Technology

It is unclear whether the Best Summer Reading of 2025 list was a "paid insert" or published as branded content, but the Chicago Sun-Times is taking the heat for unedited AI slop regardless.

Of the books named on this reading list, Brit Bennet, Isabel Allende, Andy Weir, Taylor Jenkins Reid, Min Jin Lee, Rumaan Alam, Rebecca Makkai, Maggie O'Farrell, Percival Everett, and Delia Owens' titles are all books that DO NOT EXIST!!!

• Source.
• Company response.

The ZEUS laser facility at the University of Michigan has roughly doubled the peak power of any other laser in the U.S. with its first official experiment at 2 petawatts (2 quadrillion watts).

At more than 100 times the global electricity power output, this huge power lasts only for the brief duration of its laser pulse—just 25 quintillionths of a second long.

• Adobe has announced pricing changes to its Creative Cloud subscriptions that will take effect from the middle of next month.
• It cited “continued innovation” as a reason to overhaul the pricing for its creative software suite.
• The changes only affect users in the US, Canada, and Mexico for now.

Google is testing removing the site names from the search result snippets and just showing the site's URL at the top - title link - position of the snippet.

Karlena Hamblin was sitting on a stool in her Brownsville, Brooklyn apartment waiting for the Administration for Children’s Services to knock on her door for a weekly check-in. She’d just fed her infant daughter, who she held cradled in her arms.

ACS, which is responsible for investigating child welfare in New York City, had been watching her and her family since she was three months pregnant, when the agency held a pre-birth conference to talk over her family’s future. “The baby’s not even here yet and you’re already talking about removing her?” she said. “I didn’t even know what I was having yet.” She sobbed at night from fear.

Now, investigators check her daughter for signs of abuse or neglect, and could report anything they learn to a family court judge. Hanging over every visit is the chance that a misstep leads to her losing her daughter, who’s now just a few months old, to the foster care system.

“I’m always worried,” Hamblin said. “I get more anxious around any court date, and even though I tell myself, ‘No, I’m not doing nothing wrong, I don’t have nothing to hide,’ it’s like I’m programmed to be scared because I’ve been afraid since day one.”

Hamblin has a good idea why she’s under surveillance. She grew up in foster care. Shortly after aging out, she got pregnant and later, she says, developed symptoms of postpartum depression. She checked herself into the psych ward while her sister cared for her infant son. She lost him to foster care in 2017.

• Huawei is no longer running Windows OS on its latest laptops, as the company has opted instead for its home-grown system.
• HarmonyOS 5 will be running on brand new MateBook Pro and MateBook Fold models.
• The PC-version of the OS looks strikingly similar to Windows, at least in official promotional images.

• Young Indonesians applying for tech jobs via Facebook and Telegram are trafficked to scam farms.
• Scammers use deepfakes, voice clones, and other technologies to dupe victims around the world.
• Americans alone lost $12.5 billion last year, mostly to investment scams.

I post this here because I think there is a interesting discussion out of this, what do you people think about this?

In the summer of 2020, two issues dominated the headlines: the COVID pandemic and the widespread unrest surrounding George Floyd, Black Lives Matter, and the “racial reckoning.” It was in this environment, with the country also at or near the apex of “cancel culture,” that the University of Central Florida tried to fire associate professor of psychology Charles Negy for his tweets about race and society. Negy fought back and sued.

Five years later, his lawsuit continues — and last week, it brought good news not just for Professor Negy but for everyone who cares about free speech on campus.

Last week, Judge Carlos E. Mendoza of the U.S. District Court for the Middle District of Florida ruled that Negy’s lawsuit could proceed against four of the five administrators he sued. Importantly, the court denied claims of qualified immunity, a doctrine that says public officials aren’t liable for unconstitutional activity unless they knew or should have known their actions were unconstitutional. By denying qualified immunity to UCF’s administrators, Judge Mendoza formally recognized what was obvious from the very beginning: UCF knew or should have known that what it was doing violated the First Amendment, but they went ahead and did it anyway.

Let’s set the stage. Picture a semi-governmental company. Around $130 million in annual revenue. They build and operate very expensive things — in space. Hundreds of physical hosts. Nearly 4,000 VMs. Most of their IT stack, in fact, runs on our platform.

Are they paying customers?

No.

Are they using the fully open-source version, from source?

Also no.

Instead, they discovered our Xen Orchestra Appliance (XOA): a turnkey virtual machine, with Xen Orchestra pre-installed, regularly tested, easy to deploy and update (and yes, still running fully on-prem). A supported and stable experience, designed for teams that don’t want to git pull on master branch in production.

But they didn’t want to pay for it. So they came up with a creative workaround: abusing our 30-day trial (initially 15 days until recently), over and over again.

It all started back in April 2015 — yes, a full decade ago. At first, they used their corporate emails to request trials. One here, one there. Nothing suspicious. But over the years, the pattern grew. More emails. More trials. Enough that, when we looked back, we realized we could chart it. Literally. Here's what the "creative licensing strategy" has looked like over time:

As you can imagine, we ended up with what looked like the entire staff directory. Developers, sysadmins, managers… pretty sure we even had the janitor signed up for a trial at some point.

When those ran out, they switched to personal Outlook or Gmail addresses. Every time: starting with a new (real!) person with their… personal email, a new 30-day trial. And then go incrementally with it. johndoe01@outlook.com, then johndoe02@outlook.com… We're now well past johndoe60. Same company name, every time… which is impressive considering the field isn’t even required in order to register your account. Hard to say if it was a mistake, a flex, or just their way of making sure we didn’t miss who was milking the trials.

Yes, they’re that committed. Committed to not paying.

• TikTok’s recommendation algorithm began quickly and progressively populating our For You Page with right-wing conspiracy theories and toxic masculinity content.
• Of the 425 videos coded, 121 (28%) contained conspiracy theories and 70 (16%) contained toxic masculinity content.
• Our For You Page also contained content promoting medical misinformation, doomsday prepping, racism, right-wing media, and transphobia.

Backlog getting you down? Drowning in technical debt? Delegate issues to Copilot so you can focus on the creative, complex, and high-impact work that matters most. Copilot coding agent makes this possible.

Simply assign an issue (or multiple issues) to Copilot just as you would another developer. You can do this from github.com, GitHub Mobile, or the GitHub CLI. Copilot works in the background, using its own secure cloud-based development environment powered by GitHub Actions. Copilot explores the repository, makes changes, and even validates its work with your tests and linter before it pushes.

After 2,5 years of intensive research and programming efforts, the entire Openwebsearch.eu project team is excited to grant access to its pilot of the first-ever federated pan-European Open Web Index (OWI).

The 19th explains how the new law on nonconsensual intimate imagery will be implemented — and how you can request the takedown of explicit images created or shared without permission.

The Texas Legislature has already passed a bill requiring age verification to download apps and is seriously considering another to ban children from social media.

Imagine wearing a T-shirt that measures your breathing or gloves that translate your hand movements into commands for your computer. Researchers at ETH Zurich, led by Daniel Ahmed, Professor of Acoustic Robotics for Life Sciences and Healthcare, have laid the foundations for just such smart textiles. Unlike many previous developments in this area, which usually use electronics, the ETH researchers rely on acoustic waves passed through glass fibres. This makes the measurements more precise and the textiles lighter, more breathable and easier to wash. “They are also inexpensive because we use readily available materials, and the power consumption is very low,” says Ahmed.

This is called a superinfection—a file or system that has been infected several times. It typically occurs on systems that do not have antivirus software. It also fits that Cameron had a warning for Floxif. Systems that have been neglected in terms of basic security often become hosts to multiple types of self-replicating malware.

The virus infection also explains why a total of 39 files in the downloads section of Procolored were infected. SnipVex likely replicated itself on a developer’s system or the build servers.

It made a bit of money for the threat actor along the way. Blockchain explorer shows that the threat actor’s BTC address has received a total of 9.30857859 BTC—equivalent to approximately $100.000,00 or 90.000,00 EUR today.

It’s nearly impossible to use the internet without being asked about cookies. A typical pop-up will offer to either “accept all” or “reject all”. Sometimes, there may be a third option, or a link to further tweak your preferences.

These pop-ups and banners are distracting, and your first reaction is likely to get them out of the way as soon as possible – perhaps by hitting that “accept all” button.

But what are cookies, exactly? Why are we constantly asked about them, and what happens when we accept or reject them? As you will see, each choice comes with implications for your online privacy.

An advisor to al-Qaida. One of the founders of Hezbollah. The head of an Iraqi militia group known for attacks on U.S. troops. And a top official with the Houthi rebels who recently lashed out at the “criminal Trump.”

These are among the U.S.-sanctioned terrorists who appear to have paid, premium accounts on Elon Musk's X, a new Tech Transparency Project investigation has found, raising questions about the platform's dealings with individuals who have been deemed a threat to U.S. national security.

Regulations enforced by the Treasury Department’s Office of Foreign Assets Control (OFAC) prohibit U.S. companies from engaging in transactions with sanctioned individuals or entities unless they are licensed or otherwise authorized by the government. X’s policies explicitly state that its premium services are off limits to users subject to OFAC sanctions.

But TTP found premium blue checkmark accounts for multiple terrorists and others under OFAC-enforced sanctions. Some of these accounts even had an “ID verified” badge, meaning that X confirmed their identity after they submitted a government-issued ID and a selfie to the company. Several made use of revenue-generating features offered by X, including a button for tips.

The findings add to questions, first raised by TTP in February 2024, about X’s adherence to sanctions designed to protect U.S. national interests, even as the company maintains it has a “robust and secure” approach to its monetization features. X, formerly known as Twitter, once handed out blue checkmarks to notable figures for free. But after taking over the company, Musk turned the blue checkmark into a paid product and required users to purchase a premium subscription to obtain them.

X’s ongoing dealings with U.S.-sanctioned terrorists on its platform are all the more striking given that Musk, who has been leading the Trump administration’s so-called Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), chastised the Treasury Department in February for lacking “basic controls” to track payments and ensure they don’t end up going to terrorist organizations and other wrongful recipients. Speaking at a televised Oval Office appearance with Trump, Musk said such controls are “in place in any company.”

X did not provide a comment on the findings when contacted by TTP.

X says it uses three companies for ID verification. Two of the companies, Au10tix and Stripe, declined to comment. A third company, Persona, did not respond to a request for comment.

In an era defined by polarized views on everything from public health to politics, a new Tulane University study offers insight into why people may struggle to change their minds—especially when they turn to the internet for answers.