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Ypsilanti Township, Michigan, has imposed a six-month moratorium on "major electric utility infrastructure" in its latest attempt to delay a proposed $1.2 billion University of Michigan-Los Alamos data center that would support nuclear-weapons research. Township leaders, who have already paused water service for data centers, say the project has moved forward without adequate consultation and want…
Apple is cutting more than 200 jobs as it shifts resources toward a rebuilt, AI-powered Siri and other future products. Roughly 100 positions are being eliminated from the Vision Pro organization, including much of its gaming team and some immersive-video staff. Another 100 cuts are hitting the Siri and software teams. Bloomberg reports: In a statement, Apple acknowledged that it was realigning…
Federal prosecutors have charged activist Samuel Tunick with obstruction after he gave Customs and Border Protection officers a duress passcode that wiped his GrapheneOS-powered Pixel during a border search. "His prosecution is one of the earliest known instances of the federal authorities charging a person with destroying evidence using a program designed to wipe a device clean after a specific…
An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Economist: Students and school children are increasingly using artificial intelligence. A survey last year by Chegg, an ed-tech firm, found that 80% of rich-world undergraduates used it in their studies. More recent polls put the figure at 94% in Britain and 93% in Germany. Such widespread adoption has fueled concerns about the impact the technology…
A man dressed as Darth Vader used a Public Safety and Livable Neighborhoods Committee meeting in San Diego to mock the city's use of Flock surveillance cameras, sarcastically arguing that the technology would help the "emperor" track "rebel scum" and find Luke Skywalker. "This is what the emperor needs. This technology will help us find the rebel scum and the hidden base on Hoth," he said. The…
Micron says it will spend $10 billion over the next decade on a new research lab in Boise focused on advanced memory technologies, computing systems, and future chip manufacturing. Here are some details, as reported by Reuters: - Micron Research Labs will bring together customers, academia, government and the broader semiconductor ecosystem to pursue breakthroughs, the company said. - The latest…
Linus Torvalds says AI "enormously helped" him track down a stubborn Intel Xe graphics driver bug that took 24 debugging patches and 18 kernel boots to isolate. "I'd like to call it my tireless helper, but the AI several times stated flat out that this was impossible and unsolvable and that we should just write a report about it," wrote Torvalds on the commit. "I suspect those things have been…
After years of refusing to adopt tap-to-pay technology in its stores, retail giant Walmart announced today that it is finally accepting payments via both Apple Pay and Google Pay. The rollout begins August 24 at select Walmart and Sam's Club locations and is expected to reach all stores by year-end. It will then expand to fuel stations by mid-2027. TechCrunch reports: The news is a surprise, as…
Google is giving publishers a new way to fight declining referral traffic from AI-powered search by letting them embed a "Preferred Sources" button that readers can use to favor their sites across Search, Discover, and Google News. "The idea is to make it easier for readers to find links from the sites they know and trust when they're searching for content or interacting with Google's AI to learn…
Microsoft is expanding Windows Task Manager to show per-process NPU and GPU neural-engine usage, giving users more visibility into which apps are consuming hardware for AI workloads. The Register reports: The Processes tab can show NPU use alongside CPU and GPU activity, while the Performance tab displays overall utilization. [...] Microsoft was keen to point out the metrics that can be monitored.…
China's Chang'e 7 mission is set to launch for the moon's south pole, where it will attempt the first-ever landing directly at the pole and search the region's dark craters for water ice. "It's an amazing mission," says Norbert Schorghofer, a Hawaii-based senior scientist at the Planetary Science Institute. "There has never been a landed mission to find water [on the moon]." If successful, China…
RAMageddon could soon push car prices higher as modern vehicles rely on ever more RAM and powerful centralized computers to run everything from infotainment to driver-assistance systems. Analysts cited by The Atlantic estimate the shortage could add a few percentage points to vehicle prices, which might not sound like much, but could potentially translate to around $2,000 on a $50,000 vehicle. The…
Bilibili, often described as China's answer to YouTube, is relaunching its international app and preparing an English-language site as part of a broader push into the U.S., Europe, Japan, and other markets. The company is courting Western creators like MrBest, hiring community and moderation staff globally, and building tools for brand partnerships. Semafor reports: The revamped international app…
An anonymous reader quotes a report from RathBiotaClan: Millions of people finish short video after short video every day; a new brain-scan study shows that the very act of finishing a clip they like temporarily quiets the brain regions that normally help them stay focused and weigh longer-term goals. When people watch a short video they enjoy enough to finish, two brain regions involved in…
Russian attacks on Ukrainian publishing infrastructure in July and August destroyed roughly 10 million books, which equates to about 30% of Ukraine's annual book output. The Ukrainian Book Institute is warning of a potential "collapse of the entire book ecosystem" and is calling for international financial and industry support to help publishers, printers, and distributors recover. The Guardian…
A growing backlash against AI data centers is spilling into local politics, with residents in more than a dozen communities pushing recall elections against officials who approved projects. "People are standing up and saying, 'Sorry, we don't want these data centers in our communities for a number of reasons,'" Senator Bernie Sanders, the Vermont independent, said in an interview. "'If you can't…
An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Guardian: A math professor at the University of California, Berkeley, criticizing a "severe" math deficiency among students in an op-ed for the San Francisco Standard, admitted to using artificial intelligence to help edit the piece. The Standard published a 2,000-word piece by Zvezdelina Stankova last week, in which the professor said some of her math…
Bloomberg reports that YouTube is offering major creators millions of dollars to keep some content exclusive to its platform as Netflix increasingly signs YouTube-native talent to non-exclusive deals. YouTube has also warned that creators who simultaneously publish on Netflix could lose marketing support, event opportunities, and access to revenue from certain brand campaigns. Quartz reports:…
Security researcher Jeremiah Fowler found that people-search service ClarityCheck left more than 9 million image files accessible in an unsecured Amazon S3 bucket, despite advertising its reverse-image search as "private and secure." A separate misconfiguration also exposed email addresses, phone numbers, and other personal information. Wired reports: Overall, according to findings from…
bryanandaimee shares a report from ScienceDaily: A Finnish study has found an unexpected association between screen use and cognitive performance. Children who accumulated more screen time as they grew up tended to show better cognitive processing during adolescence. One of the researchers cautions against viewing screen time as entirely harmful and says the goal should be to balance physical…
NASA has called off a $30 million mission to rescue its aging Swift space telescope after Katalyst Space's Link spacecraft developed persistent control and positioning problems. The Associated Press reports: Katalyst said Link will not attempt to capture Swift and boost it to a higher orbit because of problems with controlling the spacecraft. NASA said this means the telescope will plunge through…
An anonymous reader quotes a report from NPR: Meta was infused with a culture in which employees obsessed over user numbers and consistently pushed safety to the side, according to Arturo Bejar, a former employee turned whistleblower, who testified today in the landmark child safety trial against the social media company. Only one man had the ability to change that, Bejar said: CEO Mark…
BrianFagioli writes: PINE64 has some very bad news for Linux hardware fans. PINE64 says it has no plans to produce additional Linux devices in the near future because of the ongoing DRAM and eMMC shortage. Future production will depend on component pricing after mid 2027, while existing PineNote and PineTab2 inventory could run out in roughly three months. The company says PineTime, PineVoice, and…
Stripe is acquiring AI model marketplace OpenRouter as it pushes beyond payments into the infrastructure behind AI applications. According to The New York Times, the deal is reportedly valued at about $7.5 billion, with $1.5 billion allocated to OpenRouter's founders. Less than three months ago the company was valued at about $1.3 billion. CNBC reports: OpenRouter has become popular with…
Amazon says its Prime Air drone delivery service will expand sixfold to nearly 500 U.S. cities and towns by the end of 2026, including metro areas around Chicago, Syracuse, Cleveland, Atlanta, and Boise. According to Amazon Prime Air vice president David Carbon, the service has already delivered "hundreds of thousands of packages to customers" this year, typically within about an hour. The Verge…
Independent music publisher Round Hill is suing Suno and Anthropic for allegedly using hundreds of copyrighted songs without permission to train their AI systems. The company says potential damages could exceed $1 billion, arguing there is "nothing fair" about building multibillion-dollar AI businesses on copyrighted material while rights holders receive nothing. From The Hollywood Reporter: Round…
CISA says the Medusa ransomware operation has breached more than 500 U.S. critical infrastructure organizations since 2021, up from more than 300 reported last year. The group has targeted healthcare, government, defense, manufacturing, IT and financial organizations, evolving into a ransomware-as-a-service operation that recruits initial-access brokers and uses stolen data to pressure victims…
Moderna and Merck say their personalized mRNA melanoma vaccine significantly reduced both cancer recurrence and spread in a late-stage trial. The treatment could reach patients as soon as next year if regulators approve it. Reuters reports: Moderna developed the vaccine with Merck and tested it together with immunotherapy drug Keytruda, a widely used treatment for melanoma. [...] This is the first…
An anonymous reader quotes a report from 404 Media: X's algorithm learns what you hate and shows you more of it, according to a new study just published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS). The paper, titled Value misalignment of X's feed algorithm is a reflection of value tensions in engagement, found that the site's algorithm prioritized engagement above all else when…
