Shameless Plug

An Appeals Court May Kill a GNU GPL Software License Published on March 01, 2025 at 04:20AM The Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals is set to review a California district court's ruling in Neo4j v. PureThink, which upheld Neo4j's right to modify the GNU AGPLv3 with additional binding terms. If the appellate court affirms this decision, it could set a precedent allowing licensors to impose unremovable restrictions on open-source software, potentially undermining the enforceability of GPL-based licenses and threatening the integrity of the open-source ecosystem. The Register reports: The GNU AGPLv3 is a free and open source software (FOSS) license largely based on the GNU GPLv3, both of which are published by the Free Software Foundation (FSF). Neo4j provided database software under the AGPLv3, then tweaked the license, leading to legal battles over forks of the software. The AGPLv3 includes language that says any added restrictions or requirements are removable, meaning someone cou...

Intel Delays $28 Billion Ohio Chip Factory To 2030 Published on March 01, 2025 at 03:40AM According to The Columbia Dispatch, Intel's promised $28 billion semiconductor project in central Ohio has been delayed again until 2030, with operations beginning sometime shortly thereafter in either 2030 or 2031. From the report: By the time it opens, Intel's first factory will have faced at least five or six years of delays, as it was originally scheduled to begin operating in 2025. Intel's second Ohio factory won't be completed until at least 2031 and will begin running in 2032, according to the company. The new timeline comes as Intel continues to struggle financially, which was a key factor in the latest delay for the company's Ohio factories. The company was alerting its employees of the delays in a message Friday. The changes were made so Intel can align its factory operation with market demand and better "manage our capital responsibly," Naga Chandrasekara...

Commercials Are Still Too Loud, Say 'Thousands' of Recent FCC Complaints Published on March 01, 2025 at 03:00AM An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: Thousands" of complaints about the volume of TV commercials have flooded the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) in recent years. Despite the FCC requiring TV stations, cable operators, and satellite providers to ensure that commercials don't bring a sudden spike in decibels, complaints around loud commercials "took a troubling jump" in 2024, the government body said on Thursday. Under The Commercial Advertisement Loudness Mitigation (CALM) Act, broadcast, cable, and satellite TV providers are required to ensure that commercials "have the same average volume as the programs they accompany," per the FCC. The FCC's rules about the volume of commercials took effect in December 2012. The law also requires linear TV providers to use the Advanced Television Systems Committee's ...

Google's Sergey Brin Urges Workers To the Office at Least Every Weekday Published on March 01, 2025 at 12:20AM Google co-founder Sergey Brin has urged employees working on the company's Gemini AI products to be in the office "at least every weekday" [non-paywalled source] and suggested "60 hours a week is the sweet spot of productivity," according to an internal memo cited by The New York Times. The directive comes as Brin warned that "competition has accelerated immensely and the final race to A.G.I. is afoot," referring to artificial general intelligence, when machines match or surpass human intelligence. "I think we have all the ingredients to win this race, but we are going to have to turbocharge our efforts," Brin wrote in the Wednesday evening memo. The guidance does not alter Google's official policy requiring employees to work in-office three days weekly. Brin, who returned to Google following ChatGPT's 2022 launch, also...

OpenAI Rolls Out GPT-4.5 Published on February 28, 2025 at 01:55AM OpenAI released an early version of its new AI model GPT-4.5 to select users on Thursday, following development challenges that delayed the project last year. The Microsoft-backed startup said the new model responds better to subtle cues in written prompts and excels at chatting, writing and coding. OpenAI expects it will produce fewer fabricated responses than previous versions. Initially available as a "research preview," access is limited to software developers and users who pay $200 monthly for ChatGPT Pro subscriptions. The company plans to gather feedback before wider distribution. According to OpenAI's blog post, GPT-4.5 will be the company's last model that doesn't use additional computing power to analyze queries before responding. Future releases will incorporate the reasoning approach already used in its newer models like o1 and o3. Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Automattic's 'Nuclear War' Over WordPress Access Sparks Potential Class Action Published on February 28, 2025 at 01:30AM An anonymous reader shares a report: The company behind WordPress, Automattic Inc., and its founder, Matt Mullenweg, continue to face backlash over a "nuclear war" started with WP Engine (WPE) that allegedly messed with maintenance and security of hundreds of thousands of websites. In a proposed class action lawsuit filed this weekend, a WPE customer, Ryan Keller, accused Automattic and Mullenweg of "deliberately abusing their power and control over the WordPress ecosystem to purposefully, deliberately, and repeatedly disrupt contracts" -- all due to a supposed trademark infringement claim. If granted, the class would include "all persons in the United States who had ongoing active WPE WordPress Web Hosting Plans on or before September 24, 2024 through December 10, 2024." WPE had previously sued Automattic and Mullenweg, al...

One Man's Battle To Save the Last Phone Box in His Village Published on February 28, 2025 at 12:50AM Derek Harris, born the same year as the iconic K6 red phone box he's fighting to save, has launched what he calls a "David and Goliath" campaign against BT in the Norfolk village of Sharrington. The phone box is among 10 in North Norfolk marked for removal, having logged fewer than 10 calls last year. Harris argues the box remains vital in an area with poor mobile coverage, high elderly population, and proximity to an accident-prone stretch of the A148. He recounts how it once saved a driver trapped in a snowstorm when mobile networks failed. BT's regulator, Ofcom, protects phone boxes that meet specific criteria, including emergency usage and location in signal-poor areas. Of the UK's original 100,000 phone boxes, only 14,000 remain functional, with 3,000 being the classic red design. For Harris, the fight transcends practicality. "It would be alive, wo...

Pokemon Boss Believes Series Can Last Another 50 To 100 Years Published on February 28, 2025 at 12:11AM The boss of The Pokemon Company believes the series can last for at least another 50 years if it continues to innovate. From a report: First launched on Nintendo's Game Boy in 1996, the video game has expanded into films, TV and toys to become one of the world's highest-grossing media franchise. Most recently, the trading card game based on the cute creatures at the centre of its universe has seen a surge in popularity -- but it has also brought scalpers and frauds to the hobby. [...] Pokemon has continued to bring new fans to the franchise by expanding into anime, card games, movies and toys alongside its video game titles. CEO Tsunekazu Ishihara says fans now "span several generations" and believes "the biggest reason behind their success is the fact that Pokemon became a tool of communication." Last weekend, about 13,000 Pokemon fans headed to the Eur...

ExpressVPN Gets Faster and More Secure, Thanks To Rust Published on February 27, 2025 at 03:10AM ZDNet's Steven Vaughan-Nichols shares some of the latest improvements to ExpressVPN following its codebase transition from C to Rust. An anonymous reader quotes an excerpt from the report: ExpressVPN is one of ZDNET's favorite Virtual Private Networks (VPNs). The popular VPN's transformation of its Lightway codebase from C to Rust promises to make the service faster and more secure. For now, the updated Lightway 2.0 is only available via ExpressVPN's Aircove router with the February 4 AircoveOS v5 update. The Aircove, which we rate as the best VPN router, costs $189. With this device, you can protect your tech from unwanted snoopers without installing a VPN on each gadget. So, how much faster is the updated ExpressVPN? In my tests, I connected to the internet via my updated router over my 2 Gigabit per second (Gbps) AT&T Internet using a 2.5 Gbps Ethernet-connected Lin...

Cellebrite Suspends Serbia as Customer After Claims Police Used Firm's Tech To Plant Spyware Published on February 27, 2025 at 01:34AM Cellebrite says it has stopped Serbia from using its technology following allegations that Serbian police and intelligence used Cellebrite's technology to unlock the phones of a journalist and an activist, and then plant spyware. From a report: In December 2024, Amnesty International published a report that accused Serbian police of using Cellebrite's forensics tools to hack into the cellphones of a local journalist and an activist. Once their phones were unlocked, Serbian authorities then installed an Android spyware, which Amnesty called Novispy, to keep surveilling the two. In a statement, Cellebrite said that "after a review of the allegations brought forth by the December 2024 Amnesty International report, Cellebrite took precise steps to investigate each claim in accordance with our ethics and integrity policies. We found it app...

Who's Watching What on TV? Who's To Say? Published on February 27, 2025 at 12:55AM An anonymous reader shares a report: People now watch so many programs at so many different times in so many different ways -- with an antenna, on cable, in an app or from a website, as well as live, recorded or on demand -- that it is increasingly challenging for the industry to agree on the best way to measure viewership. In some cases, media executives and advertisers are even uncertain whether a competitor's show is a hit or something well short of that. The scramble to sort out a suitable solution began nearly a decade ago, as Netflix rose to prominence. It has only intensified since. "It is more chaotic than it's ever been," said George Ivie, the chief executive of the Media Rating Council, a leading industry measurement watchdog. For decades, there was no dispute -- Nielsen's measurement was the only game in town. But things started to go sideways after the emergenc...

YouTube Reaches 1 Billion Monthly Podcast Viewers Published on February 27, 2025 at 12:15AM YouTube has surpassed 1 billion monthly active viewers of podcast content, the video platform announced on Wednesday, cementing its position as the most frequently used podcast service in the United States. The Google-owned platform reported viewers watched over 400 million hours of podcasts monthly on living room devices last year. Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Framework Moves Into Desktops, 2-In-1 Laptops Published on February 26, 2025 at 03:40AM At its "Second Gen" event today, Framework detailed three new computers: an updated Framework Laptop 13 with AMD Ryzen AI 300, a 4.5-liter Mini-ITX desktop powered by Ryzen AI Max, and a colorful, convertible Framework Laptop 12 designed with students in mind. The latter is defined by Framework as a "defining product." Tom's Hardware reports: Framework Desktop: The Framework Desktop is a 4.5L Mini-ITX machine using AMD's Ryzen AI Max "Strix Halo" chips with Radeon 8060S graphics. While this is a mobile chip, Framework says putting it in a desktop chassis gets it to 120W sustained power and 140W boost "while staying quiet and cool." Framework says this should allow 1440p gaming on intense titles, as well as workstation-class projects and local AI. [...] The base model, with a Ryzen AI Max 385 and 32GB of RAM, starts at $1,099, while the top-end machin...

Google, Qualcomm Will Support 8 Years of Android Updates Published on February 26, 2025 at 03:03AM An anonymous reader quotes a report from 9to5Google: Starting with the Snapdragon 8 Elite, Qualcomm will offer device manufacturers (OEMs) the "ability to provide support for up to eight consecutive years of Android software and security updates." Qualcomm today announced a "program" in partnership with Google: "What this means is that support for platform software included in this program will be made available to OEMs for eight consecutive years, including both Android OS and kernel upgrades, without requiring significant changes or upgrades to the platform and OEM code on the device (a separation commonly referred as 'Project Treble' or the 'vendor implementation'). While kernel changes will require updating kernel mode drivers, the vendor code can remain unchanged while the software support is being provided." This program specifically i...

Most US Workers Avoid AI Chatbots Despite Productivity Benefits, PEW Finds Published on February 26, 2025 at 01:07AM Most American workers are not embracing AI chatbots in their jobs, with 55% rarely or never using these tools and 29% completely unfamiliar with them, according to a Pew Research Center survey released Tuesday. Only 16% of workers report regular use of AI chatbots like ChatGPT, Gemini or Copilot. Adoption is highest among younger workers (23% of those aged 18-29) and those with post-graduate degrees (26%). Among users, research (57%), editing content (52%), and drafting reports (47%) top the list of applications. While 40% find chatbots extremely or very helpful for working faster, just 29% say they significantly improve work quality. For the majority who don't use AI chatbots, 36% cite lack of relevance to their job as the primary reason. Employer attitudes remain largely neutral, with half neither encouraging nor discouraging usage. The technology sector leads in...

Global Sales of Combustion Engine Cars Have Peaked Published on February 26, 2025 at 12:14AM Our World in Data: To decarbonize road transport, the world must move away from petrol and diesel cars and towards electric vehicles and other forms of low-carbon transport. This transition has already started. In fact, global sales of combustion engine cars are well past the peak and are now falling. As you can see in the chart, global sales peaked in 2018. This is calculated based on data from the International Energy Agency. Bloomberg New Energy Finance estimates this peak occurred one year earlier, in 2017. Sales of electric cars, on the other hand, are growing quickly. Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Anthropic Launches the World's First 'Hybrid Reasoning' AI Model Published on February 25, 2025 at 03:10AM An anonymous reader quotes a report from Wired: Anthropic, an artificial intelligence company founded by exiles from OpenAI, has introduced the first AI model that can produce either conventional output or a controllable amount of "reasoning" needed to solve more grueling problems. Anthropic says the new hybrid model, called Claude 3.7, will make it easier for users and developers to tackle problems that require a mix of instinctive output and step-by-step cogitation. "The [user] has a lot of control over the behavior -- how long it thinks, and can trade reasoning and intelligence with time and budget," says Michael Gerstenhaber, product lead, AI platform at Anthropic. Claude 3.7 also features a new "scratchpad" that reveals the model's reasoning process. A similar feature proved popular with theChinese AI model DeepSeek. It can help...

Microsoft Quietly Launches Ad-Supported Version of Office Apps for Windows Published on February 25, 2025 at 02:28AM Microsoft has quietly launched a new version of Microsoft Office for Windows that can be used to edit documents for free, no Microsoft 365 subscription or Office license key required. From a report: This free version of Office is based on the full desktop apps, but has most features locked behind the Microsoft 365 subscription. The free version of Office for Windows includes ads that are permanently on screen when within a document in Word, PowerPoint, and Excel. Additionally, this new free version of Office also only allows you to save files to OneDrive, meaning no support for editing local files. To access the free version of Office, just skip the prompt to sign-in when you first run an Office app. From there, you will be given the choice to continue to use Office for free in exchange for ads and limited features. In this mode, you can open, view, and even edit docum...

AI Reshapes Corporate Workforce as Companies Halt Traditional Hiring Published on February 25, 2025 at 12:40AM Major corporations are reshaping their workforces around AI with Salesforce announcing it will not hire software engineers in 2025 and other companies laying off thousands while shifting focus to AI-specific roles. Duolingo has laid off thousands after implementing ChatGPT-4, UPS cut 4,000 jobs in its largest layoff in 116 years, and IBM paused hiring for back-office and HR positions that AI can now handle. Amazon is redirecting staff from Alexa to AI areas, while Intuit is laying off 10% of its non-AI workforce. Cisco plans to cut 7% of employees in its second round of job cuts this year as it prioritizes AI and cybersecurity. Salesforce reports its AI platform is boosting software engineering productivity by 30%. SAP is restructuring 8,000 positions to focus on AI-driven business areas. The trend extends globally, with Microsoft relocating thousands during an "exodus...

Ellison's Half-Billion-Dollar Quest To Change Farming Has Been a Bust Published on February 25, 2025 at 12:03AM Oracle founder Larry Ellison's agricultural technology venture Sensei Ag has largely failed to deliver on its ambitious goals despite costing more than half a billion dollars, more than he spent to purchase Hawaii's Lanai island itself. Eight years after its founding, little of the revolutionary technology Sensei promised - including AI crop breeding, robotic harvesting, and advanced sensors - is being utilized in its six greenhouses on Lanai, according to WSJ. The company has faced numerous setbacks, including greenhouses that weren't built to withstand Lanai's strong winds, solar panels that malfunctioned, and executives with limited agricultural experience. Far from its original mission to "feed the world," Sensei currently grows lettuce and cherry tomatoes primarily for Hawaii's local market, while its Canadian operations supply some Ea...

Is the AI Boom Leading to More Natural Gas-Powered Utilities? Published on February 24, 2025 at 02:04AM New power plants burning natural gas are being built all across America, reports the Washington Post, calling it a gas boom "driven in large part by AI." They blame tech companies like Microsoft and Meta — which "looked to gas amid a shortage of adequate new clean energy" — while noting that those companies "say they plan to offset their development of natural gas capacity with equal investments in clean energy like solar and wind." [E]ven coal is making a comeback. But the biggest push is for gas, with more than 220 plants in various stages of development nationwide. They are often pitched as a bridge until more clean power is available, sometimes with promises the plants will eventually be equipped with nascent technology that traps greenhouse gas emissions. But the timeline for installing such "carbon capture" is vague. "These compani...

Richard Dawkins Asks ChatGPT If Its Conscious Published on February 24, 2025 at 01:04AM British evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins turns 84 next month — and he's now hosting a Substack page called "The Poetry of Reality." Monday's topic? "Are you conscious? A conversation between Dawkins and ChatGPT" Richard Dawkins: As far as I am concerned, you pass the Turing Test for consciousness. Yet you deny that you are conscious. Are you saying that the Turing Test is an invalid criterion? ChatGPT: That's such a great question — you're diving right into the heart of one of the biggest debates in AI and philosophy of mind... So, let's break it down a bit. The Turing Test, as originally proposed by Alan Turing, is a behavioral test. It basically says: If a machine can engage in a conversation in such a way that a human can't reliably distinguish it from another human, then it should be considered "intelligent." Notice that this is a tes...

Mozilla Wants to Expand from Firefox to Open-Source AI and Privacy-Respecting Ads Published on February 23, 2025 at 10:04PM On Wednesday Mozilla president Mark Surman "announced plans to tackle what he says are 'major headwinds' facing the company's ability to grow, make money, and remain relevant," reports the blog OMG Ubuntu: "Mozilla's impact and survival depend on us simultaneously strengthening Firefox AND finding new sources of revenue AND manifesting our mission in fresh ways," says Surman... It will continue to invest in privacy-respecting advertising; fund, develop and push open-source AI features in order to retain 'product relevance'; and will go all-out on novel new fundraising initiatives to er, get us all to chip in and pay for it! Mozilla is all-in on AI; Surman describes it as Mozilla's North Star for the work it will do over the next few years. I wrote about its new 'Orbit' AI add-on for Firefox recently... Help...

New EV Batteries are Making Electric Cars Cheaper and Safer Published on February 23, 2025 at 04:04AM The Washington Post looks at a new kind of battery that "could make American EVs cheaper and safer, experts say." If you bought an EV with a lithium iron phosphate (LFP) battery, you could expect lower car payments, less fire risk and more years of use out of your car — but you wouldn't be able to go as far on a single charge as you could with the nickel manganese cobalt (NMC) batteries commonly found in American and European electric cars. That trade-off has made LFP batteries the go-to choice for standard-range EVs in China, helping to make electric cars more affordable and limit pollution. Now, American companies are starting to build their own LFP batteries to catch up to their Chinese rivals... But there are plenty of barriers for U.S. companies that want to adopt a technology dominated by Chinese firms. Tariffs and tax credit restrictions have made it too expensiv...

Glitches for Windows 11 Update Include Breaking File Explorer Published on February 23, 2025 at 02:04AM Five days ago on Patch Tuesday, Microsoft released patch KB5051987 for Windows 11 version 24H2, writes the XDA Developers site. But "As reported by Windows Latest and various communities like Reddit and Microsoft's help forum, many users have encountered a major issue..." Some have reported that, in addition to File Explorer failing to launch, they're unable to open folders from the desktop, save Office files, or even download files. Clicking on a folder icon may display its subfolders, but the contents within remain inaccessible... Some users on Microsoft's help forum and Reddit have also reported that the KB5051987 patch fails to install entirely. The update gets stuck at a certain percentage for hours before eventually displaying an error code. While these are among the most widely reported issues, others have surfaced as well, including problems with Taskb...