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Adobe is no longer planning to discontinue Adobe Animate on March 1st. From a report: In an FAQ, the company now says that Animate will now be in maintenance mode and that it has "no plans toâdiscontinue or remove access" to the app.
Animate will still receive "ongoing security and bug fixes" and will still be available for "both new and existing users," but it won't get new features. Many creators expressed frustration after Adobe's original discontinuation announcement from earlier this week, and the application is still used by creators like David Firth, the person behind the animated web series Salad Fingers. Now, Adobe says that "We are committed to ensuring Animate usersâalways have access to their content regardless of the state of development of the application."
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Catch platform sinks under weight of bugs, missing species, and postal code gaffes while containers pile up at ports
Problems with a new digital European system for certifying fishing catches are hampering producers and delaying exports, according to ministers from several EU member states.…
Affected police officers squeezed mental health services, relocated over safety fears
Police Service of Northern Ireland (PSNI) employees who had their details exposed in a significant 2023 data breach will each receive £7,500 ($10,279) as part of a universal offer of compensation.…
Failed deorbit burn grounds workhorse rocket
SpaceX has paused flights of its workhorse Falcon 9 after a second stage failure resulted in the spent rocket tumbling uncontrollably back to Earth.…
An anonymous reader shares a report: Speaking during an earnings call on Tuesday, CEO Lisa Su stated that its development of Microsoft's next-gen Xbox SoC is "progressing well to support a launch in 2027."
While the comment doesn't outright confirm the next Xbox will release next year, it indicates that the Microsoft could be ready to launch soon.
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Open source gains urgency as Europe reassesses reliance on US tech
Open Source Policy Summit 2026 European tech leaders are waking up to the risk of the US simply turning off their IT services.…
Service terms update removes infringement cover tied to audio and video encoding tech
Amazon is warning users of its media services that it will not protect them against patent infringement claims relating to media codec technology supported by those services.…
Bring your own sound effects to a Technic-enabled Space Launch System
The launch of the Artemis II mission to send humans around the Moon is fast approaching. The Register had a go at building Lego's latest SLS set and found it a lot of fun, particularly making whooshing noises as the rocket "launches."…
BrianFagioli writes: Google has quietly retired the ZetaSQL name and rebranded its open source SQL analysis and parsing project as GoogleSQL. This is not a technical change but a naming cleanup meant to align the open source code with the SQL dialect already used across Google products like BigQuery and Spanner. Internally, Google has long called the dialect GoogleSQL, even while the open source project lived under a different name.
By unifying everything under GoogleSQL, Google says it wants to reduce confusion and make it clearer that the same SQL foundation is shared across its cloud services and open source tooling. The code, features, and team remain unchanged. Only the name is different. GoogleSQL is now the single label Google wants developers to recognize and use going forward.
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
As Spain announces stern laws for social media, and Elon Musk’s response shows regulators keep looking his way
The UK’s Information Commissioner’s Office (ICO) has launched a probe into Elon Musk’s xAI, after its Grok chatbot produced sexual images of real people, without their consent.…
As analyst house Gartner declares AI tool ‘comes with unacceptable cybersecurity risk’ and urges admins to snuff it out
If you’re brave enough to want to run the demonstrably insecure AI assistant OpenClaw, several clouds have already started offering it as a service.…
OpenAI's rivals are cutting into ChatGPT's lead. From a report: The top chatbot's market share fell from 69.1% to 45.3% between January 2025 and January 2026 among daily U.S. users of its mobile app. Gemini, in the same time period, rose from 14.7% to 25.1% and Grok rose from 1.6% to 15.2%.
The data, obtained by Big Technology from mobile insights firm Apptopia, indicates the chatbot race has tightened meaningfully over the past year with Google's surge showing up in the numbers. Overall, the chatbot market increased 152% since last January, according to Apptopia, with ChatGPT exhibiting healthy download growth.
On desktop and mobile web, a similar pattern appears, according to analytics firm Similarweb. Visits to ChatGPT went from 3.8 billion to 5.7 billion between January 2025 and January 2026, a 50% increase, while visits to Gemini went from 267.7 million to 2 billion, a 647% increase. ChatGPT is still far and away the leader in visits, but it has company in the race now.
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
A diverse portfolio is usually a good thing, except when AI is the only thing
Usually diversity is a sign of a healthy and resilient business. But for the folks on Wall Street, the breadth of AMD's portfolio is a bug, not a feature – one that sent the House of Zen's share price down by more than eight percent in after hours trading on Tuesday.…
Walmart's market cap surpassed $1 trillion on Tuesday, putting the largest U.S. retail chain in an exclusive club dominated by tech groups. Bloomberg adds: The Bentonville, Arkansas-based chain -- a longtime favorite of bargain-hunting consumers -- has flexed its massive scale and supplier network to keep prices low and grab market share across the income spectrum. While Walmart has maintained its appeal to households looking for value, its online offerings are drawing new, wealthier shoppers seeking convenience.
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Versions installed via Snap don't delete files when users empty system trash
Linux users who installed Microsoft's Visual Studio Code as a Snap package may want to check to see whether files they sent to the trash with the app have actually been deleted.…
Don't relax: This is a 'when, not if' scenario
AI agents and other systems can't yet conduct cyberattacks fully on their own - but they can help criminals in many stages of the attack chain, according to the International AI Safety report.…
An anonymous reader shares a report: Google Home users, your long nightmare is over. The platform has finally added support for buttons. The release notes for a February 2 update state that several new starter conditions for automations are now available, including "Switch or button pressed."
Smart buttons are physical, programmable switches that you can press to trigger automations or control devices in your smart home, such as turning lights on or off, opening and closing shades, running a Good Night scene, or starting a robot vacuum. A great alternative to voice and app control when you want to control multiple devices, smart buttons are often wireless and generally have several ways to press them: single press, double press, and long press, meaning one button can do multiple things.
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Ultra-processed foods (UPFs) have more in common with cigarettes than with fruit or vegetables, and require far tighter regulation, according to a new report. The Guardian: UPFs and cigarettes are engineered to encourage addiction and consumption, researchers from three US universities said, pointing to the parallels in widespread health harms that link both.
UPFs, which are widely available worldwide, are food products that have been industrially manufactured, often using emulsifiers or artificial colouring and flavours. The category includes soft drinks and packaged snacks such as crisps and biscuits. There are similarities in the production processes of UPFs and cigarettes, and in manufacturers' efforts to optimise the "doses" of products and how quickly they act on reward pathways in the body, according to the paper from researchers at Harvard, the University of Michigan and Duke University.
They draw on data from the fields of addiction science, nutrition and public health history to make their comparisons, published on 3 February in the healthcare journal the Milbank Quarterly. The authors suggest that marketing claims on the products, such as being "low fat" or "sugar free," are "health washing" that can stall regulation, akin to the advertising of cigarette filters in the 1950s as protective innovations that "in practice offered little meaningful benefit."
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Many vital open source resources rely on the devotion of a few individuals
It's hard to imagine something as fundamental to computing as the sudo command becoming abandonware, yet here we are: its solitary maintainer is asking for help to keep the project alive.…
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