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Want out of those new 'smart features'? We’ve got you covered

Google's "don't be evil" ethos is so 2015. These days, the Chocolate Factory is all about integrating users with bots, whether they like it or not. Now, it's rolling out Workspace "smart features" that process personal content with AI, and many users are finding the settings enabled by default.…

An anonymous reader shares a report: Microsoft is upgrading its Advanced Paste tool in PowerToys for Windows 11, allowing you to use an on-device AI model to power some of its features. With the 0.96 update, you can route requests through Microsoft's Foundry Local tool or the open-source Ollama, both of which run AI models on your device's neural processing unit (NPU) instead of connecting to the cloud. That means you won't need to purchase API credits to perform certain actions, like having AI translate or summarize the text copied to your clipboard. Plus, you can keep your data on your device.

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Redesigned booster ruptures during early checks, delaying latest Starship iteration

SpaceX has responded to Blue Origin's announcement of a heftier version of its New Glenn rocket in the only way it knows how – by accidentally destroying a Starship booster.…

OpenAI CEO Sam Altman told colleagues last month that Google's recent progress in AI could "create some temporary economic headwinds for our company," though he added that OpenAI would emerge ahead, The Information reports [non-paywalled source]. From the report: After OpenAI researchers heard that Google had created a new AI that appears to have leapfrogged OpenAI's in the way it was developed, Altman said in the memo that "we know we have some work to do but we are catching up fast." Still, he cautioned employees that "I expect the vibes out there to be rough for a bit."

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An anonymous reader shares a report: "In the 2024-2025 school year, homeschooling continued to grow across the United States, increasing at an average rate of 5.4%," Angela Watson of the Johns Hopkins University School of Education's Homeschool Hub wrote earlier this month. "This is nearly three times the pre-pandemic homeschooling growth rate of around 2%." She added that more than a third of the states from which data is available report their highest homeschooling numbers ever, even exceeding the peaks reached when many public and private schools were closed during the pandemic. After COVID-19 public health measures were suspended, there was a brief drop in homeschooling as parents and families returned to old habits. That didn't last long. Homeschooling began surging again in the 2023-2024 school year, with that growth continuing last year. Based on numbers from 22 states (not all states have released data, and many don't track homeschoolers), four report declines in the ranks of homeschooled children -- Delaware, the District of Columbia, Hawaii, and Tennessee -- while the others report growth from around 1 percent (Florida and Louisiana) to as high as 21.5 percent (South Carolina). The latest figures likely underestimate growth in homeschooling since not all DIY families abide by registration requirements where they exist, and because families who use the portable funding available through increasingly popular Education Savings Accounts to pay for homeschooling costs are not counted as homeschoolers in several states, Florida included. As a result, adds Watson, "we consider these counts as the minimum number of homeschooled students in each state."

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Prosecutors say front companies, falsified paperwork, and overseas drop points used to dodge US export rules

Four people have been charged in the US with plotting to funnel restricted Nvidia AI chips into China, allegedly relying on shell firms, fake invoices, and covert routing to slip cutting-edge GPUs past American export controls.…

Redmond dusts off Infocom's classic text adventures and puts the originals into public hands

Microsoft developer boss Scott Hanselman saved the company's Ignite shindig this week by unveiling the source code for Zork I-III, all available under the MIT license.…

Storing credentials safely and securely is the real trick

It's important to have your login in hand, literally. Zi Teng Wang, a UK magician who implanted an RFID chip in his appendage, has admitted losing access to it because he forgot the password.…

UK cops trace street-level crime to sanctions-busting networks tied to Moscow's war economy

On Christmas Day 2024, a Russian-linked laundering network bought itself a very special present: a controlling stake in a Kyrgyzstan bank, later used to wash cybercrime profits and funnel money into Moscow's war machine, according to the UK's National Crime Agency (NCA).…

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: Some Dell and HP laptop owners have been befuddled by their machines' inability to play HEVC/H.265 content in web browsers, despite their machines' processors having integrated decoding support. Laptops with sixth-generation Intel Core and later processors have built-in hardware support for HEVC decoding and encoding. AMD has made laptop chips supporting the codec since 2015. However, both Dell and HP have disabled this feature on some of their popular business notebooks. HP discloses this in the data sheets for its affected laptops, which include the HP ProBook 460 G11 [PDF], ProBook 465 G11 [PDF], and EliteBook 665 G11 [PDF]. "Hardware acceleration for CODEC H.265/HEVC (High Efficiency Video Coding) is disabled on this platform," the note reads. Despite this notice, it can still be jarring to see a modern laptop's web browser eternally load videos that play easily in media players. HP and Dell didn't explain why the companies disabled HEVC hardware decoding on their laptops' processors. A statement from an HP spokesperson said: "In 2024, HP disabled the HEVC (H.265) codec hardware on select devices, including the 600 Series G11, 400 Series G11, and 200 Series G9 products. Customers requiring the ability to encode or decode HEVC content on one of the impacted models can utilize licensed third-party software solutions that include HEVC support. Check with your preferred video player for HEVC software support." Dell's media relations team shared a similar statement: "HEVC video playback is available on Dell's premium systems and in select standard models equipped with hardware or software, such as integrated 4K displays, discrete graphics cards, Dolby Vision, or Cyberlink BluRay software. On other standard and base systems, HEVC playback is not included, but users can access HEVC content by purchasing an affordable third-party app from the Microsoft Store. For the best experience with high-resolution content, customers are encouraged to select systems designed for 4K or high-performance needs."

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EFF wants to know if citizens had their First Amendment rights violated

The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) is suing two government departments to understand how they compelled tech companies to remove ICE-tracking apps and websites from their platforms.…

Nvidia CPUs and GPUs dominate the bi-annual leaderboard, but FP64 performance regressions leave its long term prospectives in doubt

SC25 There's a new efficiency champ at the top of the Green500 ranking of the world's most sustainable supercomputers.…

Decision marks second penalty issued under the UK's Online Safety Act

The UK's online regulator has lobbed a £50,000 fine at an AI nudification website for failing to implement mandatory age checks, potentially allowing under-18s to waltz past the virtual velvet rope.…

Committee hears departments may have to stump up cash before savings materialize

A UK tech minister has declined to put a figure on the cost of the government's digital ID plans as MPs question the contributions expected from central departments.…

fahrbot-bot shares a report from Phys.org: Physicists from Swansea University have played the leading role in a scientific breakthrough at CERN, developing an innovative technique that increases the antihydrogen trapping rate by a factor of ten. The advancement, achieved as part of the international Antihydrogen Laser Physics Apparatus (ALPHA) collaboration, has been published in Nature Communications and could help answer one of the biggest questions in physics: Why is there such a large imbalance between matter and antimatter? According to the Big Bang theory, equal amounts were created at the beginning of the universe, so why is the world around us made almost entirely of matter? Antihydrogen is the "mirror version" of hydrogen, made from an antiproton and a positron. Trapping and studying it helps scientists explore how antimatter behaves, and whether it follows the same rules as matter. Producing and trapping antihydrogen is an extremely complicated process. Previous methods took 24 hours to trap just 2,000 atoms, limiting the scope of experiments at ALPHA. The Swansea-led team has changed that. Using laser-cooled beryllium ions, the team has demonstrated that it is possible to cool positrons to less than 10 Kelvin (below -263C), significantly colder than the previous threshold of about 15 Kelvin. These cooler positrons dramatically boost the efficiency of antihydrogen production and trapping -- allowing a record 15,000 atoms to be trapped in less than seven hours.

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The tech is impressive. Shoehorning it into absolutely everything is not

Opinion In a tweet lamenting all the "cynics" unmoved by AI, Microsoft AI boss Mustafa Suleyman demonstrated that Redmond's Reality Distortion Field is running at full power.…

AutoGuard uses injection text for good

Computer scientists based in South Korea have devised what they describe as an "AI Kill Switch" to prevent AI agents from carrying out malicious data scraping.…

alternative_right shares a report from Phys.org: Inspired by moss's resilience, researchers sent moss sporophytes -- reproductive structures that encase spores -- to the most extreme environment yet: space. Their results, published in the journal iScience on November 20, show that more than 80% of the spores survived nine months outside of the International Space Station (ISS) and made it back to Earth still capable of reproducing, demonstrating for the first time that an early land plant can survive long-term exposure to the elements of space. [Lead author Tomomichi Fujita of Hokkaido University and his team] subjected Physcomitrium patens, a well-studied moss commonly known as spreading earthmoss, to a simulated a space environment, including high levels of UV radiation, extreme high and low temperatures, and vacuum conditions. They tested three different structures from the moss -- protenemata, or juvenile moss; brood cells, or specialized stem cells that emerge under stress conditions; and sporophytes, or encapsulated spores -- to find out which had the best chance of surviving in space. The researchers found that UV radiation was the toughest element to survive, and the sporophytes were by far the most resilient of the three moss parts. None of the juvenile moss survived high UV levels or extreme temperatures. The brood cells had a higher rate of survival, but the encased spores exhibited ~1,000x more tolerance to UV radiation. The spores were also able to survive and germinate after being exposed to 196C for over a week, as well as after living in 55C heat for a month.

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Somewhat daft scheme worked until it didn’t

On Call The working week can be burdensome, so each Friday morning The Register tries to lighten the load by bringing you a new instalment of On Call, the reader-contributed column in which you let go of tech support stories that weigh on your memory.…

It’s an ethereal and weighty problem, not a powerful conundrum

The Open Compute Project (OCP) has commenced a workstream to learn how to deploy quantum computers alongside classical high performance computers in the same datacenter.…