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The mighty Z80 processor ran the code at astounding speed, proving retro-tech got a lot of things right

A Microsoft senior software engineer named Alice Vinogradova has ported a database she wrote in SAP’s ABAP language to the venerable Z80 processor that powered the Sinclair ZX Spectrum – and marveled at the results.…

A team of U.S. and German researchers analyzed over 15 million biomedical papers and found that AI-generated content has subtly infiltrated academic writing, with telltale stylistic shifts -- such as a rise in flowery verbs and adjectives. "Their investigation revealed that since the emergence of LLMs there has been a corresponding increase in the frequency of certain stylist word choices within the academic literature," reports Phys.Org. "These data suggest that at least 13.5% of the papers published in 2024 were written with some amount of LLM processing." From the report: The researchers modeled their investigation on prior COVID-19 public-health research, which was able to infer COVID-19's impact on mortality by comparing excess deaths before and after the pandemic. By applying the same before-and-after approach, the new study analyzed patterns of excess word use prior to the emergence of LLMs and after. The researchers found that after the release of LLMs, there was a significant shift away from the excess use of "content words" to an excess use of "stylistic and flowery" word choices, such as "showcasing," "pivotal," and "grappling." By manually assigning parts of speech to each excess word, the authors determined that before 2024, 79.2% of excess word choices were nouns. During 2024 there was a clearly identifiable shift. 66% of excess word choices were verbs and 14% were adjectives. The team also identified notable differences in LLM usage between research fields, countries, and venues. The findings have been published in the journal Science Advances.

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Plus: Qantas makes contact with 'potential cyber criminal'

While the aviation industry has borne the brunt of Scattered Spider's latest round of social engineering attacks, the criminals aim to catch manufacturing and medical tech companies — and even Chipotle Mexican Grill — in tjeor web, as evidenced by hundreds of domains that security researchers say look a lot like phishing websites used by the criminal crews.…

They're both silent on what, if anything, has changed

Epic Games has settled the case it brought against Samsung over the Korean giant’s treatment of third-party app stores on its Galaxy handsets.…

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Wired: Trey had struggled with alcoholism for 15 years, eventually drinking heavily each night before quitting in December. But staying sober was a struggle for the 36-year-old first responder from Atlanta, who did not wish to use his real name due to professional concerns. Then he discovered Alterd, an AI-powered journaling app that invites users to "explore new dimensions" geared towards psychedelics and cannabis consumers, meditators, and alcohol drinkers. In April, using the app as a tripsitter -- a term for someone who soberly watches over another while they trip on psychedelics to provide reassurance and support -- he took a huge dose of 700 micrograms of LSD. (A typicalrecreational doseis considered to be 100 micrograms.) "I went from craving compulsions to feeling true freedom and not needing or wanting alcohol," he says. He recently asked the app's "chat with your mind" function how he had become more wise through all his AI-assisted psychedelic trips. It responded: "I trust my own guidance now, not just external rules or what others think. I'm more creative, less trapped by fear, and I actually live by my values, not just talk about them. The way I see, reflect, and act in the world is clearer and more grounded every day." "It's almost like your own self that you're communicating with," says Trey, adding he's tripped with his AI chatbot about a dozen times since April. "It's like your best friend. It's kind of crazy." The article mentions several different chatbot tools and AI systems that are being used for psychedelic therapy. ChatGPT: "Already, many millions of people are using ChatGPT on a daily basis, and the developments may have helped democratize access to psychotherapy-style guidance, albeit in a dubious Silicon Valley style with advice that is often flush with untruths," reports Wired. The general-purpose AI chatbot is being used for emotional support, intention-setting, and even real-time guidance during psychedelic trips. While not designed for therapy, it has been used informally as a trip companion, offering customized music playlists, safety reminders, and existential reflections. Experts caution that its lack of emotional nuance and clinical oversight poses significant risks during altered states. Alterd: Alterd is a personalized AI journal app that serves as a reflective tool by analyzing a user's entries, moods, and behavior patterns. Its "mind chat" function acts like a digital subconscious, offering supportive insights while gently confronting negative habits like substance use. Users credit it with deepening self-awareness and maintaining sobriety, particularly in the context of psychedelic-assisted growth. Mindbloom's AI Copilot: Integrated into Mindbloom's at-home ketamine therapy program, the AI copilot helps clients set pretrip intentions, process post-trip emotions, and stay grounded between sessions. It generates custom reflections and visual art based on voice journals, aiming to enhance the therapeutic journey even outside of human-guided sessions. The company plans to evolve the tool into a real-time, intelligent assistant capable of interacting more dynamically with users. Orb AI/Shaman Concepts (Speculative): Conceptual "orb" interfaces imagine an AI-powered, shaman-like robot facilitating various aspects of psychedelic therapy, from intake to trip navigation. While still speculative, such designs hint at a future where AI plays a central, embodied role in guiding altered states. These ideas raise provocative ethical and safety questions about replacing human presence with machines in deeply vulnerable psychological contexts. AI in Virtual Reality and Brain Modulation Systems: Researchers are exploring how AI could coordinate immersive virtual reality environments and brain-modulating devices to enhance psychedelic therapy. These systems would respond to real-time emotional and physiological signals, using haptic suits and VR to deepen and personalize the psychedelic experience. Though still in the conceptual phase, this approach represents the fusion of biotech, immersive tech, and AI in pursuit of therapeutic transformation.

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Memory from Korea, hard disks from Thailand, plenty of stuff from Japan

World War Fee The Trump administration on Monday announced the tariff rates it will impose on fourteen nations starting on August 1st, and several big technology-producing nations made the list.…

Wimbledon's use of AI-powered electronic line-calling has sparked backlash from players who say the system made several incorrect calls, affecting match outcomes and creating accessibility issues. "This is the first year the prestigious tennis tournament, which is still ongoing, replaced human line judges, who determine if a ball is in or out, with an electronic line calling system (ELC)," notes TechCrunch. From the report: British tennis star Emma Raducanu called out the technology for missing a ball that her opponent hit out, but instead had to be played as if it were in. On a television replay, the ball indeed looked out, the Telegraph reported. Jack Draper, the British No. 1, also said he felt some line calls were wrong, saying he did not think the AI technology was "100 percent accurate." Player Ben Shelton had to speed up his match after being told that the new AI line system was about to stop working because of the dimming sunlight. Elsewhere, players said they couldn't hear the new automated speaker system, with one deaf player saying that without the human hand signals from the line judges, she was unable to tell when she won a point or not. The technology also met a blip at a key point during a match this weekend between British player Sonay Kartal and the Russian Anastasia Pavlyuchenkova, where a ball went out, but the technology failed to make the call. The umpire had to step in to stop the rally and told the players to replay the point because the ELC failed to track the point. Wimbledon later apologized, saying it was a "human error," and that the technology was accidentally shut off during the match. It also adjusted the technology so that, ideally, the mistake could not be repeated. Debbie Jevans, chair of the All England Club, the organization that hosts Wimbledon, hit back at Raducanu and Draper, saying, "When we did have linesmen, we were constantly asked why we didn't have electronic line calling because it's more accurate than the rest of the tour."

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Fubo has agreed to pay $3.4 million to settle a class-action lawsuit (PDF) accusing it of illegally sharing usersâ(TM) personally identifiable information and video viewing history with advertisers without consent, allegedly violating the Video Privacy Protection Act (VPPA). Ars Technica reports: As reported by Cord Cutters News this week, instead of going to trial, Fubo reached a settlement agreement [PDF] that allows people who used Fubo before May 29, which is when Fubo last updated its privacy policy, to receive part of a $3.4 million settlement. The settlement agreement received preliminary approval on May 29, and users recently started receiving notice of their potential entitlement to some of the settlement. They have until September 12 to submit claims. Fubo said in a statement: "We deny the allegations in the putative class lawsuit and specifically deny that we have engaged in any wrongdoing whatsoever. Fubo has nonetheless chosen to pursue a settlement for this matter in order to avoid the uncertainty and expense of litigation. We look forward to putting this matter behind us."

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Following a week of X and YouTube complaints, Apple has further reduced the transparency of its Liquid Glass design in the latest iOS 26 developer beta, making navigation bars, buttons, and tabs more opaque to improve readability. The Verge reports: "iOS 26 beta 3 completely nerfs Liquid Glass," AppleTrack developer Sam Kohl says in a post on X. "It looks so much cheaper now and feels like Apple is backtracking on their original vision." Others ask Apple to "stop ruining" Liquid Glass and call the new design a "step backwards." Some users in the beta found that the transparency level can vary depending on the app they're using. This is still just a developer beta, so it's likely that Apple will continue to make tweaks before it releases iOS 26 to the public in September.

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Investors advised to brace for massive fall from Q1 to Q2

Analysis During the AI gold rush, the next best thing to selling the shovels – that is, the GPUs –is manufacturing the silicon that makes them possible. But while TSMC and SK-Hynix continue to cash in on Nvidia's successes, Samsung hasn't been nearly so fortunate.…

An anonymous reader quotes a report from 404 Media: For someone who says she is fighting AI bot scrapers just in her free time, Xe Iaso seems to be putting up an impressive fight. Since she launched it in January, Anubis, a "program is designed to help protect the small internet from the endless storm of requests that flood in from AI companies," has been downloaded nearly 200,000 times, and is being used by notable organizations including GNOME, the popular open-source desktop environment for Linux, FFmpeg, the open-source software project for handling video and other media, and UNESCO, the United Nations organization for educations, science, and culture. [...] "Anubis is an uncaptcha," Iaso explains on her site. "It uses features of your browser to automate a lot of the work that a CAPTCHA would, and right now the main implementation is by having it run a bunch of cryptographic math with JavaScript to prove that you can run JavaScript in a way that can be validated on the server." Essentially, Anubis verifies that any visitor to a site is a human using a browser as opposed to a bot. One of the ways it does this is by making the browser do a type of cryptographic math with JavaScript or other subtle checks that browsers do by default but bots have to be explicitly programmed to do. This check is invisible to the user, and most browsers since 2022 are able to complete this test. In theory, bot scrapers could pretend to be users with browsers as well, but the additional computational cost of doing so on the scale of scraping the entire internet would be huge. This way, Anubis creates a computational cost that is prohibitively expensive for AI scrapers that are hitting millions and millions of sites, but marginal for an individual user who is just using the internet like a human. Anubis is free, open source, lightweight, can be self-hosted, and can be implemented almost anywhere. It also appears to be a pretty good solution for what we've repeatedly reported is a widespread problem across the internet, which helps explain its popularity. But Iaso is still putting a lot of work into improving it and adding features. She told me she's working on a non cryptographic challenge so it taxes users' CPUs less, and also thinking about a version that doesn't require JavaScript, which some privacy-minded disable in their browsers. The biggest challenge in developing Anubis, Iaso said, is finding the balance. "The balance between figuring out how to block things without people being blocked, without affecting too many people with false positives," she said. "And also making sure that the people running the bots can't figure out what pattern they're hitting, while also letting people that are caught in the web be able to figure out what pattern they're hitting, so that they can contact the organization and get help. So that's like, you know, the standard, impossible scenario."

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Waymo has launched new "road trips" to Philadelphia and New York City, "signaling the Alphabet-owned company's interest in expanding into Northeastern cities," reports TechCrunch. While these trips don't guarantee commercial launches, they follow a pattern that previously led to deployments in cities like Los Angeles. Other road trips this year are planned for Houston, Orlando, Las Vegas, San Diego, and San Antonio. From the report: Typically, the trips involve sending a small fleet of human-driven vehicles equipped with Waymo's autonomous driving system to map out the new city. Then Waymo tests the vehicles autonomously, though still with a human behind the wheel, before taking any data and learnings back to its engineers to improve the AI driver's performance. In some cases, these road trips have led to commercial launches. In 2023, the company made a road trip to Santa Monica, a city in Los Angeles County. The company now operates a commercial service in Los Angeles, including Santa Monica, Beverly Hills, and Hollywood. For its Philadelphia trip, Waymo plans to place vehicles in the most complex parts of the city, including downtown and freeways, according to a spokesperson. She noted folks will see Waymo vehicles driving "at all hours throughout various Philadelphia neighborhoods, from North Central to Eastwick, University City, and as far east as the Delaware River." In NYC, Waymo will drive its cars manually in Manhattan just north of Central Park down to The Battery and parts of Downtown Brooklyn. The company will also map parts of Jersey City and Hoboken in New Jersey. Waymo applied last month for a permit to test its AVs in New York City with a human behind the wheel. The company has not yet received approval.

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Jack Dorsey has launched Bitchat, a decentralized, peer-to-peer messaging app that uses Bluetooth mesh networks for encrypted, ephemeral chats without requiring accounts, servers, or internet access. The beta version is live on TestFlight, with a full white paper available on GitHub. CNBC reports: In a post on X Sunday, Dorsey called it a personal experiment in "bluetooth mesh networks, relays and store and forward models, message encryption models, and a few other things." Bitchat enables ephemeral, encrypted communication between nearby devices. As users move through physical space, their phones form local Bluetooth clusters and pass messages from device to device, allowing them to reach peers beyond standard range -- even without Wi-Fi or cell service. Certain "bridge" devices connect overlapping clusters, expanding the mesh across greater distances. Messages are stored only on device, disappear by default and never touch centralized infrastructure -- echoing Dorsey's long-running push for privacy-preserving, censorship-resistant communication. Like the Bluetooth-based apps used during Hong Kong's 2019 protests, Bitchat is designed to keep working even when the internet is blocked, offering a censorship-resistant way to stay connected during outages, shutdowns or surveillance. The app also supports optional group chats, or "rooms," which can be named with hashtags and protected by passwords. It includes store and forward functionality to deliver messages to users who are temporarily offline. A future update will add WiFi Direct to increase speed and range, pushing Dorsey's vision for off-grid, user-owned communication even further.

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An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: Epic Games, buoyed by the massive success of Fortnite, has spent the last few years throwing elbows in the mobile industry to get its app store on more phones. It scored an antitrust win against Google in late 2023, and the following year it went after Samsung for deploying "Auto Blocker" on its Android phones, which would make it harder for users to install the Epic Games Store. Now, the parties have settled the case just days before Samsung will unveil its latest phones. The Epic Store drama began several years ago when the company defied Google and Apple rules about accepting outside payments in the mega-popular Fortnite. Both stores pulled the app, and Epic sued. Apple emerged victorious, with Fortnite only returning to the iPhone recently. Google, however, lost the case after Epic showed it worked behind the scenes to stymie the development of app stores like Epic's. Google is still working to avoid penalties in that long-running case, but Epic thought it smelled a conspiracy last year. It filed a similar lawsuit against Samsung, accusing it of implementing a feature to block third-party app stores. The issue comes down to the addition of a feature to Samsung phones called Auto Blocker, which is similar to Google's new Advanced Protection in Android 16. It protects against attacks over USB, disables link previews, and scans apps more often for malicious activity. Most importantly, it blocks app sideloading. Without sideloading, there's no way to install the Epic Games Store or any of the content inside it. Auto Blocker is enabled by default on Samsung phones, but users can opt out during setup. Epic claimed in its suit that the sudden inclusion of this feature was a sign that Google was working with Samsung to stand in the way of alternative app stores again. Epic has apparently gotten what it wanted from Samsung -- CEO Tim Sweeney has announced that Epic is dropping the case in light of a new settlement. Sweeney said Samsung "will address Epic's concerns," without elaborating on the details. Samsung may stop making Auto Blocker the default or create a whitelist of apps, like the Epic Games Store, that can bypass Auto Blocker. Another possibility is that Epic and select third-party stores are granted special access while Auto Blocker remains on for others, balancing security and openness. A "more interesting outcome," according to Ars, would be for Samsung to pre-install the Epic Games Store on its new phones.

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Using prompt injections to play a Jedi mind trick on LLMs

A handful of international computer science researchers appear to be trying to influence AI reviews with a new class of prompt injection attack.…

Forget small modular reactors. Microreactors are the new hotness

The new nuclear age of small modular reactors may not have materialized yet, but that's not stopping the US Department of Energy from getting to work on even smaller, more modular reactors with a couple of new commercial partners. …

Nintendo plans to maintain its "traditional approach" to game development while managing rising costs during the Switch 2 transition, company president Shuntaro Furukawa said during a recent shareholders meeting. "Recent game software development has become larger in scale and longer in duration, resulting in higher development costs," he said, adding that "rising development costs are increasing that risk" in what has always been "a high-risk business." Nintendo's development teams are "currently devising various ways to maintain our traditional approach to creating games amidst the increasing scale and length of development," Furukawa said. The company believes, he said, "it is important to make the necessary investments for more efficient development." The early Switch 2 lineup reflects increased ambition, with Mario Kart World introducing open-world structure to the racing series and Donkey Kong Bananza adding destructive elements to 3D platforming. Mario Kart World sells for $79.99, $10 more than most Nintendo games, while the Switch 2 costs $449.99, a $100 increase over the Switch OLED.

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An anonymous reader shares a report: Delhi's government has been forced to reverse a controversial plan to effectively ban older vehicles from city roads after public backlash and concerns over how the policy would be implemented. The plan would have seen "end of life vehicles" -- petrol cars over 15 years old and diesel vehicles over 10 -- denied fuel at petrol stations using automatic number plate recognition cameras, or ANPR, and, potentially, impounded on the spot. The policy was set to come into effect this week but state environment minister Manjinder Singh Sirsa said last week the government would halt the plan following widespread complaints. Mr Sirsa said the administration would not allow vehicles to be seized and cited "technological integration challenges" and a lack of coordination with neighbouring states sharing traffic with the capital.

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NetScaler vendor issued a patch but otherwise, stony silence

Multiple exploits are circulating for CVE-2025-5777, a critical bug in Citrix NetScaler ADC and NetScaler Gateway dubbed CitrixBleed 2, and security analysts are warning a "significant portion" of users still haven't patched.…

Leaders of the BRICS group of developing nations addressed the shared challenges of global warming on Monday, the final day of their summit in Rio de Janeiro, demanding that wealthy nations fund mitigation of greenhouse gas emissions in poorer nations. From a report: In his opening remarks, Brazilian President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva, who will host the United Nations climate summit in November, also blasted denialism of the climate emergency, indirectly criticizing U.S. President Donald Trump's decision to pull his country out of the 2015 Paris Agreement. "Today, denialism and unilateralism are eroding past achievements and harming our future," he said. "The Global South is in a position to lead a new development paradigm without repeating the mistakes of the past." Trump took issue on Sunday with veiled criticism from the BRICS group, accusing the bloc of having "anti-American policies" and threatening them with extra 10% tariffs.

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