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Goldman Sachs analysts have identified a notable shift in how investors respond to corporate layoff announcements, finding that even job cuts attributed to automation and AI-driven restructuring are now causing stock prices to fall rather than rise. The investment bank linked recent layoff announcements to public companies' earnings reports and stock market data, concluding that stocks dropped by an average of 2% following such announcements, and companies citing restructurings faced even harsher punishment. The traditional Wall Street playbook held that layoffs tied to strategic restructuring would boost stock prices, while cuts driven by declining sales would hurt them. That distinction appears to have collapsed. Goldman's analysts suggest investors simply don't believe what companies are saying -- firms announcing layoffs have experienced higher capex, debt and interest expense growth alongside lower profit growth compared to industry peers this year. The real driver, analysts suspect, may be cost reduction to offset rising interest expenses and declining profitability rather than any forward-looking efficiency play. Goldman expects layoffs to keep rising, motivated in part by companies' stated desire to use AI to reduce labor costs.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader shares a report: Chinese social media users criticized two key government policies, rare signs of public dissent in the country where the internet is heavily censored. The death of the former head of China's one-child policy agency -- which for decades forced women to carry out abortions and sterilizations -- sparked criticism of the demographic effort, with one netizen lamenting the "children who were lost." Others, meanwhile, criticized Beijing's leadership over its ongoing row with Tokyo, sparked by Japanese Prime Minister Sanae Takaichi saying her country could intervene to defend Taiwan in a potential Chinese attack on the self-ruled island, which Beijing claims as its own.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Framework has announced yet another price increase for memory modules, the second in roughly a month, and the company is now actively encouraging customers to source their own RAM elsewhere if they can find better deals. The laptop maker cited "extreme memory shortages and price volatility" as the reason for the hike, noting that 32GB modules and smaller currently cost around $10 per gigabyte while 48GB modules run approximately $13 per gigabyte. Framework said it expects to raise prices again by January as its suppliers continue increasing costs, a trend analysts predict will persist through 2026. Framework plans to add a direct link to PCPartPicker in its configurators so DIY Edition buyers can compare prices and find cheaper alternatives. The company said its pricing still compares favorably to Apple's roughly $25 per gigabyte and pledged to stay as close as possible to acquisition costs. Storage price increases are also on the horizon, Framework warned.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Waymo's fleet of autonomous robotaxis can navigate city streets and compete with human taxi drivers, but they become stranded when a passenger leaves a door ajar -- prompting the company to pay tow truck operators around $20 to $24 through an app called Honk just to push a door shut. The owner of a towing company in Inglewood, California, completes up to three such jobs a week for Waymo, sometimes freeing vehicles by removing seat belts caught in doors. Another Los Angeles tow operator said locating stuck robotaxis can take 10 minutes to an hour because the precise location isn't always provided, forcing workers to search on foot through narrow streets too narrow for flatbed rigs. Tow operators also retrieve Waymos that run out of battery before reaching charging stations, earning $60 to $80 per tow -- rates that aren't always profitable after factoring in fuel and labor. During a San Francisco power outage last weekend, multiple operators received a flurry of retrieval requests as robotaxis blocked intersections across the city. One San Francisco tow company manager declined because Waymo's offered rate fell below his standard $250 flatbed fee. Waymo said in a blog post that the outage caused a "backlog" in requests to remote human workers who help vehicles navigate defunct traffic signals. San Francisco Supervisor Bilal Mahmood called for a hearing into Waymo's operations, saying the traffic disruptions were "dangerous and unacceptable." A retired Carnegie Mellon engineering professor who studied autonomous vehicles for nearly 30 years said paying humans to close doors and retrieve stalled cars is expensive and will need to be minimized as Waymo scales up. The company is testing next-generation Zeekr vehicles in San Francisco that feature automatic sliding doors.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Nvidia has agreed to buy assets from Groq, a designer of high-performance artificial intelligence accelerator chips, for $20 billion in cash, according to Alex Davis, CEO of Disruptive, which led the startup's latest financing round in September. From a report: Davis, whose firm has invested more than half a billion dollars in Groq since the company was founded in 2016, said the deal came together quickly. Groq raised $750 million at a valuation of about $6.9 billion three months ago. Investors in the round included Blackrock and Neuberger Berman, as well as Samsung, Cisco, Altimeter and 1789 Capital, where Donald Trump Jr. is a partner. Groq said in a blog post on Wednesday that it's "entered into a non-exclusive licensing agreement with Nvidia for Groq's inference technology," without disclosing a price. With the deal, Groq founder and CEO Jonathan Ross along with Sunny Madra, the company's president, and other senior leaders "will join Nvidia to help advance and scale the licensed technology," the post said.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

The Trump administration has announced it would replace the lottery programme used to grant H-1B visas for skilled foreign workers with a system that prioritises higher-paid individuals. From a report: The Department of Homeland Security said it would begin to implement a "weighted" selection process to give an advantage to higher-skilled and higher-paid applicants from February, according to a statement posted on its website. Matthew Tragesser, Citizenship and Immigration Services spokesperson, said: "The existing random selection process of H-1B registrations was exploited and abused by US employers who were primarily seeking to import foreign workers at lower wages than they would pay American workers." The move is the latest in a broad crackdown on US immigration by President Donald Trump, who has dramatically stepped up deportations of immigrants and sent enforcement agents into cities across the country to carry out arrests. The change also follows moves earlier this year to curb the number of applicants for the H-1B visa, which is popular among technology and professional services companies, including charging an additional $100,000 fee. Beryl Howell, a federal judge on the US District Court for the District of Columbia, late on Tuesday ruled the White House could move forward with the application charge after the US Chamber of Commerce had sued in October to block the six-figure fee.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from the Wall Street Journal: It's harder than ever to mine bitcoin. And less profitable, too. But mining-company stocks are still flying, even with cryptocurrency prices in retreat. That's because these firms have something in common with the hottest investment theme on the planet: the massive, electricity-hungry data centers expected to power the artificial-intelligence boom. Some companies are figuring out how to remake themselves as vital suppliers to Alphabet, Amazon, Meta, Microsoft and other "hyperscalers" bent on AI dominance. Bitcoin-mining -- using vast computer power to solve equations to unlock the digital currency -- has been a lucrative and cutting-edge pursuit in its own right. Lately, however, increased competition and other challenges have eroded profit margins. But just as the bitcoin-mining business began to cool, the AI build-out turned white hot. The AI arms race has created an insatiable demand for some assets the miners already have: data centers, cooling systems, land and hard-to-obtain contracts for electrical power -- all of which can be repurposed to train and power AI models. It's not a seamless process. Miners often have to build new, specialized facilities, because running AI requires more-advanced cooling and network systems, as well as replacing bitcoin-mining computers with AI-focused graphics processing units. But signing deals with miners allows AI giants to expand faster and cheaper than starting new facilities from scratch. These companies still mine some bitcoin, but the transition gives miners a new source of deep-pocketed customers willing to commit to longer-term leases for their data centers. "The opportunity for miners to convert to AI is one of the greatest opportunities I could possibly imagine," said Adam Sullivan, chief executive of Core Scientific, which has pivoted to AI data centers. The shift has boosted miners' stocks. The CoinShares Bitcoin Mining ETF has surged about 90% this year, a rally that has accelerated even as bitcoin erased its gains for 2025. The ETF holds shares of miners including Cipher Mining and IREN, both of which have surged following long-term deals with companies such as Amazon and Microsoft. Shares of Core Scientific quadrupled in 2024 after the company signed its first AI contract that February. The stock has gained 10% this year. The company now expects to exit bitcoin mining entirely by 2028.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

alternative_right shares a report from Euronews: France's President Emmanuel Macron discovered news of his own supposed overthrow, after he received a message of concern, along with a link to a Facebook video. "On Sunday (14 December) one of my African counterparts got in touch, writing 'Dear president, what's happening to you? I'm very worried,'" Macron told readers of French local newspaper La Provence on December 16. Alongside the message, a compelling video showcasing a swirling helicopter, military personnel, crowds and -- what appears to be -- a news anchor delivering a piece to camera. "Unofficial reports suggest that there has been a coup in France, led by a colonel whose identity has not been revealed, along with the possible fall of Emmanuel Macron. However, the authorities have not issued a clear statement," she says. Except, nothing about this video is authentic: it was created with AI. After discovering the video, Macron asked Pharos -- France's official portal for signaling online illicit content -- to call Facebook's parent company Meta, to get the fake video removed. But that request was turned down, as the platform claimed it did not violate its "rules of use." [...] The original video ... racked up more than 12 million views [...].The teenager running the account is based in Burkina Faso and makes money running courses focusing on how to monetize AI. He eventually took the video down more than a week after its initial publication, due to political -- and public -- controversy. "I tend to think that I have more power to apply pressure than other people," Macron said. "Or rather, that it's easier to say something is serious if I am the one calling, but it doesn't work." "These people are mocking us," he added. "They don't care about the serenity of public debates, they don't care about democracy, and therefore they are putting us in danger."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

With NASA's Mars Sample Return mission delayed into the 2030s, engineers are certifying the Perseverance rover to keep operating for many more years while it continues collecting and safeguarding Martian rock samples. Ars Technica reports: The good news is that the robot, about the size of a small SUV, is in excellent health, according to Steve Lee, Perseverance's deputy project manager at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL). "Perseverance is approaching five years of exploration on Mars," Lee said in a press briefing Wednesday at the American Geophysical Union's annual fall meeting. "Perseverance is really in excellent shape. All the systems onboard are operational and performing very, very well. All the redundant systems onboard are available still, and the rover is capable of supporting this mission for many, many years to come." The rover's operators at JPL are counting on sustaining Perseverance's good health. The rover's six wheels have carried it a distance of about 25 miles, or 40 kilometers, since landing inside the 28-mile-wide (45-kilometer) Jezero Crater in February 2021. That is double the original certification for the rover's mobility system and farther than any vehicle has traveled on the surface of another world. Now, engineers are asking Perseverance to perform well beyond expectations. An evaluation of the rover's health concluded it can operate until at least 2031. The rover uses a radioactive plutonium power source, so it's not in danger of running out of electricity or fuel any time soon. The Curiosity rover, which uses a similar design, has surpassed 13 years of operations on Mars. There are two systems that are most likely to limit the rover's useful lifetime. One is the robotic arm, which is necessary to collect samples, and the other is the rover's six wheels and the drive train that powers them. "To make sure we can continue operations and continue driving for a long, long way, up to 100 kilometers (62 miles), we are doing some additional testing," Lee said. "We've successfully completed a rotary actuator life test that has now certified the rotary system to 100 kilometers for driving, and we have similar testing going on for the brakes. That is going well, and we should finish those early part of next year."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from the Financial Post: A Texas power developer is proposing to repurpose nuclear reactors from Navy warships to power the United States grid as the Trump administration pushes to secure massive amounts of energy for the artificial intelligence boom. HGP Intelligent Energy LLC filed an application to the Energy Department to redirect two retired reactors to a data center project proposed at Oak Ridge, Tennessee, according to a letter submitted to the agency's Office of Energy Dominance Financing. The project, filed for the White House's Genesis Mission, would produce about 450-520 megawatts of around-the-clock electricity, or enough to power roughly 360,000 homes. The proposal would rewire reactors from naval vessels, originally built by Westinghouse Electric Company and General Electric, at a fraction of the cost of new builds. According to the report, The developer expects to seek a loan guarantee from the U.S. Department of Energy and raise roughly $1.8-$2.1 billion in private capital to prepare the reactors for civilian use, targeting initial completion by 2029. The approach is technically feasible but would break new ground by adapting military nuclear assets for the commercial grid. Bloomberg first reported the story.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

"In the age of Spotify and AI slop, tapes remind us what we're missing when we stop taking risks," writes author Janus Rose in an article for 404 Media. Here's an excerpt: There are lots of advantages to the cassette lifestyle. Unlike vinyl records, tapes are compact and super-portable, and unlike streaming, you never have to worry about a giant company suddenly taking them away from you. They can be easily duplicated, shared, and made into mixtapes using equipment you find in a junk shop. When I was a kid, the first music I ever owned were tapes I recorded from MTV with a Kids' Fisher Price tape recorder. I had no money, so I would listen to those tapes for hours, relishing every word Kim Gordon exhaled on my bootlegged copy of Sonic Youth's "Bull in the Heather." Just like back then, my rediscovery of cassettes has led me to start listening more intentionally and deeply, devoting more and more time to each record without the compulsion to hit "skip." Most of the cassettes I bought in Tokyo had music I probably never would have found or spent time with otherwise. Getting reacquainted with tapes made me realize how much has been lost in the streaming era. Over the past two decades, platforms like Spotify co-opted the model of peer-to-peer filesharing pioneered by Napster and BitTorrent into a fully captured ecosystem. But instead of sharing, this ecosystem was designed around screen addiction, surveillance, and instant gratification -- with corporate middlemen and big labels reaping all the profits. Streaming seeks to virtually eliminate what techies like to call "user friction," turning all creative works into a seamless and unlimited flow of data, pouring out of our devices like water from a digital faucet. Everything becomes "Content," flattened into aesthetic buckets and laser-targeted by "perfect fit" algorithms to feed our addictive impulses. Thus the act of listening to music is transformed from a practice of discovery and communication to a hyper-personalized mood board of machine-optimized "vibes." What we now call "AI Slop" is just a novel and more cynically efficient vessel for this same process. Slop removes human beings as both author and subject, reducing us to raw impulses -- a digital lubricant for maximizing viral throughput. Whether we love or hate AI Slop is irrelevant, because human consumers are not its intended beneficiaries. In the minds of CEOs like OpenAI's Sam Altman, we're simply components in a machine built to maintain and accelerate information flows, in order to create value for an insatiably wealthy investor class. [...] Tapes and other physical media aren't a magic miracle cure for late-stage capitalism. But they can help us slow down and remember what makes us human. Tapes make music-listening into an intentional practice that encourages us to spend time connecting with the art, instead of frantically vibe-surfing for something that suits our mood from moment-to-moment. They reject the idea that the point of discovering and listening to music is finding the optimal collection of stimuli to produce good brain chemicals. More importantly, physical media reminds us that nothing good is possible if we refuse to take risks. You might find the most mediocre indie band imaginable. Or you might discover something that changes you forever. Nothing will happen if you play it safe and outsource all of your experiences to a content machine designed to make rich people richer.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Apple will allow alternative iOS app stores and external payment systems in Brazil after settling an antitrust case with the country's competition authority, following a lawsuit brought by MercadoLibre back in 2022. Thurrott reports: Yesterday, Brazil's Conselho Administrativo de Defesa Economica (CADE) explained in its press release that it has approved a Term of Commitment to Cease (TCC) submitted by Apple. To settle the lawsuit, the iPhone maker has agreed to allow third-party iOS app stores in Brazil and to let developers use external payment systems. The company will also use neutral wording in the warning messages about third-party app stores and external payment systems that iOS users in Brazil will see. As part of the settlement, Apple has 105 days to implement these changes to avoid a fine of up to $27.1 million. A separate report from Brazilian blog Tecnoblog revealed that Apple will still take a 5% "Core Technology Commission" fee on transactions going through alternative app stores. Additionally, the company will take a 15% cut on in-app purchases for App Store apps when developers redirect users to their own payment systems.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Wired: Two years ago, Lizmary Fernandez took a detour from studying to be an immigration attorney to join a free Apple course for making iPhone apps. The Apple Developer Academy in Detroit launched as part of the company's $200 million response to the Black Lives Matter protests and aims to expand opportunities for people of color in the country's poorest big city. But Fernandez found the program's cost-of-living stipend lacking -- "A lot of us got on food stamps," she says -- and the coursework insufficient for landing a coding job. "I didn't have the experience or portfolio," says the 25-year-old, who is now a flight attendant and preparing to apply to law school. "Coding is not something I got back to." Since 2021, the academy has welcomed over 1,700 students, a racially diverse mix with varying levels of tech literacy and financial flexibility. About 600 students, including Fernandez, have completed its 10-month course of half-days at Michigan State University, which cosponsors the Apple-branded and Apple-focused program. WIRED reviewed contracts and budgets and spoke with officials and graduates for the first in-depth examination of the nearly $30 million invested in the academy over the past four years -- almost 30 percent of which came from Michigan taxpayers and the university's regular students. As tech giants begin pouring billions of dollars into AI-related job training courses across the country, the Apple academy offers lessons on the challenges of uplifting diverse communities. [...] The program gives out iPhones and MacBooks and spends an estimated $20,000 per student, nearly twice as much as state and local governments budget for community colleges. [...] About 70 percent of students graduate, which [Sarah Gretter, the academy leader for Michigan State] describes as higher than typical for adult education. She says the goal is for them to take "a next step," whether a job or more courses. Roughly a third of participants are under 25, and virtually all of them pursue further schooling. [...] About 71 percent of graduates from the last two years went onto full-time jobs across a variety of industries, according to academy officials. Amy J. Ko, a University of Washington computer scientist who researches computing education, calls under 80 percent typical for the coding schools she has studied but notes that one of her department's own undergraduate programs has a 95 percent job placement rate.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Adult children across the United States are increasingly reporting that their aging parents have developed what looks remarkably like the smartphone addiction [non-paywalled source] typically associated with teenagers, a phenomenon The Atlantic's Charlie Warzel has dubbed "phone-based retirement." A 2019 Pew Research Center study found people 60 and older spend more than half their daily leisure time -- four hours and 16 minutes -- in front of screens. Nielsen reported this year that adults 65 and up watch YouTube on their TVs nearly twice as much as they did two years ago. 40% of adults aged 59 to 77 reported feeling anxious without device access in a 2,000-person survey. Ipsit Vahia, chief of geriatric psychiatry at Mass General Brigham's McLean Hospital, cautioned against treating all older adults as a monolithic group. The COVID-19 pandemic drove significant tech adoption among seniors as Zoom became essential for family gatherings, church services, and telehealth. Some research suggests device use may be linked to better cognitive function for people over 50, and Vahia noted that technology use in older adults appears to protect them from isolation and loneliness -- the opposite of its effect on teenagers.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

After Anna's Archive published a massive scrape containing 86 million songs and metadata from Spotify, the streaming giant responded by disabling the nefarious accounts responsible. A spokesperson for Spotify told Recorded Future News that it "has identified and disabled the nefarious user accounts that engaged in unlawful scraping." "We've implemented new safeguards for these types of anti-copyright attacks and are actively monitoring for suspicious behavior," the spokesperson said. "Since day one, we have stood with the artist community against piracy, and we are actively working with our industry partners to protect creators and defend their rights." The Record reports: The spokesperson added that Anna's Archive did not contact them before publishing the files. They also said it did not consider the incident a "hack" of Spotify. The people behind the leaked database systematically violated Spotify's terms by stream-ripping some of the music from the platform over a period of months, a spokesperson said. They did this through user accounts set up by a third party and not by accessing Spotify's business systems, they added. Anna's Archive published a blog post about the cache this weekend, writing that while it typically focuses its efforts on text, its mission to preserve humanity's knowledge and culture "doesn't distinguish among media types." "Sometimes an opportunity comes along outside of text. This is such a case. A while ago, we discovered a way to scrape Spotify at scale. We saw a role for us here to build a music archive primarily aimed at preservation," they said. "This Spotify scrape is our humble attempt to start such a 'preservation archive' for music. Of course Spotify doesn't have all the music in the world, but it's a great start."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Microsoft has denied any plans to rewrite Windows 11 using AI and Rust after a LinkedIn post from one of its top-level engineers sparked a wave of online backlash by claiming the company's goal was to "eliminate every line of C and C++ from Microsoft by 2030." Galen Hunt, a principal software engineer responsible for several large-scale research projects at Microsoft, made the claim in what was originally a hiring post for his team. His original wording described a "North Star" of "1 engineer, 1 month, 1 million lines of code" and outlined a strategy to "combine AI and Algorithms to rewrite Microsoft's largest codebases." The repeated use of "our" in the post led many to interpret it as an official company direction rather than a personal research ambition. Frank X. Shaw, Microsoft's head of communications, told Windows Latest that the company has no such plans. Hunt subsequently edited his LinkedIn post to clarify that "Windows is NOT being rewritten in Rust with AI" and that his team's work is a research project focused on building technology to enable language-to-language migration. He characterized the reaction as "speculative reading between the lines."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Italy's antitrust regulator Italian Competition Authority ordered Meta to suspend a policy that blocks rival AI chatbots from using WhatsApp's business APIs, citing potential abuse of market dominance. "Meta's conduct appears to constitute an abuse, since it may limit production, market access, or technical developments in the AI Chatbot services market, to the detriment of consumers," the Authority wrote. "Moreover, while the investigation is ongoing, Meta's conduct may cause serious and irreparable harm to competition in the affected market, undermining contestability." TechCrunch reports: The AGCM in November had broadened the scope of an existing investigation into Meta, after the company changed its business API policy in October to ban general-purpose chatbots from being offered on the chat app via the API. Meta has argued that its API isn't designed to be a platform for the distribution of chatbots and that people have more avenues beyond WhatsApp to use AI bots from other companies. The policy change, which goes into effect in January, would affect the availability of AI chatbots from the likes of OpenAI, Perplexity, and Poke on the app.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Amazon finds itself caught between two competing impulses as AI shopping agents from OpenAI, Google, Perplexity and Microsoft mushroom across the e-commerce space -- block them to protect its dominant position, or partner with them to avoid being left behind. The company has largely played defense so far. Amazon recently updated its website code to block external AI agents from crawling it, and as of this week had blocked 47 bots including those from all major AI companies. In November, Amazon sued Perplexity over an agent in the startup's Comet browser that can make purchases on users' behalf, alleging the company concealed its agents to continue scraping Amazon's site. But Amazon's stance appears to be shifting, CNBC reports. CEO Andy Jassy said on an October earnings call that Amazon expects to partner with third-party agents and has engaged in conversations with some providers. The company is now hiring a corporate development leader to forge strategic partnerships in "agentic commerce." Amazon is also investing in its own tools. The company launched shopping chatbot Rufus last February and has been testing an agent called Buy For Me that can purchase products from other sites within Amazon's app.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from the Wall Street Journal: Concerned that artificial intelligence could threaten Communist Party rule, Beijing is taking extraordinary steps to keep it under control. Although China's government sees AI as crucial to the country's economic and military future, regulations and recent purges of online content show it also fears AI could destabilize society. Chatbots pose a particular problem: Their ability to think for themselves could generate responses that spur people to question party rule. In November, Beijing formalized rules it has been working on with AI companies to ensure their chatbots are trained on data filtered for politically sensitive content, and that they can pass an ideological test before going public. All AI-generated texts, videos and images must be explicitly labeled and traceable, making it easier to track and punish anyone spreading undesirable content. Authorities recently said they removed 960,000 pieces of what they regarded as illegal or harmful AI-generated content during three months of an enforcement campaign. Authorities have officially classified AI as a major potential threat, adding it alongside earthquakes and epidemics to its National Emergency Response Plan. Chinese authorities don't want to regulate too much, people familiar with the government's thinking said. Doing so could extinguish innovation and condemn China to second-tier status in the global AI race behind the U.S., which is taking a more hands-off approach toward policing AI. But Beijing also can't afford to let AI run amok. Chinese leader Xi Jinping said earlier this year that AI brought "unprecedented risks," according to state media. A lieutenant called AI without safety like driving on a highway without brakes. There are signs that China is, for now, finding a way to thread the needle. Chinese models are scoring well in international rankings, both overall and in specific areas such as computer coding, even as they censor responses about the Tiananmen Square massacre, human-rights concerns and other sensitive topics. Major American AI models are for the most part unavailable in China. It could become harder for DeepSeek and other Chinese models to keep up with U.S. models as AI systems become more sophisticated. Researchers outside of China who have reviewed both Chinese and American models also say that China's regulatory approach has some benefits: Its chatbots are often safer by some metrics, with less violence and pornography, and are less likely to steer people toward self-harm. "The Communist Party's top priority has always been regulating political content, but there are people in the system who deeply care about the other social impacts of AI, especially on children," said Matt Sheehan, who studies Chinese AI at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, a think tank. "That may lead models to produce less dangerous content on certain dimensions."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Los Angeles Times (non-paywalled source): When police questioned Marvin Margolis following the murder of Elizabeth Short -- who became known as the Black Dahlia -- he lied about how well he had known her. The 22-year-old Short had been found mutilated in a weedy lot in South Los Angeles, severed neatly in half with what detectives thought was surgical skill. Margolis was on the list of suspects. He was a sullen 21-year-old premed student at USC, a shell-shocked World War II veteran who had expressed an eagerness to practice surgery. He was "a resentful individual who shows ample evidence of open aggression," a military psychiatrist had concluded. At first, Margolis did not tell detectives that he had lived with Short for 12 days at a Hollywood Boulevard apartment, three months before her January 1947 murder. Margolis later admitted they had lived together in Apartment 726 at the Guardian Arms Apartments. But he soon moved to Chicago and changed his name, frustrating further attempts to question him. Among many suspects, a district attorney investigator would note, Margolis was "the only pre-medical student who ever lived as a boy friend with Beth Short." A generation later and hundreds of miles north, a killer who called himself the Zodiac terrorized the San Francisco Bay Area with five seemingly random murders from 1968 to 1969, taunting police and media for years with letters and cryptograms. The toughest to decipher was the letter he sent in April 1970 to the San Francisco Chronicle, with the words "My name is -" followed by a 13-character string of letters and symbols. It came to be called the Z13 cipher, and its brevity has stymied generations of PhDs and puzzle prodigies. Alex Baber, a 50-year-old West Virginia man who dropped out of high school and taught himself codebreaking, now says he has cracked the Zodiac killer's identity -- and in the process solved the Black Dahlia case as well. "It's irrefutable," said Baber, obsessive, hyperfocused and cocksure in manner, his memory encyclopedic and his speech a firehose of dates, locations and surprising linkages. [...] To attack the problem, Baber used artifical intelligence and generated a list of 71 million possible 13-letter names. Using known details of the Zodiac killer, based on witness descriptions, he cross-checked those names against military, marriage, census and other public records. "This takes me nine months of working 18-20 hour days," he said. "I'm starting to kill this onion. I'm starting to eliminate layers: Too tall, too short, or wrong race." The candidates narrowed to 185, to 14, and then, he said, to one. The name he found buried in the Z13 code: "Marvin Merrill."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

European leaders including Emmanuel Macron have accused Washington of "coercion and intimidation," after the US imposed a visa ban on five prominent European figures who have been at heart of the campaign to introduce laws regulating American tech companies. From a report: The visa bans were imposed on Tuesday on Thierry Breton, the former EU commissioner and one of the architects of the bloc's Digital Services Act (DSA), and four anti-disinformation campaigners, including two in Germany and two in the UK. The other individuals targeted were Imran Ahmed, the British chief executive of the US-based Center for Countering Digital Hate; Anna-Lena von Hodenberg and Josephine Ballon of the German non-profit HateAid; and Clare Melford, co-founder of the Global Disinformation Index. Justifying the visa bans, the US secretary of state, Marco Rubio, wrote on X: "For far too long, ideologues in Europe have led organised efforts to coerce American platforms to punish American viewpoints they oppose. The Trump administration will no longer tolerate these egregious acts of extraterritorial censorship." Macron condemned the visa ban in furious terms. "These measures amount to intimidation and coercion aimed at undermining European digital sovereignty," he wrote, also on X. "The European Union's digital regulations were adopted following a democratic and sovereign process by the European Parliament and the Council. They apply within Europe to ensure fair competition among platforms, without targeting any third country, and to ensure that what is illegal offline is also illegal online. The rules governing the European Union's digital space are not meant to be determined outside Europe."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Russia plans to put a nuclear power plant on the moon in the next decade to supply its lunar space programme and a joint Russian-Chinese research station, as major powers rush to explore the earth's only natural satellite. Reuters: Ever since Soviet cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin became the first human to go into space in 1961, Russia has prided itself as a leading power in space exploration, but in recent decades it has fallen behind the United States and, increasingly, China. Russia's ambitions suffered a massive blow in August 2023 when its unmanned Luna-25 mission smashed into the surface of the moon while attempting to land, and Elon Musk has revolutionised the launch of space vehicles - once a Russian speciality. Russia's state space corporation, Roscosmos, said in a statement that it planned to build a lunar power plant by 2036 and signed a contract with the Lavochkin Association aerospace company to do it. Roscosmos did not say explicitly that the plant would be nuclear but it said the participants included Russian state nuclear corporation Rosatom and the Kurchatov Institute, Russia's leading nuclear research institute. Roscosmos said the purpose of the plant was to power Russia's lunar programme, including rovers, an observatory and the infrastructure of the joint Russian-Chinese International Lunar Research Station.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

The Justice Department justified its delayed release of sensitive files by citing the need to carefully redact information that could identify victims, but at least some of those redactions have proven to be technically ineffective and can be bypassed by simply copying and pasting the blacked-out text into a new document. A 2022 complaint filed by the US Virgin Islands seeking damages from Jeffrey Epstein's estate appeared on the DOJ's "Epstein Library" website with black boxes throughout. Techdirt founder Mike Masnick and others shared on Bluesky that the redactions could be trivially circumvented. The exposed text includes allegations that a co-executor signed over $400,000 in foundation checks "payable to young female models and actresses, including a former Russian model," and details about an immigration lawyer allegedly "involved in one or more forced marriages arranged among Epstein's victims." Separately, Drop Site News was also apparently able to guess URLs of files not yet published by extrapolating the format.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Hallmark has released more than 300 Christmas-themed TV movies since 2000, and a detailed internal rulebook obtained by film data analyst Stephen Follows explains how the company manages to produce nearly one new holiday film per week during the final quarter of each year without the whole operation collapsing into creative chaos. The document, referred to as Hallmark's "bible" by writers and producers who have worked on these films, specifies everything from script length (105-110 pages across a rigid nine-act structure) to prohibited activities (no bowling, no karaoke). Christmas movies must include snow or its remnants and feature characters engaged in seasonal activities like baking cookies, ice skating, and drinking hot chocolate. The target demographic is women aged 25-54, and the content must be watchable by an 80-year-old grandmother and a 5-year-old niece simultaneously. The economics differ sharply from theatrical filmmaking. Licensed titles from outside production companies carry budgets around $500,000 or less, while Hallmark's in-house productions can exceed $2 million. About three-quarters of the library comes from external producers. The formula appears to work. Hallmark TV movies have averaged a 6.3 IMDb user score over the past 14 years, compared to 5.9 for feature films worldwide. Further reading: Using Data To Determine if 'Die Hard' is a Christmas Movie.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader shares a report: In 2024, 25.2% of gross final energy consumption in the EU came from renewable sources, up by 0.7 percentage points compared with 2023. This share is 17.3 pp short of meeting the 2030 target (42.5%), which would require an annual average increase of 2.9 pp from 2025 to 2030. Among the EU countries, Sweden recorded the highest share of its gross final energy consumption coming from renewable sources (62.8%). Sweden primarily relied on solid biomass, hydro and wind. Finland followed with 52.1%, relying on solid biomass, wind and hydro, while Denmark came in third with 46.8%, with most of its renewable energy sourced from solid biomass, wind and biogas. The lowest shares of renewables were recorded in Belgium (14.3%), Luxembourg (14.7%), and Ireland (16.1%).Read more of this story at Slashdot.

YouTube has been winning the streaming wars for years, but its real competitive advantage comes not from prime-time viewing but from its stranglehold on daytime hours when Americans are meditating, exercising, cooking, or simply looking for background noise. At 11 a.m. in October, YouTube commanded an average audience of 6.3 million viewers compared to Netflix's 2.8 million, according to Nielsen data. Amazon drew about a million viewers at that hour, and HBO Max, Paramount+ and Peacock each pulled fewer than 600,000. The gap narrows significantly at night -- Netflix's audience swells to over 11 million at 9 p.m., trailing YouTube's 12 million -- but YouTube's dominance reasserts itself in overnight hours and through the next day. Netflix is responding by bringing at least 34 video podcasts to its service next year, including "The Breakfast Club," "The Bill Simmons Podcast," and "Pardon My Take." Amazon added the Kelce brothers' "New Heights" podcast to Prime Video in September. The strategy is intentional: roughly 75 percent of all podcast listening happens between 6 a.m. and 6 p.m., according to Edison Research. YouTube said viewers watched 700 million hours of video podcasts on living room devices in October alone, a 75% increase from the previous year.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Goldman Sachs, in a note this week, via India Dispatch: There are various reasons that explains this: (i) A large part of the global education spend goes towards formal education (schools, colleges and universities), which are typically either run by governments or are not-for-profit institutions; (ii) It is difficult to replicate education quality at scale in our view, since most teachers would have a different pedagogy, and thus standardization is harder to achieve vs that in other internet categories; (iii) Education is fragmented - it includes various fields (schools, undergrad courses, medicine, engg, management, etc.), each with their own curriculum, and the same being vastly different across countries globally; this makes scalability difficult beyond a few certain specializations and regions. Additionally, we believe the ability for online education to capture a sizable value share of supplemental education is limited since the perceived value of offline, including that from community, in-person engagement and doubt solving, rigour, etc., is typically higher. However, we note that before China's double reduction policy in 2021, TAL and EDU had market caps of up to US$50 bn; these companies were mostly domestic focused and on the K-12 tutoring segment, which has large volumes. Similarly in India, Byju's reached a peak valuation of US$20 bn+ (link; again, focused on K-12), before issues around governance etc. impacted the business.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from the Associated Press: The State Department announced Tuesday it was barring five Europeans it accused of leading efforts to pressure U.S. tech firms to censor or suppress American viewpoints. The Europeans, characterized by Secretary of State Marco Rubio as "radical" activists and "weaponized" nongovernmental organizations, fell afoul of a new visa policy announced in May to restrict the entry of foreigners deemed responsible for censorship of protected speech in the United States. "For far too long, ideologues in Europe have led organized efforts to coerce American platforms to punish American viewpoints they oppose," Rubio posted on X. "The Trump Administration will no longer tolerate these egregious acts of extraterritorial censorship." The five Europeans were identified by Sarah Rogers, the under secretary of state for public diplomacy, in a series of posts on social media. [...] The five Europeans named by Rogers are: Imran Ahmed, chief executive of the Centre for Countering Digital Hate; Josephine Ballon and Anna-Lena von Hodenberg, leaders of HateAid, a German organization; Clare Melford, who runs the Global Disinformation Index; and former EU Commissioner Thierry Breton, who was responsible for digital affairs. Rogers in her post on X called Breton, a French business executive and former finance minister, the "mastermind" behind the EU's Digital Services Act, which imposes a set of strict requirements designed to keep internet users safe online. This includes flagging harmful or illegal content like hate speech. She referred to Breton warning Musk of a possible "amplification of harmful content" by broadcasting his livestream interview with Trump in August 2024 when he was running for president.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Longtime Slashdot reader MrFreak shares a public radio interview from 2015 discussing artificial intelligence as inference over abstract inputs, along with scaling limits, automation, and governance models, where for-profit engines are constrained by nonprofit oversight: Recorded months before OpenAI was founded, the conversation treats intelligence as math plus incentives rather than something mystical, touching on architectural bottlenecks, why "reasoning" may not simply emerge from brute force, labor displacement, and institutional design for advanced AI systems. Many of the themes align closely with current debates around large language models and AI governance. The recording was revisited following recent remarks by Sergey Brin at Stanford, where he acknowledged that despite Google's early work on Transformers, institutional hesitation and incentive structures limited how aggressively the technology was pursued. The interview provides an earlier, first-principles perspective on how abstraction, scaling, and organizational design might interact once AI systems begin to compound.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

theodp writes: We all mix pictures, emojis, and text freely in our communications. So why not in our code? That's the premise of "Fun With Python and Emoji: What Might Adding Pictures to Text Programming Languages Look Like?" (two-image Bluesky explainer; full slides), which takes a look at what mixing emoji with Python and SQL might look like. A GitHub repo includes a Google Colab-ready Python notebook proof of concept that does rudimentary emoji-to-text translation via an IPython input transformer. So, in the Golden Age of AI -- some 60+ years after Kenneth Iverson introduced the chock-full-of-symbols APL -- are valid technical reasons still keeping symbols and pictures out of code, or is their absence more of a programming dogma thing?Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from TechCrunch: Across Uzbekistan, a network of about a hundred banks of high-resolution roadside cameras continuously scan vehicles' license plates and their occupants, sometimes thousands a day, looking for potential traffic violations. Cars running red lights, drivers not wearing their seatbelts, and unlicensed vehicles driving at night, to name a few. The driver of one of the most surveilled vehicles in the system was tracked over six months as he traveled between the eastern city of Chirchiq, through the capital Tashkent, and in the nearby settlement of Eshonguzar, often multiple times a week. We know this because the country's sprawling license plate-tracking surveillance system has been left exposed to the internet. Security researcher Anurag Sen, who discovered the security lapse, found the license plate surveillance system exposed online without a password, allowing anyone access to the data within. It's not clear how long the surveillance system has been public, but artifacts from the system show that its database was set up in September 2024, and traffic monitoring began in mid-2025. The exposure offers a rare glimpse into how such national license plate surveillance systems work, the data they collect, and how they can be used to track the whereabouts of any one of the millions of people across an entire country. The lapse also reveals the security and privacy risks associated with the mass monitoring of vehicles and their owners, at a time when the United States is building up its nationwide array of license plate readers, many of which are provided by surveillance giant Flock.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Under pressure from the Digital Markets Act, Apple's iOS 26.3 adds AirPods-style proximity pairing and notification support for third-party accessories in the EU. The changes will roll out to European users in 2026. MacRumors reports: The Digital Markets Act requires Apple to provide third-party accessories with the same capabilities and access to device features that Apple's own products get. In iOS 26.3, EU wearable device makers can now test proximity pairing and improved notifications. Here are the new capabilities that Apple is adding:- Proximity pairing - Devices like earbuds will be able to pair with an iOS device in an AirPods-like way by bringing the accessory close to an iPhone or iPad to initiate a simple, one-tap pairing process. Pairing third-party devices will no longer require multiple steps.- Notifications - Third-party accessories like smart watches will be able to receive notifications from the iPhone. Users will be able to view and react to incoming notifications, which is functionality normally limited to the Apple Watch. Notifications can only be forwarded to one connected device at a time, and turning on notifications for a third-party device disables notifications to an Apple Watch.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

A group of authors led by John Carreyrou has filed a new lawsuit against Anthropic, Google, OpenAI, Meta, xAI, and Perplexity, accusing the AI firms of training models on pirated copies of their books. TechCrunch reports: If this sounds familiar, it's because another set of authors already filed a class action suit against Anthropic for these same acts of copyright infringement. In that case, the judge ruled that it was legal for Anthropic and similar AI companies to train on pirated copies of books, but that it was not legal to pirate the books in the first place. While eligible writers can receive about $3,000 from the $1.5 billion Anthropic settlement, some authors were dissatisfied with that resolution -- it doesn't hold AI companies accountable for the actual act of using stolen books to train their models, which generate billions of dollars in revenue. The plaintiffs in the new lawsuit say the proposed Anthropic settlement "seems to serve [the AI companies], not creators." "LLM companies should not be able to so easily extinguish thousands upon thousands of high-value claims at bargain-basement rates, eliding what should be the true cost of their massive willful infringement."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Phoronix's Michael Larabel writes: An interesting anecdote from this month's Linux Plumbers Conference in Tokyo is that Meta (Facebook) is using the Linux scheduler originally designed for the needs of Valve's Steam Deck... On Meta Servers. Meta has found that the scheduler can actually adapt and work very well on the hyperscaler's large servers. [...] The presentation at LPC 2025 by Meta engineers was in fact titled "How do we make a Steam Deck scheduler work on large servers." At Meta they have explored SCX_LAVD as a "default" fleet scheduler for their servers that works for a range of hardware and use-cases for where they don't need any specialized scheduler. They call this scheduler built atop sched_ext as "Meta's New Default Scheduler." LAVD they found to work well across the growing CPU and memory configurations of their servers, nice load balancing between CCX/LLC boundaries, and more. Those wishing to learn more about Meta's use and research into SCX-LAVD can find the Linux Plumbers Conference presentation embedded below along with the slide deck (PDF).Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from MarketWatch: ServiceNow announced a deal to acquire cybersecurity company Armis on Tuesday, marking a new milestone in the software giant's artificial-intelligence business strategy. The $7.75 billion all-cash transaction is part of ServiceNow's goal of advancing governance and trust in autonomous AI agents, and the company's largest transaction to date. "The acquisition of Armis will extend and enhance ServiceNow's Security, Risk, and [Operational Technology] portfolios in critical and fast-growing areas of cybersecurity and drive increased AI adoption by strengthening trust across businesses' connected environments," the company wrote in a press release. While ServiceNow built its foundation IT service management products, the company has positioned itself as an "AI control tower" that orchestrates workflows across HR, customer service and security operations. Organizations today are operating in increasingly complex environments, with assets spanning from laptops and servers to smart grid devices, Gina Mastantuono, chief financial officer of ServiceNow, told MarketWatch on Tuesday. "But at the same time, cyber threats are becoming more sophisticated and more complex," she added. ServiceNow's Security and Risk business crossed $1 billion in annual contract value earlier this year, and the Armis acquisition is expected to triple ServiceNow's market opportunity in the sector. Armis currently has over $340 million in annual recurring revenue, with growth exceeding 50% year-over-year, according to the press release. The Armis acquisition would allow ServiceNow to create an "end-to-end proactive cybersecurity exposure and operations stack that enables enterprises to see, decide and act across a business' entire technology footprint," Mastantuono said.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Irish competitor Diarmuid Early, dubbed the "Lebron James of Excel spreadsheets," has won the 2025 Microsoft Excel World Championship in Las Vegas, dethroning three-time champion Andrew Ngai. The BBC reports: The esport showpiece in December attracted competitors worldwide as 256 spreadsheet heads battled it out across knockout rounds to join the final 24 in Vegas. [...] A three-time champion in the financial Excel tournaments, this win was Diarmuid's first in the overall competition. He held the triple-world champion Andrew Ngai to second place, and won the $5,000 prize and title belt. [...] Excel esports transforms a common office tool into a dynamic sport. More than 20 years old, the competitive scene has evolved from being finance based to now involving more general problem solving. Although it might help, Diarmuid said "it doesn't require accounting or finance knowledge." He described an example where Excel is used in solving a maze, scoring poker hands, or even sorting Kings and Queens into the battles in which they fought. Generally there is a 30 minute challenge, with each challenge broken up into levels. The questions increase gradually in difficulty, with each correct answer gaining a player points. Whoever gets the most points wins, and in a tie, it is whoever got there first. "It's just, can you think on your feet and do things quickly in Excel?" he said. "If you solve the earlier levels in a neat way, that'll let you hit the ground running faster on the later ones."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

A federal judge blocked Texas' app store age-verification law, ruling it likely violates the First Amendment by forcing platforms to gate speech and collect data in an overly broad way. The law was set to go into effect on January 1, 2026. The Verge reports: In an order granting a preliminary injunction on the Texas App Store Accountability Act (SB 2420), Judge Robert Pitman wrote that the statute "is akin to a law that would require every bookstore to verify the age of every customer at the door and, for minors, require parental consent before the child or teen could enter and again when they try to purchase a book." Pitman has not yet ruled on the merits of the case, but his decision to grant the preliminary injunction means he believes its defenders are unlikely to prevail in court. Pitman found that the highest level of scrutiny must be applied to evaluate the law under the First Amendment, which means the state must prove the law is "the least restrictive means of achieving a compelling state interest." The judge found this is not the case and that it wouldn't even survive intermediate scrutiny, because Texas has so far failed to prove that its goals are connected to its methods. Since Texas already has a law requiring age verification for porn sites, Pitman said that "only in the vast minority of applications would SB 2420 have a constitutional application to unprotected speech not addressed by other laws." Though Pitman acknowledged the importance of safeguarding kids online, he added, "the means to achieve that end must be consistent with the First Amendment. However compelling the policy concerns, and however widespread the agreement that the issue must be addressed, the Court remains bound by the rule of law." "The Texas App Store Accountability Act is the first among a series of similar state laws to face a legal challenge, making the ruling especially significant, as Congress considers a version of the statute," notes The Verge. "The laws, versions of which also passed in Utah and Louisiana, aim to impose age verification standards at the app store level, making companies like Apple and Google responsible for transmitting signals about users' ages to app developers to block users from age-inappropriate experiences." "The state can still appeal the ruling with the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals, which has a history of reversing blocks on internet regulations."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: CBS cannot contain the online spread of a "60 Minutes" segment that its editor-in-chief, Bari Weiss, tried to block from airing. The episode, "Inside CECOT," featured testimonies from US deportees who were tortured or suffered physical or sexual abuse at a notorious Salvadoran prison, the Center for the Confinement of Terrorism. "Welcome to hell," one former inmate was told upon arriving, the segment reported, while also highlighting a clip of Donald Trump praising CECOT and its leadership for "great facilities, very strong facilities, and they don't play games." Weiss controversially pulled the segment on Monday, claiming it could not air in the US because it lacked critical voices, as no Trump officials were interviewed. She claimed that the segment "did not advance the ball" and merely echoed others' reporting, NBC News reported. Her plan was to air the segment when it was "ready," insisting that holding stories "for whatever reason" happens "every day in every newsroom." But Weiss apparently did not realize that the "Inside CECOT" would still stream in Canada, giving the public a chance to view the segment as reporters had intended. Critics accusing CBS of censoring the story quickly shared the segment online Monday after discovering that it was available on the Global TV app. Using a VPN to connect to the app with a Canadian IP address was all it took to override Weiss' block in the US, as 404 Media reported the segment was uploaded to "to a variety of file sharing sites and services, including iCloud, Mega, and as a torrent," including on the recently revived file-sharing service LimeWire. It's currently also available to stream on the Internet Archive, where one reviewer largely summed up the public's response so far, writing, "cannot believe this was pulled, not a dang thing wrong with this segment except it shows truth." "Yo what," joked Reddit user Howzitgoin, highlighting only the word "LimeWire." Another user responded, "man, who knew my nostalgia prof pic would become relevant again, WTF." "Bringing back LimeWire to illegally rip copies of reporting suppressed by the government is definitely some cyberpunk shit," a Bluesky user wrote. "We need a champion against the darkness," a Reddit commenter echoed. "I side with LimeWire."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader shares a report: It's been more than eight years since Amazon bought Whole Foods, but the two companies still haven't aligned their setup for the Microsoft software their employees use. That disconnect was flagged in an 8-week Deloitte review of Whole Foods' use of Microsoft 365 apps earlier this year, according to an internal document obtained by Business Insider. Deloitte found that Whole Foods relies on "fragmented" Microsoft toolsets, has loose security and data-retention practices, and employs a complex user-management setup -- all of which contribute to inefficiencies and lower productivity when working with Amazon employees. The consulting firm recommended a 24-month integration plan that would first move Whole Foods' corporate employees onto Amazon's backend system, followed by its frontline workers. The phased approach would ensure a "smooth transition for users and minimal disruption to business processes," while generating cost savings, the document said. The review, completed in May, highlights Amazon's ongoing challenges in integrating Whole Foods. Since acquiring the chain in 2017, the company has struggled to scale the business and integrate operations, resulting in frequent reorganizations and shifting strategic priorities.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

In the late 1980s, Merriam-Webster's Collegiate Dictionary sat on the New York Times best-seller list for 155 consecutive weeks and eventually sold 57 million copies, a figure believed to be second only to the Bible in the United States -- but those days are thoroughly gone. Stefan Fatsis's new book "Unabridged: The Thrill of (and Threat to) the Modern Dictionary" chronicles what Louis Menand describes in The New Yorker as "a losing struggle" for legacy dictionaries to survive in the internet age. The profession has been decimated: an estimated 200 full-time lexicographers worked in the US 25 years ago, and Fatsis believes that number is "probably closer to thirty" today. "By the time I finished this book," Fatsis writes, "it wasn't clear how long flesh-bone-and-blood lexicographers would be needed to chronicle the march of the English language." Merriam-Webster is now owned by Encycloaedia Britannica, another print-era giant that stopped publishing physical volumes in 2012. The company's free website draws about a billion page views annually, but the content has shifted dramatically -- word games, trending slang and ads dominate rather than lexicographic depth. The scale of the challenge facing dictionaries is staggering. One study of digitized library books found the English lexicon grew from about 600,000 words in 1950 to over a million by 2000, and concluded that 52% of English words in printed books are "lexical dark matter" that appears in no standard reference work.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

European public institutions are quietly migrating away from American cloud providers and office software, driven less by policy ambitions in Brussels than by the mundane legal reality that GDPR-mandated risk assessments keep flagging the US CLOUD Act as an unacceptable threat to citizen data. Austria's Federal Ministry for Economy, Energy and Tourism moved 1,200 employees to the open-source platform Nextcloud in four months. Germany's Schleswig-Holstein has already transitioned 24,000 of its 30,000 civil servants to LibreOffice, Nextcloud and Thunderbird. The International Criminal Court in The Hague announced in November 2025 that it would replace Microsoft office software after chief prosecutor Karim Khan was temporarily locked out of his Outlook account. Competition economist Cristina Caffarra estimates that 90% of Europe's digital infrastructure is now controlled by non-European companies. Forrester predicts no European enterprise will fully abandon US hyperscalers in 2026, but these targeted migrations for sensitive government applications are already underway.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader shares a report: Samsung is breaking new ground with its 2026 lineup of gaming monitors, with the Odyssey 3D G90XH becoming the first to feature a 6K display with "glasses-free 3D." The new monitor comes with a 32-inch IPS panel, offering real-time eye-tracking that "adjusts depth and perspective" based on your position, along with a speedy 165Hz refresh rate that you can boost to 330Hz with a Dual Mode feature that switches to 3K. [...] A 6K 3D display isn't the only notable upgrade coming to Samsung's lineup; the company is launching the Odyssey G6 G60H, which it says is the "world's first" 1,040Hz gaming monitor. The 27-inch monitor only supports this ultra-fast refresh rate in HD, while its native 1440p resolution still offers speeds up to a very fast 600Hz. It's also compatible with AMD FreeSync Premium and NVIDIA G-Sync.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

The great return-to-office battle has effectively concluded and a clear pecking order has emerged, according to Sander van 't Noordende, the CEO of Randstad, a staffing giant that places around half a million workers in jobs every week. Remote work is becoming a status symbol reserved for star performers and those possessing rare skills. "You have to be very special to be able to demand a 100% remote job," van 't Noordende told Fortune. "That's increasingly the story. You have to have very special technology skills or some expertise." The equilibrium appears to be settling at a hybrid model of three to four days in office for most workers. Van 't Noordende noted that apart from some banks in major cities, the five-day office week isn't returning as the norm despite hardline mandates from companies like Amazon and JPMorgan. Korn Ferry predicted this "hybrid hierarchy" at the start of 2025, forecasting that flexibility would become a perk reserved for top talent. At some companies, high performers are already being offered flexible schedules as a bonus while mid-range employees don't get the privilege, the Wall Street Journal reported.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Australia is on track for a significant expansion of desalination capacity -- converting seawater to freshwater -- to meet the needs of a swelling population at a time of declining average rainfall. From a report: The world's driest inhabited continent is projected to build or expand 11 desalination plants worth more than A$23 billion ($15 billion) over the next 10 years, according to a research report by Dominic McNally at Oxford Economics. "Our population growth forecasts imply an additional 190GL/year in household water demand across major cities by 2035, while the booming data center industry also threatens to rapidly expand urban water use," he said. "This growing demand coincides with falling average rainfall in major population centers, increasing the vulnerability of existing infrastructure." Water construction activity slowed after 2010 as a severe drought receded. However, recent dry periods have reignited interest in water security and coincide with a new boom in water infrastructure investment, including desalination, McNally said.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Asus has been showcasing its new 5K 27-inch ROG Strix 27 Pro gaming monitor running at 5,120 x 2,880 resolution and up to 180Hz, but even Nvidia's flagship RTX 5090 struggles to deliver smooth frame rates at this demanding pixel count. In testing conducted by Asus, the RTX 5090D -- a Chinese-exclusive variant with weaker AI performance -- achieved just 51 frames per second in a Cyberpunk 2077 benchmark at ultra ray traced settings. The test system ran an AMD Ryzen 9950X3D processor, had DLSS set to balanced, and kept frame generation disabled. The same configuration running at 4K managed 77 fps, around 50% higher. The underlying math is simple: 5K resolution requires rendering 78% more pixels than 4K. That 218 PPI pixel density delivers impressive sharpness up close, but Asus chose an IPS panel over OLED technology to reach it, trading away deeper black levels and faster response times. Asus appears to be positioning the monitor as a dual-mode display -- 5K for productivity and video, 1440p at up to 330Hz for gaming. Early Chinese listings have it priced at the equivalent of $800, roughly what you'd pay for a larger 4K OLED panel.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Speaking of Italy's competition authority , it has fined Ryanair $301 million for abusing its dominant market position to limit sales of tickets by online travel agents. The Guardian: The authority said Europe's largest airline had "implemented an abusive strategy to hinder travel agencies" via an "elaborate strategy" of technical obstacles for agents and passengers to make it difficult for online travel agents to sell Ryanair tickets and instead force sales through its own website. The fine related to Ryanair's conduct between April 2023 and at least until April 2025, the authority said on Tuesday. It said Ryanair had prevented online travel agents from selling tickets on its flights in combination with other airlines and services, weakening competition. Ryanair said it would immediately appeal against the "legally flawed" ruling.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Tech giants Google and Apple are asking some employees with H-1B visas to reconsider international travel, as their legal teams warned that visa processing delays could keep employees abroad for months, according to Business Insider. From a report: Law firms representing the tech giants sent memos advising staff who require visa stamps for reentry to stay in the U.S., warning that international travel could entangle them in visa screening delays following the introduction of a new social media screening requirement, according to the news agency. The policy subjects H-1B workers and their dependents to reviews of their social media histories. "Please be aware that some US Embassies and Consulates are experiencing significant visa stamping appointment delays, currently reported as up to 12 months," BAL Immigration Law, which represents Google, said in a memo obtained by Business Insider. The law firm said the delays were affecting H-1B, H-4, F, J and M visas.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Apple has been fined $116 million by Italy's antitrust regulator over the "excessively burdensome" privacy rules it imposes on third-party apps. From a report: The Italian Competition Authority (AGCM) says that Apple abused its dominant app store market position by burdening developers with "disproportionate" terms around data collection that exceed privacy law requirements, compared to rules for native iOS apps. The fine specifically targets the App Tracking Transparency (ATT) policy Apple launched in 2021, which requires third-party developers to ask users for consent twice to track their data across other apps and websites. Apple's own apps can obtain this permission in a single tap. AGCM says that the burden of consenting twice led to a reduction in user consent rates for advertising profiling, thus harming developers whose business models depend upon revenue generated by personalized ads.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader shares a report: The United States will take action against China's semiconductor industry, setting new tariffs on chips from China from June 23, 2027, that have 0% duties currently, the US Trade Representative said. The announcement comes following a year-long investigation into China's chip imports into the United States, launched by the Biden administration and led by the U.S. Trade Representative. "China's targeting of the semiconductor industry for dominance is unreasonable and burdens or restricts U.S. commerce and thus is actionable," the agency said in its release.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

China has unveiled new rules to rein in aggressive pricing tactics by online platforms, prohibiting e-commerce operators from forcing merchants to offer discounts or setting different prices based on user demographics without consent. The 29-article regulation -- jointly issued over the weekend by the National Development and Reform Commission, State Administration for Market Regulation (SAMR), and Cyberspace Administration of China -- lays out detailed compliance requirements that target several long-standing pain points as competition among internet giants has often eroded the rights of both consumers and merchants. To restore merchant autonomy on pricing, the rules ban platform operators from leveraging their dominant scale to impose "lowest price" agreements. Platforms are prohibited from using traffic throttling, search ranking demotions, or algorithm penalties to pressure merchants into predatory price-cutting or exclusive pricing arrangements.Read more of this story at Slashdot.