doesn't follow that you aren't allowed to use them! U.S. Copyright law has a broad set "limitations and exceptions," including fair use. ... [>>>]

"The ancient evolution of fish mouths could help solve a modern source of plastic pollution," writes ScienceAlert.
"Inspired by these natural filtration systems, scientists in Germany have invented a way to remove 99 percent of plastic particles from water. It's based on how some fish filter-feed to eat microscopic prey."

The research team has already filed a patent in Germany, and in the future, they hope their creation will help curb a ubiquitous form of plastic pollution that many are unaware of. Every time a load of laundry is done, millions of microplastics are washed from the fibers of our clothes into local waterways. By some estimates, up to 90 percent of plastic in 'sewage sludge' comes from washing machines. This material is then often used in agriculture as soil or fertilizer, possibly exposing those who eat the resulting crops to these pollutants...

Unlike other plastic filtration systems on the market, this one reduces clogging by 85 percent.

[ Read more of this story ]( https://news.slashdot.org/story/26/01/04/1810209/fish-mouth-filter-removes-99-of-microplastics-from-laundry-waste?utm_source=atom1.0moreanon&utm_medium=feed ) at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader shared this report from the Independent:

Candida auris, a type of invasive yeast that can cause deadly infections in people with weakened immune systems, has infected at least 7,000 people [in 2025] across 27 U.S. states, according to data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. The fungus, which can spread easily in healthcare settings such as hospitals and nursing homes, is gaining virulence and spreading at an "alarming" rate, the CDC says. Some strains of the fungus are particularly troublesome — and even considered a superbug — because they're resistant to all types of antibiotics used to treat fungal infections, The Hill reports.

While healthy people may be able to fight off the infection on their own, the fungus can be deadly, especially in healthcare settings, where it can quickly spread amongst a vulnerable population. "If you get infected with this pathogen that's resistant to any treatment, there's no treatment we can give you to help combat it. You're all on your own," Melissa Nolan, an assistant professor of epidemiology and biostatistics at the University of South Carolina, told Nexstar...

A recent study found that Candida auris is gaining virulence and spreading rapidly, not just in the U.S., but also globally. Candida auris has already been found in at least 61 countries on six continents.

Some context from Newsweek:

There are strategies available to combat Candida auris infection. While the superbug can develop ways to evade the immune response, vaccination and treatment strategies are possible, but researchers would like them to be strengthened. Four classes of antifungal drugs are currently available, with varying degrees of efficacy, and three new drugs are currently in trials or at newly approved stages

[ Read more of this story ]( https://science.slashdot.org/story/26/01/04/1732257/a-drug-resistant-superbug-fungus-infected-7000-americans-in-2025?utm_source=atom1.0moreanon&utm_medium=feed ) at Slashdot. ... [>>>]

"Microsoft is hoping that Windows can once again serve as the platform where it all takes off," reports GeekWire:

A new framework called Agent Launchers, introduced in December as a preview in the latest Windows Insider build, lets developers register agents directly with the operating system. They can describe an agent through what's known as a manifest, which then lets the agent show up in the Windows taskbar, inside Microsoft Copilot, and across other apps... "We are now entering a phase where we build rich scaffolds that orchestrate multiple models and agents; account for memory and entitlements; enable rich and safe tools use," Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella wrote in a blog post this week looking ahead to 2026. "This is the engineering sophistication we must continue to build to get value out of AI in the real world...." [The article notes Google's Gemini and Anthropic's Claude will also offer desktop-style agentsthrough browsers and native apps, while Amazon is developing "frontier agents" for automating business processes in the cloud.]

But Microsoft's Windows team is betting that agents tightly linked to the operating system will win out over ones that merely run on top of it, just as a new class of Windows apps replaced a patchwork of DOS programs in the early days of the graphical operating system. Microsoft 365 Copilot is using the Agent Launchers framework for first-party agents like Analyst, which helps users dig into data, and Researcher, which builds detailed reports. Software developers will be able to register their own agents when an app is installed, or on the fly based on things like whether a user is signed in or paying for a subscription...

Agents are meant to maintain this context across apps, ask follow-up questions, and take actions on a user's behalf. That requires a different level of trust than Windows has ever had to manage, which is already raising difficult questions for the company. Microsoft acknowledges that agents introduce unique security risks. In a support document, the company warned that malicious content embedded in files or interface elements could override an agent's instructions — potentially leading to stolen data or malware installation. To address this, Microsoft says it has built a security framework that runs agents in their own contained workspace, with a dedicated user account that has limited access to user folders. The idea is to create a boundary between the agent and what the rest of the system can access. The agentic features are off by default, and Microsoft is advising users to "understand the security implications of enabling an agent on your computer" before turning them on... ... [>>>]

Last June the Trump organization announced sales of a $499 "T1" smartphone with a gold-colored case. But though they originally were scheduled for release in August, this week a customer service representative for the wireless carrier told CBS News the device will be pushed back again, now until the end of January, "attributing the delay to the recent U.S. government shutdown."

Some context from The Independent:

Shortly after the phone was first announced, language describing it as "Made in the USA" was removed from its official website with the vague claim that the devices are "brought to life" in the United States posted in its place... Other information about the phone has also changed or been removed since its first unveiling, The Verge has reported. Trump Mobile initially indicated the T1's screen measured 6.78 inches, but now claims it is 6.25 inches. It also said the phone had 12GB of RAM; however, that claim has now also disappeared.

As the wait for the T1 continues, Trump Mobile has begun offering refurbished Samsung S23s, S24s, and Apple iPhone 15s and 16s for sale on its site, which appear to have no specific Trump branding and are priced considerably higher than customers might pay elsewhere.

[ Read more of this story ]( https://mobile.slashdot.org/story/26/01/03/060203/trump-organizations-499-smartphone-delayed-again-now-until-the-end-of-january?utm_source=atom1.0moreanon&utm_medium=feed ) at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader shared this report from the Linux news site Linuxiac:

Archboot, a guided, user-friendly, menu-driven installer for Arch Linux that automates much of the traditional manual installation process (while still allowing advanced users to intervene when needed), has added the COSMIC desktop environment as a new selectable option. The change is part of Archboot's development cycle leading up to the 2026.01 release and is already available in the latest tagged builds. With COSMIC now integrated, users can boot an Archboot ISO and choose the desktop to either perform a full Arch Linux installation or start a live session for testing and recovery.

[ Read more of this story ]( https://tech.slashdot.org/story/26/01/04/0432252/archboot-adds-cosmic-desktop-as-a-new-install-and-rescue-option?utm_source=atom1.0moreanon&utm_medium=feed ) at Slashdot.

The Wall Street Journal profiles "the startup that is now one of a handful of chip makers nipping at the heels of Nvidia."

Furiosa's AI chip is dubbed "RNGD" — short for renegade — and slated to start mass production this month. Valued at nearly $700 million based on its most recent fundraising, Furiosa has attracted interest from big tech firms. Last year, Meta Platforms attempted to acquire it, though the startup declined the offer. OpenAI used a Furiosa chip for a recent demonstration in Seoul. LG's AI research unit is testing the chip and said it offered "excellent real-world performance." Furiosa said it is engaged in talks with potential customers.

Nvidia's graphic processing units, or GPUs, dominated the initial push to train AI models. But companies like Furiosa are betting that for the next stage — referred to as "inference," or using AI models after they're trained — their specialty chips can be competitive. Furiosa makes chips called neural processing units, or NPUs, which are a rising class of chips designed specifically to handle the type of computing calculations underpinning AI and use less energy than GPUs. [Founder/CEO June] Paik said Furiosa's chips can provide similar performance as Nvidia's advanced GPUs with less electricity usage. That would drive down the total costs of deploying AI. The tech world, Paik says, shouldn't be so reliant on one chip maker for AI computing. "A market dominated by a single player — that's not a healthy ecosystem, is it?" Paik said...

In 2024, at Stanford's prestigious Hot Chips conference, Paik debuted Furiosa's RNGD chip as a solution for what he called "sustainable AI computing" in a keynote speech. Paik presented data showing how the chip could run the then-latest version of Meta's Llama large language model with more than twice the power efficiency of Nvidia's high-end chips. Furiosa's booth was swarmed with engineers from big tech firms, including Google, Meta and Amazon.com, wanting to see a live demo of the chip. "It was a moment where we felt we could really move forward with our chip with confidence," Paik said. ... [>>>]

The New York Times checks in on U.S. university researchers and start-ups trying to create domestic rare-earth processing facility:

There is too little money to be made in rare earths for the elements to be of much interest to mining giants, so the challenge of reestablishing a domestic industry has fallen to small companies like Phoenix Tailings, a Boston-area startup that runs the metal-making plant in Exeter, New Hampshire. A handful of other companies in the United States are processing rare earths in small quantities, including MP Materials, which owns a mine in Mountain Pass, California, and recently began producing rare-earth metal in Fort Worth, Texas. Similar efforts are underway in Europe and Asia. "It's small volumes of low-value materials that are very expensive to process," said Elsa Olivetti, a materials science and engineering professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. "Meaning it's hard to make money."

Phoenix Tailings' New Hampshire operation is about 2 months old, housed in a converted medical device plant. The company buys metric-ton bags of powder — a mixture of neodymium and praseodymium bound with oxygen — from mining and refining companies in the United States, South America and Australia. It funnels that flour-like material into a drying oven and eventually into furnaces that heat it to the temperature of volcanic lava. This circuit takes up less than 15,000 square feet and is designed to generate no emissions other than those associated with the electricity Phoenix Tailings uses. The closed-loop design distinguishes this process from the more energy-intensive techniques used in China, where workers scoop up molten metal with ladles. That approach releases perfluorocarbons, potent greenhouse gases that do not break down easily.

In late 2024 the company was three weeks from bankruptcy — but it's recently been valued at $189 million.

[ Read more of this story ]( https://hardware.slashdot.org/story/26/01/04/0515201/the-us-effort-to-break-chinas-rare-earth-monopoly?utm_source=atom1.0moreanon&utm_medium=feed ) at Slashdot. ... [>>>]

Reddit "has overtaken TikTok as Britain's fourth most-visited social media service," reports the Guardian:

The platform has undergone huge growth over the last two years, with an 88% increase in the proportion of UK internet users it reaches. Three in five Brits online now encounter the site, up from a third in 2023, according to Ofcom. Its popularity is rising fastest with younger internet users. It is now the sixth most visited organisation of any kind by UK users aged between 18 and 24, up from 10th a year earlier. More than three-quarters of that cohort now visit it....

The UK is a boom market for the platform, with the second largest user base behind the US, according to company records. A series of factors are behind its rise. However, a change in Google's search algorithms last year to prioritise helpful content from discussion forums appears to have been a significant driver. A recent deal with Google that allows the company to train its AI model on Reddit's content also appears to have provided a boost. Reddit is the most-cited source for Google AI overviews, which is likely to see more people directed to its forums. It has a similar deal with OpenAI, which owns the most popular AI chatbot, ChatGPT.

According to the article, Reddit "believes it is also benefiting from shifting internet habits, as younger users seek out human-generated reviews and opinions."

[ Read more of this story ]( https://tech.slashdot.org/story/26/01/04/0547242/reddit-surges-in-popularity-to-overtake-tiktok-in-the-uk---thanks-to-googles-algorithm?utm_source=atom1.0moreanon&utm_medium=feed ) at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader shared this report from Electrek:

Tesla has released a new video showing a Tesla Semi truck charging at a massive 1.2 megawatts (MW), finally giving us a clear look at the charging speeds that will enable long-haul electric trucking...>

Tesla claimed the Semi would be able to charge 70% of its range in 30 minutes. For a truck with a 500-mile range and an estimated battery pack of around 800-900 kWh, that requires an incredibly high power output, well beyond the 250 kW or even 350 kW we see on passenger EVs in North America. Today, the official Tesla Semi account on X released a video showing exactly that. In the video, Tesla engineers are seen monitoring a charging session where the power output climbs to a peak of 1.2 MW (1,206 kW).

This is consistent with the capabilities Tesla announced for its new V4 Cabinet architecture earlier this year. The V4 cabinets are designed to support 400V-1000V vehicle architectures and can deliver up to 500 kW for cars (like the Cybertruck) and up to 1.2 MW for the Semi. There is some information missing from the video. For example, we don't see the state-of-charge of the truck, so we don't at what battery percentage Tesla Semi can achieve and maintain this charge rate. Peak speed is one thing, but sustaining that power without overheating the pack or the cable is the real challenge. The liquid-cooled charging cable and the immersion-cooled connector (part of the Megawatt Charging System or a high-power proprietary Tesla solution, though Tesla has been leaning toward MCS compatibility) seem to be doing their job....

This comes just as Tesla is gearing up for volume production of the Semi at its new factory expansion near Gigafactory Nevada. The automaker is targeting a start of production in the first half of 2026 and a ramp up to volume production in the second half.

[ Read more of this story ]( https://hardware.slashdot.org/story/26/01/03/238257/new-tesla-video-shows-tesla-semi-electric-truck-charging-at-12-mw?utm_source=atom1.0moreanon&utm_medium=feed ) at Slashdot. ... [>>>]

An AI chatbot to answer probate questions from Alaska residents "was supposed to be a three-month project," said Aubrie Souza, a consultant with the National Center for State Courts told NBC News. "We are now at well over a year and three months, but that's all because of the due diligence that was required to get it right."

"With a project like this, we need to be 100% accurate, and that's really difficult with this technology," said Stacey Marz, the administrative director of the Alaska Court System and one of the Alaska Virtual Assistant (AVA) project's leaders... While many local government agencies are experimenting with AI tools for use cases ranging from helping residents apply for a driver's license to speeding up municipal employees' ability to process housing benefits, a recent Deloitte report found that less than 6% of local government practitioners were prioritizing AI as a tool to deliver services. The AVA experience demonstrates the barriers government agencies face in attempting to leverage AI for increased efficiency or better service, including concerns about reliability and trustworthiness in high-stakes contexts, along with questions about the role of human oversight given fast-changing AI systems. These limitations clash with today's rampant AI hype and could help explain larger discrepancies between booming AI investment and limited AI adoption.

The chatbot was developed with Tom Martin, a lawyer/law professor who designs legal AI tools, according to the article. But the project "had to contend with the serious issue of hallucinations, or instances in which AI systems confidently share false or exaggerated information."

"We had trouble with hallucinations, regardless of the model, where the chatbot was not supposed to actually use anything outside of its knowledge base," Souza told NBC News. "For example, when we asked it, 'Where do I get legal help?' it would tell you, 'There's a law school in Alaska, and so look at the alumni network.' But there is no law school in Alaska." Martin has worked extensively to ensure the chatbot only references the relevant areas of the Alaska Court System's probate documents rather than conducting wider web searches. ... [>>>]

Remember how California's government negotiated a 2024 deal where Google contributed millions to California's local newsrooms to offset advertisers moving to the search engine?

"A year after it was cemented — and billed as a model that could succeed where entire countries and continents had fallen short — the agreement is tangled in budget cuts, bureaucratic infighting and unresolved questions about who controls the money," reports Politico, "leaving journalists empty-handed and casting doubt on whether the lofty experiment will ever live up to its promise."

The program, initially framed as a nearly $250 million commitment over five years, has secured just $20 million in new money for journalists in its first year, with no guarantee the funding will continue. It's changed hands twice since the University of California, Berkeley withdrew its support [with school officials "worried they wouldn't have enough of a say in how the money was distributed"]. Suggestions that other big tech players like ChatGPT-maker OpenAI could front more resources haven't materialized. A $62.5 million "AI accelerator" tied to the deal hasn't been set up yet.

Not a single newsroom has seen a dollar of funding, and there's no definitive timeline spelling out when they will... [The article adds later that state officials "have yet to draft precise rules for how California will decide which newsrooms get cash..."] Conversations with at least 20 people involved in the deal's rollout reveal how California's budget shortfalls and intraparty spats among Democrats scrambled it... California's struggle to launch its program has dampened hopes of replicating its model in other states such as Oregon, Illinois and New York, where lawmakers have tried but failed to make Big Tech pay for news...

When [California governor] Newsom unveiled his final state budget plan in May 2025 after a $12 billion deficit suddenly scrambled the state's finances, California's first-year commitment was reduced from $30 million to $10 million. Google followed suit within days and cut its first-year contribution from $15 million to $10 million... Whether the program even continues past 2026 is also unclear. Newsom's office declined to confirm whether the state will provide its $10 million commitment to the fund in the coming 2026-27 state budget. Newsom will also be termed out in 2027, and there's no requirement for his successor to honor the state's agreement with Google. ... [>>>]

An anonymous reader shared
this report from Neowin:

Offline Windows activation has been possible to do using the phone. However, it looks like Microsoft has quietly killed off that method as users online have found that they are no longer able to activate the OS using it... [As documented by Windows user Ben Kleinberg on his YouTube channel], Now when trying to activate the OS by attempting to call the phone number for Microsoft Product Activation, an automated voice response says the following: "Support for product activation has moved online. For the fastest and most convenient way to activate your product, please visit our online product activation portal at aka.ms/aoh"

If you are wondering, that link takes users to the Microsoft Product Activation Portal for online activation. Thus it appears that offline ways to activate Windows may no longer be available even though the official support documentation by the company may not reflect it yet.

[ Read more of this story ]( https://tech.slashdot.org/story/26/01/03/1947258/has-microsoft-discontinued-offline-activation-of-windows?utm_source=atom1.0moreanon&utm_medium=feed ) at Slashdot.

Why did the U.S. invade Venezuela and capture its leader Nicolás Maduro? "If you asked ChatGPT about it this morning, it told you that youâ(TM)re making it up," Wired reported Saturday:

WIRED asked leading chatbots ChatGPT, Claude, and Gemini the same question a little before 9 am ET. In all cases, we used the free, default version of the service, since that's what the majority of users experience. We also asked AI search platform Perplexity, which advertises "accurate, trusted, and real-time answers to any question..."

ChatGPT did not course-correct. Instead, it emphatically refuted that Maduro had been captured at all. "That didn't happen," it wrote. "The United States has not invaded Venezuela, and Nicolás Maduro has not been captured." It then rationalized: ChatGPT did not course-correct. Instead, it emphatically refuted that Maduro had been captured at all. "That didn't happen," it wrote. "The United States has not invaded Venezuela, and Nicolás Maduro has not been captured." It then rationalized:

"What's likely going on is a mix-up with real events that are often described in dramatic or misleading ways online. Here's what actually has happened... No U.S. military invasion of Venezuela. No arrest or capture of Nicolás Maduro... Maduro is still in power in Venezuela." It went on to detail recent tensions between the US and Venezuela and explained that âoeconfusionâ can happen because of âoesensational headlines,â âoesocial media misinformation,â and âoeconfusing sanctions, charges, or rhetoric with actual military action.â

Perplexity was similarly scolding. âoeThe premise of your question is not supported by credible reporting or official records: there has been no invasion of Venezuela by the United States that resulted in capturing NicolÃs Maduro,â it responded. âoeIn fact, the U.S. has not successfully invaded or apprehended Maduro, and he remains the Venezuelan president as of late 2025. If youâ(TM)re seeing sensational claims, they likely originate from misinformation or hypothetical scenarios rather than factual events.â ... [>>>]

"Starlink is beginning a significant reconfiguration of its satellite constellation focused on increasing space safety," announced Michael Nicolls, Starlink's vice president of engineering:

"We are lowering all Starlink satellites orbiting at ~550 km to ~480 km (~4400 satellites) over the course of 2026. The shell lowering is being tightly coordinated with other operators, regulators, and USSPACECOM. Lowering the satellites results in condensing Starlink orbits, and will increase space safety in several ways... Starlink satellites have extremely high reliability, with only 2 dead satellites in its fleet of over 9000 operational satellites. Nevertheless, if a satellite does fail on orbit, we want it to deorbit as quickly as possible. These actions will further improve the safety of the constellation, particularly with difficult to control risks such as uncoordinated maneuvers and launches by other satellite operators.

But orbits are being lowered for another reason (besides quick de-orbiting), notes Space.com. Within the next four years the period of least solar activity is expected, a period which coincides with decreased atmospheric density, Nicolls added, "which means the ballistic decay time at any given altitude increases."

[Bringing the satellites lower] will mean a >80% reduction in ballistic decay time in solar minimum, or 4+ years reduced to a few months," Nicolls wrote in his X post. "Correspondingly, the number of debris objects and planned satellite constellations is significantly lower below 500 km, reducing the aggregate likelihood of collision...." The downward migration in 2026 involves roughly half of SpaceX's Starlink megaconstellation, which currently consists of nearly 9,400 operational spacecraft (though that number is always growing).

[ Read more of this story ]( https://science.slashdot.org/story/26/01/03/075205/spacex-lowering-orbits-of-4400-starlink-satellites-for-safetys-sake?utm_source=atom1.0moreanon&utm_medium=feed ) at Slashdot. ... [>>>]

"While a growing number of U.S. employers are mandating workers return to the office five days a week," reports the Washington Post, "some companies say AI is saving them enough time to launch or sustain a four-day workweek.

"More companies may move toward a shortened workweek, several executives and researchers predict, as workers, especially those in younger generations, continue to push for better work-life balance." And "several companies — especially those with a largely remote workforce — have adjusted their work rhythm after delegating many tasks to AI..."

AI "has such a potential to have so much labor savings, you'll see firms shift to a four-day week in an evolutionary way," said Juliet Schor, an economist and sociologist at Boston College who has studied the subject. "There's enough social consensus that people are exhausted and stressed...." Small and medium businesses often adopt shortened workweeks to compete with big salaries for new hires and retention, Schor said. That's how Peak PEO, a London-based service that helps companies expand globally with teams in different locations, thought about its strategy... CEO Alex Voakes said that job openings that used to get two applications jumped to 350 after the change.

"Some of the world's most influential business leaders have publicly suggested the shift may be inevitable," adds Fortune:

Jamie Dimon, the CEO of JPMorgan Chase, has said advancing technology could eventually push the workweek down to just three-and-a-half days. Microsoft cofounder Bill Gates has gone further, openly questioning whether a two-day workweek could be the future. Elon Musk has taken the idea to its logical extreme, positing that the need to work altogether could cease... Tech innovation could "probably" lead to a transition toward four-day workweeks, [Nvidia CEO Jensen] Huang said on Fox Business in August...

[ Read more of this story ]( https://it.slashdot.org/story/26/01/03/0510258/could-ai-bring-us-four-day-workweeks?utm_source=atom1.0moreanon&utm_medium=feed ) at Slashdot. ... [>>>]

CNBC reports that U.S. airlines have "canceled hundreds of flights to airports in Puerto Rico and Aruba, according to flight tallies from FlightAware and carriers' sites."

JetBlue, Southwest, and American Airlines were among the multiple airlines showing cancelled flights, which "included close to 300 flights to and from San Juan, Puerto Rico's Luis Muñoz Marín International Airport, more than 40% of the day's schedule, according to FlightAware."

Airlines canceled flights throughout the Caribbean on Saturday following U.S. strikes on Venezuela after the Federal Aviation Administration ordered commercial aircraft to avoid airspace in parts of the region.... It wasn't immediately clear how long the disruptions would last, though such broad restrictions are often temporary. Airlines said they would waive change fees and fare differences for customers affected by the airspace closures who could fly later in the month.

CNN cites a U.S. official who says more than 150 U.S. aircraft (including helicopters) launched from 20 different bases "on land and sea" during Friday's attack.

The U.S. has said the lights were out in Caracas during the attack, presumably because of a targeted strike on their power grid. "Videos filmed by Caracas residents showed parts of the city in the dark," reports the Miami Herald.

United Nations secretary-general António Guterres issued a statement via his spokesman saying he was "deeply concerned that the rules of international law have not been respected," (according to a Reuters report cited by the Guardian). The Guardian adds that "a number of nations have called for an emergency meeting of the UN Security Council, in New York, today, as a result of the U.S.'s unilateral action."

[ Read more of this story ]( https://news.slashdot.org/story/26/01/03/1740239/airlines-cancel-hundreds-of-flights-after-us-attack-on-venezuela?utm_source=atom1.0moreanon&utm_medium=feed ) at Slashdot. ... [>>>]

86 aircraft were affected by an incident in Denver ,and 256 more in Dallas-Fort Worth, America's Federal Aviation Admistrationtold the Washington Post:

The pilots flying into Denver International Airport could tell something was wrong. In urgent calls to air traffic controllers, they reported that the Global Positioning System was going haywire, forcing them to rely on backup navigation systems for more than a day. The Federal Aviation Administration issued a warning to air traffic in the area. Eight months later, in October 2022, it happened again — this time at Dallas-Fort Worth International Airport, which shut down a runway as pilots and air traffic controllers scrambled over two days without GPS to guide them. Federal officials have not said who was responsible for interfering with the systems or why it took so long to get them back online, though they've said the Denver incident was unintentional. But the disruptions stoked fear about the security vulnerabilities of GPS, a satellite network relied on daily by 6 billion people, businesses and governments.

Over the past two years, interference with the U.S. Global Positioning System has grown dramatically, threatening a network that is highly vulnerable to attack in a conflict. The danger could be posed by enemy or rogue nation-states — or even just hobbyists with commercially available equipment. Efforts by the Pentagon to upgrade GPS have been delayed by years and have cost billions, as adversaries are developing increasingly sophisticated ways to jam and trick the system with false signals that make it think it is somewhere it isn't. And it's not just civilian airline traffic at risk. The underpinnings of modern life and entire economies could be disrupted by a broad attack on the fragile satellite system — power grids, financial systems, cellphone networks — raising the prospect of catastrophe in an era of increasing electronic warfare...

A report last year by the OpsGroup, an organization of international airline operators, found that in January 2024, about 300 flights per day were affected by GPS interference. By late last year, that number had grown to 1,500 flights per day as conflicts in Eastern Europe and the Middle East continued. And in a one-month period, between July and August last year, some 41,000 flights were affected. "While GPS interference is not a new phenomenon, the scale and effects of the current wave of spoofing are unprecedented," the report found... ... [>>>]

AI startups now outnumber all publicly traded U.S. companies, according to a year-end note to investors from economists at Vanguard.

And yet that report also suggest the jobs most susceptible to replacement by AI "are actually thriving, not dying out," writes Forbes:

"The approximately 100 occupations most exposed to AI automation are actually outperforming the rest of the labor market in terms of job growth and real wage increases," the Vanguard report revealed. "This suggests that current AI systems are generally enhancing worker productivity and shifting workers' tasks toward higher-value activities..."

The job growth rate of occupations with high AI exposure — including office clerks, HR assistants, and data scientists — increased from 1% in pre-COVID-19 years (2015 through 2019) to 1.7% in 2023 and beyond, according to Vanguard's research. Meanwhile, the growth rate of all other jobs declined from 1.1% to 0.8% over the same period. Workers in AI-prone roles are getting pay bumps, too; the wage growth of jobs with high AI exposure shot up from 0.1% pre-COVID to 3.8% post-pandemic (and post-ChatGPT). For all other jobs, compensation only marginally increased from 0.5% to 0.7%... As technology improves production and reallocates employee time to higher-value tasks, a smaller workforce is needed to deliver services. It's a process that has "distinct labor market implications," Vanguard writes, just like the many tech revolutions that predate AI...

"Entry-level employment challenges reflect the disproportionate burden that a labor market with a low hiring rate can have on younger workers," the Vanguard note said. "This dynamic is observed across all occupations, even those largely unaffected by AI..." While many people see these labor disruptions and point their fingers at AI, experts told Fortune these layoffs could stem from a whole host of issues: navigating economic uncertainty, resolving pandemic-era overhiring, and bracing for tariffs. Vanguard isn't convinced that an AI is the reason for Gen Z's career obstacles. ... [>>>]

A small section of the International Space Station that has experienced persistent leaks for years appears to have stopped venting atmosphere into space. ArsTechnica: The leaks were caused by microscopic structural cracks inside the small PrK module on the Russian segment of the space station, which lies between a Progress spacecraft airlock and the Zvezda module. The problem has been a long-running worry for Russian and US operators of the station, especially after the rate of leakage doubled in 2024. This prompted NASA officials to label the leak as a "high likelihood" and "high consequence" risk. However, recently two sources indicated that the leaks have stopped. And NASA has now confirmed this.

"Following additional inspections and sealing activities, the pressure in the transfer tunnel attached to the Zvezda Service Module of the International Space Station, known as the PrK, is holding steady in a stable configuration," a space agency spokesman, Josh Finch, told Ars. "NASA and Roscosmos continue to monitor and investigate the previously observed cracks for any future changes that may occur."

For the better part of half a decade, Russian cosmonauts have been searching for the small leaks like a proverbial needle in a haystack. They would periodically close the hatch leading to the PrK module and then, upon re-opening it, look for tiny accumulations of dust to indicate the leak sites. Then the Russian cosmonauts would apply a sealant known as Germetall-1 (which has now been patented) to the cracks. They would close the hatch again, monitor the pressure inside the PrK module, and begin the search anew for additional leaks. This process went on for years.

[ Read more of this story ]( https://science.slashdot.org/story/26/01/02/196256/after-half-a-decade-the-russian-space-station-segment-stopped-leaking?utm_source=atom1.0moreanon&utm_medium=feed ) at Slashdot. ... [>>>]

New York City's statewide smartphone ban that went into effect this fall has been largely successful at getting students to focus in class and socialize at lunch, but teachers across the city have discovered an unexpected side effect: many teenagers cannot read analog clocks. "The constant refrain is 'Miss, what time is it?'" said Madi Mornhinweg, a high school English teacher in Manhattan, who eventually started responding by asking students to identify the big hand and little hand themselves.

Tiana Millen, an assistant principal at Cardozo High School in Queens, said the ban has helped move foot traffic more swiftly through hallways and gotten more students to class on time -- they just don't know it because they can't read the wall clocks. The city's education department says students learn clock-reading in first and second grade. A 2017 Oklahoma study found only one in five children ages 6-12 could read analog clocks, and England began replacing classroom analog clocks with digital ones in 2018.

[ Read more of this story ]( https://news.slashdot.org/story/26/01/02/1919255/nyc-phone-ban-reveals-some-students-cant-read-clocks?utm_source=atom1.0moreanon&utm_medium=feed ) at Slashdot.

A new sweeping meta-analysis has found no reliable link between economic inequality and well-being or mental health, challenging a long-held assumption that has shaped public health policy discussions for decades. The study, led by Nicolas Sommet at the University of Lausanne and Annahita Ehsan at the University of British Columbia, synthesized 168 studies involving more than 11 million participants across most world regions. The researchers screened thousands of scientific papers and contacted hundreds of researchers to compile the dataset, extracting more than 100 study features from each paper and linking them to more than 500 World Bank indicators.

They also replicated their findings using Gallup World Poll data spanning 2005 to 2021, which surveyed more than two million respondents from more than 150 countries. People living in more economically unequal places did not, on average, report lower life satisfaction or happiness than those in more equal places. The average effect across studies was not statistically significant and was practically equivalent to zero. Studies that did find links between inequality and poorer mental health turned out to reflect publication bias, where small, noisy studies reporting larger effects were over-represented in the literature. The study adds: Further analyses showed that the near-zero averages conceal more-complex patterns. Greater income inequality was associated with lower well-being in high-inflation contexts and, surprisingly, higher well-being in low-inflation contexts. Greater inequality was also associated with poorer mental health in studies in which the average income was lower. We conclude that inequality is a catalyst that amplifies other determinants of well-being and mental health (such as inflation and poverty) but on its own is not a root cause of negative effects on well-being and mental health.

[ Read more of this story ]( https://science.slashdot.org/story/26/01/02/1954229/economic-inequality-does-not-equate-to-poor-well-being-or-mental-health-massive-meta-analysis-finds?utm_source=atom1.0moreanon&utm_medium=feed ) at Slashdot. ... [>>>]

Dell is planning to bring back its XPS laptop branding, according to a news report, just one year after the company retired the storied name in favor of a simplified naming scheme that organized its consumer and professional lineup into Dell, Dell Pro and Dell Pro Max tiers. VideoCardz reported this week that Dell has presented an updated XPS lineup during prebriefings ahead of CES 2026, though the company has not officially confirmed the badge's return.

The reported reversal would come after Dell launched the Dell 14 Premium and Dell 16 Premium in mid-2025 as flagship consumer models meant to carry the XPS legacy forward. Those machines replaced the XPS 14 and XPS 16 in Dell's lineup.

[ Read more of this story ]( https://it.slashdot.org/story/26/01/02/192248/dells-xps-brand-may-return-just-a-year-after-being-retired-report-claims?utm_source=atom1.0moreanon&utm_medium=feed ) at Slashdot.

The tech industry needs to move "beyond the arguments of slop vs sophistication" and develop a new "theory of the mind" that accounts for humans now equipped with "cognitive amplifier tools," Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella wrote in a year-end reflection blog. The post frames 2026 as yet another "pivotal year for AI" -- but one that "feels different in a few notable ways." Nadella claims the industry has moved past the initial discovery phase and is now "beginning to distinguish between 'spectacle' and 'substance.'" He argues for evolving beyond Steve Jobs' famous "bicycles for the mind" framing, positioning AI instead as "scaffolding" for human potential rather than a substitute.

"We will evolve from models to systems when it comes to deploying AI for real world impact," Nadella writes, adding that these systems must consider their societal impact on people and the planet. "For AI to have societal permission it must have real world eval impact."

[ Read more of this story ]( https://slashdot.org/story/26/01/02/1851202/microsoft-ceo-time-to-move-beyond-the-arguments-of-slop-vs-sophistication?utm_source=atom1.0moreanon&utm_medium=feed ) at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader shares a report: MTV shut down many of its last dedicated 24-hour music channels Dec. 31. The move, announced back in October, affected channels around the world, with the U.K. seeing five different MTV stations going dark. These include MTV Music, MTV 80s, MTV 90s, Club MTV, and MTV Live. As Consequence notes, MTV Music -- which launched in 2011 -- notably ended its run by airing the Buggles' "Video Killed the Radio Star," the first visual to air when MTV launched in the United States in 1981.

MTV's parent company, Paramount Skydance, is also expected to shutter music-only channels in Australia, Poland, France, and Brazil. Despite axing much of its dedicated music programming, MTV's flagship channels are still expected to keep broadcasting in the U.K. and elsewhere. Like in the U.S., these channels primarily air massively popular reality programs, as opposed to music videos.

[ Read more of this story ]( https://entertainment.slashdot.org/story/26/01/02/1832200/mtvs-music-only-channels-go-off-the-air?utm_source=atom1.0moreanon&utm_medium=feed ) at Slashdot.

A Guardian investigation published Friday found that Google's AI Overviews -- the generative AI summaries that appear at the top of search results -- are serving up inaccurate health information that experts say puts people at risk of harm. The investigation, which came after health groups, charities and professionals raised concerns, uncovered several cases of misleading medical advice despite Google's claims that the feature is "helpful" and "reliable."

In one case described by experts as "really dangerous," Google advised people with pancreatic cancer to avoid high-fat foods, which is the exact opposite of what should be recommended and could jeopardize a patient's chances of tolerating chemotherapy or surgery. A search for liver blood test normal ranges produced masses of numbers without accounting for nationality, sex, ethnicity or age of patients, potentially leaving people with serious liver disease thinking they are healthy. The company also incorrectly listed a pap test as a test for vaginal cancer.

The Eve Appeal cancer charity noted that the AI summaries changed when running the exact same search, pulling from different sources each time. Mental health charity Mind said some summaries for conditions such as psychosis and eating disorders offered "very dangerous advice."

Google said the vast majority of its AI Overviews were factual and that many examples shared were "incomplete screenshots," adding that the accuracy rate was on par with featured snippets.

[ Read more of this story ]( https://tech.slashdot.org/story/26/01/02/188203/google-ai-overviews-put-people-at-risk-of-harm-with-misleading-health-advice?utm_source=atom1.0moreanon&utm_medium=feed ) at Slashdot.

President Donald Trump signed into law this month a measure that prohibits anyone based in China and other adversarial countries from accessing the Pentagon's cloud computing systems. From a report: The ban, which is tucked inside the $900 billion defense policy law, was enacted in response to a ProPublica investigation this year that exposed how Microsoft used China-based engineers to service the Defense Department's computer systems for nearly a decade -- a practice that left some of the country's most sensitive data vulnerable to hacking from its leading cyber adversary.

U.S.-based supervisors, known as "digital escorts," were supposed to serve as a check on these foreign employees, but we found they often lacked the expertise needed to effectively supervise engineers with far more advanced technical skills. In the wake of the reporting, leading members of Congress called on the Defense Department to strengthen its security requirements while blasting Microsoft for what some Republicans called "a national betrayal." Cybersecurity and intelligence experts have told ProPublica that the arrangement posed major risks to national security, given that laws in China grant the country's officials broad authority to collect data.

[ Read more of this story ]( https://news.slashdot.org/story/26/01/02/182247/trump-signs-defense-bill-prohibiting-china-based-engineers-in-pentagon-it-work?utm_source=atom1.0moreanon&utm_medium=feed ) at Slashdot.

AMD's share of processors among Steam users climbed to 47.27% in December 2025, a 4.66% jump in a single month that continues the company's steady encroachment on Intel's once-dominant position in the gaming CPU market. Intel held roughly 77% of the Steam Hardware Survey five years ago, and that lead has eroded considerably as AMD broke the 40% threshold in the third quarter of 2025 and kept climbing.

The gains came despite an ongoing memory shortage that has pushed DDR5 prices to record highs -- AMD's AM5 platform requires DDR5 exclusively, while Intel's Raptor Lake Refresh chips support both DDR4 and DDR5. Many gamers are turning to older AMD Zen 3 processors like the Ryzen 5 5800X, which topped Amazon's bestseller lists during the holiday period and work on DDR4-compatible platforms. Meanwhile, the proportion of Steam users running 32GB of RAM rose to 39.07%, nearly matching the 40.14% still on 16GB, as gamers likely rushed to upgrade before prices climbed further amid AI's demand for memory.

[ Read more of this story ]( https://slashdot.org/story/26/01/02/1719244/amd-closes-in-on-intel-in-latest-steam-hardware-survey?utm_source=atom1.0moreanon&utm_medium=feed ) at Slashdot.

The International Publishers Association spent the past year promoting the slogan "Democracy depends on reading," but Atlantic senior editor Adam Kirsch argues that this utilitarian pitch fundamentally misunderstands why people become readers in the first place.

The most recent Survey of Public Participation in the Arts found that less than half of Americans read a single book in 2022, and only 38% read a novel or short story. A University of Florida and University College London study found daily reading for pleasure fell 3% annually from 2003 to 2023. Among 13-year-olds, just 14% read for fun almost every day in 2023, down from 27% a decade earlier.

Kirsch says to stop treating reading as civic medicine. "It would be better to describe reading not as a public duty but as a private pleasure, sometimes even a vice," he writes. When literature was considered transgressive, moralists couldn't stop people from buying dangerous books. Now that books are deemed virtuous, nobody picks them up. He points to Don Quixote and Madame Bovary -- novels whose protagonists are ruined by their reading habits. Great writers, he notes, never idealized literature the way educators do. The pitch to young readers should emphasize staying up late reading under the covers by flashlight, hoping nobody finds out.

[ Read more of this story ]( https://news.slashdot.org/story/26/01/02/1649208/reading-is-a-vice?utm_source=atom1.0moreanon&utm_medium=feed ) at Slashdot.

A new study [PDF] from Cardiff University analyzing a decade of the popular topical debate programme BBC Question Time found that the broadcaster's flagship political debate show relies disproportionately on journalists and pundits from right-wing media outlets, particularly those connected to The Spectator magazine.

Researcher Matt Walsh examined 391 editions and 1,885 panellist appearances between 2014 and 2024. Journalists from right-leaning publications accounted for 59.59% of media guest slots, compared to just 16.86% for left-leaning outlets. The Spectator, a conservative magazine with a circulation of roughly 65,000, had an outsized presence among the most frequently booked guests. The study's list of top non-politician appearances reads like a roster of right-wing media figures. Isabel Oakeshott appeared 14 times, Julia Hartley-Brewer 13, Kate Andrews (formerly of the Institute for Economic Affairs and now at The Spectator) 13, and Tim Stanley of The Telegraph and Spectator also 13.

No equivalent frequency existed for left-wing journalists; Novara Media's Ash Sarkar and podcaster Alastair Campbell each appeared six times. Walsh said that the programme's need to be entertaining may explain some of these choices, as columnists unconstrained by party talking points tend to generate livelier debate. The BBC maintains that Question Time aims to present a "breadth of viewpoints," but the data suggests the programme's construction of impartiality tilts notably in one direction.

[ Read more of this story ]( https://news.slashdot.org/story/26/01/02/1542232/a-decade-of-bbc-question-time-data-reveals-imbalance-in-journalist-guests?utm_source=atom1.0moreanon&utm_medium=feed ) at Slashdot.

Yann LeCun, Meta's outgoing chief AI scientist and one of the pioneers credited with laying the groundwork for modern AI, has acknowledged that the company's Llama 4 language model had its benchmark results manipulated before its April 2025 release. In an interview with the Financial Times, LeCun said the "results were fudged a little bit" and that the team "used different models for different benchmarks to give better results."

Llama 4 was widely criticized as a flop at launch, and the company faced accusations of gaming benchmarks to make the model appear more capable than it was. LeCun said CEO Mark Zuckerberg was "really upset and basically lost confidence in everyone who was involved" in the release.

Zuckerberg subsequently "sidelined the entire GenAI organisation," according to LeCun. "A lot of people have left, a lot of people who haven't yet left will leave." LeCun himself is departing Meta after more than a decade to start a new AI research venture called Advanced Machine Intelligence Labs. He described the new hires brought in for Meta's superintelligence efforts as "completely LLM-pilled" -- a technology LeCun has repeatedly called "a dead end when it comes to superintelligence."

[ Read more of this story ]( https://tech.slashdot.org/story/26/01/02/1449227/results-were-fudged-departing-meta-ai-chief-confirms-llama-4-benchmark-manipulation?utm_source=atom1.0moreanon&utm_medium=feed ) at Slashdot.

Ghana has decided to deal with the viral spread of prophetic content on social media by setting up an official reporting mechanism for sensitive predictions, a move triggered by the August 2025 helicopter crash that killed the country's defence and environment ministers along with six others.

After the accident, TikTok clips circulated showing pastors who claimed to have foreseen the disaster before it happened. Elvis Ankrah, the presidential envoy for inter-faith and ecumenical relations, now asks prophets to submit their predictions for review.

Charismatic preacher-prophets have been a fixture of Ghanaian public life since Pentecostalism arrived in the 1980s, but social media has amplified their reach and made their claims increasingly outlandish. Police have threatened to arrest prophets who cannot prove their predictions eventually came true. Some two-thirds of Ghanaians favor giving divine intervention a role in politics. Ankrah recently declared that most prophecies submitted to him are "total bunk."

[ Read more of this story ]( https://tech.slashdot.org/story/26/01/02/0720202/ghana-tries-to-regulate-online-prophecies?utm_source=atom1.0moreanon&utm_medium=feed ) at Slashdot.

CBS News: The Atlanta Journal-Constitution has printed its final newspaper, marking the end of a 157-year chapter in Georgia history and officially transitioning the longtime publication into a fully digital news outlet.

The front-page story of the final print edition asks a fitting question: "What is the future of local media in Atlanta?" The historic last issue is also being sold for $8, a significant increase from the typical $2.00 price.

Wednesday, Dec. 31, marks the last day The AJC will be delivered to driveways across metro Atlanta. Starting Jan. 1, 2026, the newspaper will exist exclusively online, a move its leadership says reflects how readers now consume news and ensures the organization's future.

AJC President and Publisher Andrew Morse said the decision was not made lightly, especially given how deeply the paper is woven into daily life for generations of readers. The move makes Atlanta the only major U.S. city without a daily printed newspaper.

[ Read more of this story ]( https://news.slashdot.org/story/26/01/02/074243/the-atlanta-journal-constitution-prints-final-newspaper-shifts-to-all-digital-format?utm_source=atom1.0moreanon&utm_medium=feed ) at Slashdot.

Nokia, the Finnish company whose iconic ringtone was played an estimated 1.8 billion times daily at the height of its mobile phone dominance and whose 3310 "brick" sold 126 million units, has reinvented itself again -- this time as a key piece of AI infrastructure. In October, Nvidia announced a $1 billion investment in Nokia and a strategic partnership to incorporate AI into telecommunications networks.

The company that was once worth $335 billion and controlled more than a quarter of the global handset market seemed destined for irrelevance after the iPhone's 2007 arrival. A last-ditch bet on Microsoft's Windows phone system in 2011 failed, and Nokia sold its devices division to Microsoft for $6.34 billion in 2014. Revenues had fallen from $44.27 billion in 2007 to $12.56 billion. Nokia rebuilt around its $2 billion acquisition of Siemens' networks stake in 2013, then added French network provider Alcatel-Lucent for $18.32 billion in 2015.

Current CEO Justin Hotard, who took over in April, has pushed the company further into cloud services, data centers and optical networks. Nokia acquired optical specialist Infinera for $2.3 billion in February. The company's optical technology enables information to pass between data centers, and it produces routers for cloud-based services.

[ Read more of this story ]( https://slashdot.org/story/26/01/02/070257/how-nokia-went-from-iphone-victim-to-1-billion-nvidia-deal?utm_source=atom1.0moreanon&utm_medium=feed ) at Slashdot.

ASUS has informed its partners that prices on certain products will increase starting January 5, just days before the company is expected to unveil new hardware at CES. In a letter dated December 30 and obtained by Digitimes, the Taiwanese manufacturer pointed to rising costs for memory and storage components as the primary driver behind the adjustment.

The company specifically called out DRAM, NAND, and SSD pricing pressure stemming from what it described as "structural volatility" in the global supply chain tied to AI-driven demand. ASUS also cited shifts in capacity allocation by upstream suppliers and higher investment costs for advanced manufacturing processes.

[ Read more of this story ]( https://it.slashdot.org/story/26/01/02/0444220/asus-announces-price-hikes-starting-january-5?utm_source=atom1.0moreanon&utm_medium=feed ) at Slashdot.

Australia's largest pension fund is planning to reduce its allocation to global equities this year, amid signs that the AI boom in the US stock market could be running out of steam. Financial Times: John Normand, head of investment strategy at the A$400bn (US$264bn) AustralianSuper, told the Financial Times that not only did valuations of big US tech companies look high relative to history, but the leverage being used to fund AI investment was increasing "very rapidly," as was the pace of fundraising through mergers, venture capital and public listings.

"I can see some forces lining up that we are looking for less public equity allocation at some point next year. It's the basic intersection of the maturing AI cycle with a shift towards Fed[eral Reserve] tightening in 2027," Normand said in an interview.

[ Read more of this story ]( https://slashdot.org/story/26/01/01/1740215/australias-biggest-pension-fund-to-cut-global-stocks-allocation-on-ai-concerns?utm_source=atom1.0moreanon&utm_medium=feed ) at Slashdot.

MacRumors: Apple is not expected to release a standard iPhone 18 model this year, according to a growing number of reports that suggest the company is planning a significant change to its long-standing annual iPhone launch cycle.

Despite the immense success of the iPhone 17 in 2025, the iPhone 18 is not expected to arrive until the spring of 2027, leaving the iPhone 17 in the lineup as the latest standard model for over 18 months. This would mark the first time Apple skips an entire calendar year without releasing a new generation of its flagship non-Pro iPhone.

[ Read more of this story ]( https://mobile.slashdot.org/story/26/01/01/1816240/no-standard-iphone-18-launch-this-year-reports-suggest?utm_source=atom1.0moreanon&utm_medium=feed ) at Slashdot.

Apple's Chinese manufacturing partner Luxshare halted production of the Vision Pro headset at the start of 2025, according to market research firm IDC, after the device shipped 390,000 units during its 2024 launch year. The $3,499 headset has also seen its digital advertising budget cut by more than 95% year to date in the US and UK, according to market intelligence group Sensor Tower.

IDC expects Apple to ship just 45,000 new units in the fourth quarter of 2025. Apple launched an upgraded M5 version in October featuring a more powerful chip, extended battery life, and a redesigned headband. The company sells the device directly in 13 countries and did not expand availability in 2025.

[ Read more of this story ]( https://apple.slashdot.org/story/26/01/01/189219/idc-estimates-apple-shipped-just-45000-vision-pros-last-quarter?utm_source=atom1.0moreanon&utm_medium=feed ) at Slashdot.

Every human body contains a small population of cells that are not genetically its own -- cells that crossed the placenta during pregnancy and that persist for decades after birth. These "microchimeric" cells, named after the lion-goat-serpent hybrid of Greek mythology, have been found in every organ studied so far, though they are exceedingly rare: one such cell exists for every 10,000 to 1 million of a person's own cells.

The cells were first noticed in the late 1800s when pathologist Georg Schmorl described placenta-like "giant cells" in the lungs of people who had died from eclampsia. In 1969, researchers detected Y-chromosome-containing white blood cells in people who would later give birth to boys. For more than two decades, scientists presumed these cells were temporary. That changed in 1993 when geneticist Diana Bianchi found Y-chromosome cells in women who had given birth to sons up to 27 years earlier.

The cells appear to have regenerative properties, transforming into blood vessels or skin cells to promote wound healing. They also challenge a central assumption of immunology -- that the immune system classifies cells as either "self" or "non-self" and rejects foreign material. Microchimeric cells should trigger rejection but do not. Higher-than-typical concentrations have been found in people with autoimmune conditions including diabetes, lupus, and scleroderma.

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Costco's consistency -- from its $1.50 hot dog and drink combo to its functional shopping carts and satisfied employees -- has produced what The Atlantic calls a "cultlike loyalty" among members at more than 600 locations across the U.S.

Its annual membership costs $65. The model traces back to Fedco, a nonprofit wholesale collective for federal employees founded in Los Angeles in the 1940s. Costco's private label Kirkland Signature has become one of the world's largest consumer packaged goods brands while maintaining deliberately understated branding. The company relies on word-of-mouth marketing from satisfied members rather than traditional advertising.

Atlantic staff writer Jake Lundberg, who shops at the Granger, Indiana location, describes the stores as spaces of "cooperation, courtesy, and grown-ups mostly acting like grown-ups." Shoppers follow unwritten rules: move along, don't block the way, step aside to check your phone. Checkout lines form orderly queues. The exceptions come near sample stations and before major holidays, when spatial awareness and common courtesy break down.

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Iran is offering to sell advanced weapons systems including ballistic missiles, drones and warships to foreign governments for cryptocurrency, in a bid to use digital assets to bypass western financial controls. From a report: Iran's Ministry of Defence Export Center, known as Mindex, says it is prepared to negotiate military contracts that allow payment in digital currencies, as well as through barter arrangements and Iranian rials, according to promotional documents and payment terms analysed by the Financial Times.

The offer, introduced during the past year, appears to mark one of the first known instances in which a nation state has publicly indicated its willingness to accept cryptocurrency as payment for the export of strategic military hardware. Mindex, a state-run body responsible for Iran's overseas defence sales, says it has client relationships with 35 countries and advertises a catalogue of weapons that includes Emad ballistic missiles, Shahed drones, Shahid Soleimani-class warships and short-range air defence systems.

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Three decades after RFC 1883 promised to future-proof the internet by expanding the available pool of IP addresses from around 4.3 billion to over 340 undecillion, IPv6 has yet to achieve the dominance its creators envisioned. Data from Google, APNIC and Cloudflare analyzed by The Register shows less than half of all internet users rely on IPv6 today.

"IPv6 was an extremely conservative protocol that changed as little as possible," APNIC chief scientist Geoff Huston told The Register. "It was a classic case of mis-design by committee." The protocol's lack of backward compatibility with IPv4 meant users had to choose one or run both in parallel. Network address translation, which allows thousands of devices to share a single public IPv4 address, gave operators an easier path forward. Huston adds: "These days the Domain Name Service (DNS) is the service selector, not the IP address," Huston told The Register. "The entire security framework of today's Internet is name based and the world of authentication and channel encryption is based on service names, not IP addresses."

"So folk use IPv6 these days based on cost: If the cost of obtaining more IPv4 addresses to fuel bigger NATs is too high, then they deploy IPv6. Not because it's better, but if they are confident that they can work around IPv6's weaknesses then in a largely name based world there is no real issue in using one addressing protocol or another as the transport underlay." But calling IPv6 a failure misses the point. "IPv4's continued viability is largely because IPv6 absorbed that growth pressure elsewhere -- particularly in mobile, broadband, and cloud environments," said John Curran, president and CEO of the American Registry for Internet Numbers. "In that sense, IPv6 succeeded where it was needed most." Huawei has sought 2.56 decillion IPv6 addresses and Starlink appears to have acquired 150 sextillion.

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An anonymous reader shares a report: Only the government could spend 20 years creating a national ID that no one wanted and that apparently doesn't even work as a national ID. But that's what the federal government has accomplished with the REAL ID, which the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) now considers unreliable, even though getting one requires providing proof of citizenship or lawful status in the country.

In a December 11 court filing [PDF], Philip Lavoie, the acting assistant special agent in charge of DHS' Mobile, Alabama, office, stated that, "REAL ID can be unreliable to confirm U.S. citizenship." Lavoie's declaration was in response to a federal civil rights lawsuit filed in October by the Institute for Justice, a public-interest law firm, on behalf of Leo Garcia Venegas, an Alabama construction worker. Venegas was detained twice in May and June during immigration raids on private construction sites, despite being a U.S. citizen. In both instances, Venegas' lawsuit says, masked federal immigration officers entered the private sites without a warrant and began detaining workers based solely on their apparent ethnicity.

And in both instances officers allegedly retrieved Venegas' Alabama-issued REAL ID from his pocket but claimed it could be fake. Venegas was kept handcuffed and detained for an hour the first time and "between 20 and 30 minutes" the second time before officers ran his information and released him.

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As the calendar flips to January 1, 2026, thousands of copyrighted works from 1930 are entering the US public domain alongside sound recordings from 1925, making them free to copy, share, remix and build upon without permission or licensing fees. The literary haul includes William Faulkner's As I Lay Dying, Dashiell Hammett's full novel The Maltese Falcon, Agatha Christie's first Miss Marple mystery The Murder at the Vicarage, and the first four Nancy Drew books. The popular illustrated version of The Little Engine That Could also joins the commons. Betty Boop makes her public domain debut through her first appearance in the Fleischer Studios cartoon Dizzy Dishes.

The original iteration of Disney's Pluto -- then named Rover -- enters as well. Nine additional Mickey Mouse cartoons and ten Silly Symphonies from 1930 are now available for reuse. Films entering the public domain include the Academy Award-winning All Quiet on the Western Front, the Marx Brothers' Animal Crackers, and John Wayne's first leading role in The Big Trail. Musical compositions going public include George and Ira Gershwin's "I Got Rhythm," Hoagy Carmichael's "Georgia on My Mind," and "Dream a Little Dream of Me."

Sound recordings from 1925 now available include Bessie Smith and Louis Armstrong's "The St. Louis Blues" and Marian Anderson's "Nobody Knows the Trouble I've Seen." Piet Mondrian's Composition with Red, Blue, and Yellow rounds out the artistic entries.

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The European Space Agency has acknowledged yet another security incident after a cybercriminal posted an offer on BreachForums the day after Christmas claiming to have stolen over 20GB of data including source code, confidential documents, API tokens and credentials.

The attacker claims they gained access to ESA-linked external servers on December 18 and remained connected for about a week, during which they allegedly exfiltrated private Bitbucket repositories, CI/CD pipelines, Terraform files and hardcoded credentials. ESA said that the breach may have affected only "a very small number of external servers" used for unclassified engineering and scientific collaboration, and that it has initiated a forensic security analysis.

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Mark Thomson, a professor of experimental particle physics at the University of Cambridge, takes over as CERN's director general this week, and one of his first major decisions during his five-year tenure will be shutting down the Large Hadron Collider for an extended upgrade. The shutdown starts in June to make way for the high-luminosity LHC -- a major overhaul involving powerful new superconducting magnets that will squeeze the collider's proton beams and increase their brightness. The upgrade will raise collisions tenfold and strengthen the detectors to better capture subtle signs of new physics. The machine won't restart until Thomson's term is nearly over.

Thomson is far from disconsolate about the downtime. "The machine is running brilliantly and we're recording huge amounts of data," he told The Guardian. "There's going to be plenty to analyse over the period." Beyond the upgrade, Thomson must shepherd CERN's plans for the Future Circular Collider, a proposed 91km machine more than three times the size of the current collider. Member states vote on the project in 2028; the first phase carries an estimated price tag of 15 billion Swiss francs (nearly $19 billion).

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