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Nintendo has announced plans to introduce Virtual Game Cards for its Switch console in late April, allowing users to share digital games across multiple systems, the Japanese gaming company said during its Nintendo Direct event. The new feature will enable players to virtually load and eject digital games between Nintendo Switch consoles, mimicking the flexibility of physical game cartridges. Users can play a single digital title on up to two systems, requiring only a one-time local connection between devices. The company has also confirmed that Virtual Game Cards will be compatible with both current and next-generation hardware. The system will also feature a family sharing option, allowing users to lend digital games to family members for two-week periods before automatically returning to the owner's account.

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Paul Ginsparg, a physics professor at Cornell University, created arXiv nearly 35 years ago as a digital repository where researchers could share their findings before peer review. Today, the platform hosts more than 2.6 million papers, receives 20,000 new submissions monthly, and serves 5 million active users, Wired writes in a profile of the platform. "Just when I thought I was out, they pull me back in!" Ginsparg quotes from The Godfather, reflecting his inability to fully hand over the platform despite numerous attempts. If arXiv stopped functioning, scientists worldwide would face immediate disruption. "Everybody in math and physics uses it," says Scott Aaronson, a computer scientist at the University of Texas at Austin. "I scan it every night." ArXiv revolutionized academic publishing, previously dominated by for-profit giants like Elsevier and Springer, by allowing instant and free access to research. Many significant discoveries, including the "transformers" paper that launched the modern AI boom, first appeared on the platform. Initially a collection of shell scripts on Ginsparg's NeXT machine in 1991, arXiv followed him from Los Alamos National Laboratory to Cornell, where it found an institutional home despite administrative challenges. Recent funding from the Simons Foundation has enabled a hiring spree and long-needed technical updates.

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Vendors with millions in federal contracts are watching nervously

Tech vendors are awaiting the outcome of a constitutional battle to decide the fate of government contracts worth hundreds of millions of dollars after US President Donald Trump issued an executive order calling for the federal Department of Education to be dismantled.…

China's ambitious AI infrastructure push has resulted in hundreds of idle data centers with local media reporting up to 80% of newly built computing resources remaining unused. The country announced over 500 data center projects during 2023-2024, with at least 150 completed facilities now struggling to secure customers in a rapidly changing market. The rise of DeepSeek's open-source reasoning model R1, which matches ChatGPT o1's performance at a fraction of the cost, has fundamentally altered hardware demand. Computing needs now prioritize low-latency infrastructure for real-time reasoning rather than facilities optimized for large-scale training workloads. Technical misalignment compounds the problem, as many centers were constructed by companies with little AI expertise, MIT Technology Review reports. The facilities, often built in remote regions to capitalize on cheaper electricity and land, now face obsolescence as AI companies require proximity to tech hubs to minimize transmission delays. GPU rental prices have collapsed, with eight-GPU Nvidia H100 server clusters now leasing for 75,000 yuan ($10,333) monthly, down from peaks of 180,000 yuan, making operations financially unsustainable for many data center operators.

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Screenshot shows company head unhappy, claiming 'real CVE is pending'

CrushFTP's CEO is not happy with VulnCheck after the CVE numbering authority (CNA) released an unofficial ID for the critical vulnerability in its file transfer tech disclosed almost a week ago.…

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Tom's Hardware: Qualcomm has reportedly filed secret complaints against Arm with the European Commission, the U.S. Federal Trade Commission (FTC), and the Korea Fair Trade Commission. Qualcomm argues that Arm's open licensing approach helped build a robust hardware and software ecosystem. However, this ecosystem is under threat now as Arm moves to restrict that access to benefit its chip design business, namely compute subsystems (CSS) reference designs for client and datacenter processors and custom silicon based on CSS for large-scale clients. Qualcomm has presented its case to the EC, U.S. FTC, and Korea FTC behind closed doors and through formal filings, so it does not comment on the matter now. Arm rejected the accusations, stating that it is committed to innovation, competition, and upholding contract terms. The company called Qualcomm's move an attempt to shift attention from a wider commercial dispute between the two companies and use regulatory pressure for its benefit. Indeed, the antitrust complaints align with Qualcomm's arguments in a recent legal clash with Arm in Delaware. Qualcomm won that trial, as the court ruled that the company did not break the terms of its architecture license agreement (ALA) and technology license agreement (TLA) by acquiring Nuvia and using its IP in its Snapdragon X processors for client PCs. Arm said it would seek a retrial. However, Qualcomm seems to want to ensure that it will have access to Arm's instruction set architecture and technologies by filing complaints with antitrust regulators.

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'This was not good dog food'

Retired Microsoft engineer Dave Plummer has taken to his YouTube channel to explain Redmond's missteps with Windows Longhorn and the background to the company's failed attempt at an XP follow-up.…

Britain's biggest semiconductor plant to produce EV chips that can take the heat

The former Newport Wafer Fab (NWF) facility in South Wales is getting £250 million ($323 million) to start making silicon carbide semiconductors, a year after the sale of the site was approved by UK government.…

Your mouse once understood two protocols. What's your excuse?

Before Bluetooth and USB, computers had PS/2 ports. Microsoft veteran Raymond Chen took another trip down memory lane this week to explain just how dumb the USB-to-PS/2 adapters that shipped with Microsoft Mouse devices really were.…

As if living in Croydon wasn't bad enough

The Metropolitan Police has confirmed its first permanent installation of live facial recognition (LFR) cameras is coming this summer and the lucky location will be the South London suburb of Croydon.…

The U.S. Space Force has certified United Launch Alliance's Vulcan Centaur rocket for national security missions after successful test flights and resolution of a booster nozzle issue. This certification allows ULA to join SpaceX in conducting launches under the National Security Space Launch program, with Vulcan missions expected to begin this summer. SpaceNews reports: "Thank you to all our customer partners who have worked hand-in-hand with us throughout this comprehensive certification process. We are grateful for the collaboration and excited to reach this critical milestone in Vulcan development," said Tory Bruno, president and chief executive of United Launch Alliance in a ULA statement about the vehicle's certification. Bruno said at the roundtable that the next launch by ULA will be of its Atlas 5, carrying a set of Project Kuiper broadband satellites for Amazon. That launch is expected as soon as next month. He said then that would be followed by the first two Vulcan national security launches, missions designated USSF-106 and USSF-87. ULA did not give a schedule for those upcoming Vulcan launches but Space Systems Command, in a summary accompanying its press release, said the first NSSL mission on Vulcan is planned for the summer. Bruno said at the roundtable that the payloads for those missions have "complex processing" requirements beyond a typical mission, and did not state how long it would take them to be ready for a launch. Bruno said ULA is projecting a dozen launches this year, split roughly evenly between Atlas and Vulcan and between national security and commercial missions. ULA has been stockpiling components, such as BE-4 engines and solid rocket boosters, needed for those missions. "We're all staged up and ready, and as spacecraft show up, we'll be able to fly them," he said. He noted the company wants to get to a "baseline tempo" of two launches a month by the end of this year and perform 20 launches next year.

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Data stolen included checklist for medics on how to get into vulnerable people's homes

The UK's data protection watchdog is dishing out a £3.07 million ($3.95 million) fine to Advanced Computer Software Group, whose subsidiary's security failings led to a ransomware attack affecting NHS care.…

If coworkers cranking out biz strategies and fussing over balance sheets seem robotic, you ain't seen nothing yet

Microsoft on Wednesday introduced out two "reasoning agents" it claims can handle research and analysis projects.…

Desktop users get free access – assuming they're cool with logging in and limited speeds

Vivaldi has become the latest browser to include a virtual private network (VPN) option with its product, working with Proton VPN to up user privacy.…

Beating a dead horse to a 4-4 beat

Napster, the original file-sharing troublemaker that shook the music industry, is about to change hands once again in yet another attempt to drag the brand into relevance.…

Scientists in China successfully transplanted a genetically modified pig liver into a brain-dead patient, where it functioned for 10 days. The liver, modified to reduce immune rejection, produced key proteins and bile, showing compatibility and offering hope for future short-term xenotransplants. The Guardian reports: The surgery, at a Chinese hospital last year, is thought to mark the first time a pig liver has been transplanted into a human. It raises the prospect of pig livers serving as a "bridging organ" for patients on the waiting list for a transplant or to support liver function while their own organ regenerates. [...] The latest procedure was carried out in a 50-year-old man diagnosed with brain death after a severe head injury. The patient's own liver was intact and, in a surgery that took more than 10 hours, the organ taken from a genetically modified Bama miniature pig was plumbed into his blood supply as an additional liver. The pig had six genetic modifications aimed at preventing immune rejection. These included deactivating genes that contribute to the production of sugars on the surface of pig cells, which the human immune system attacks, and introducing genes that express human proteins to "humanize" the liver. After the transplant, the pig liver showed signs of functioning, including producing bile, which helps break down fats in the digestive system, and porcine albumin, a blood protein. The team behind the advance, described in the journal Nature, said it was not clear whether the liver would have been able to fully support the patient, given that he had an existing liver and because the liver was removed after 10 days at the request of his family.

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Reveals it ‘dramatically improved IOPS and throughput’ of its own storage with homebrew 'L4' automation and cache

Google has revealed that it still relies on hard disk drives for most of its storage needs, but has been able to ‘dramatically’ improve the performance of its storage systems with a homebrew automated data tiering system.…

Confirmed: 12,000 people let go over 12 months

Rumours of swingeing layoffs at Dell were not exaggerated, a statement The Register offers after reading the hardware giant’s most recent annual report which reveals its workforce shrank by 12,000 in the year to January 31st, 2025.…

An anonymous reader quotes a report from TechCrunch: It's only been a day since ChatGPT's new AI image generator went live, and social media feeds are already flooded with AI-generated memes in the style of Studio Ghibli, the cult-favorite Japanese animation studio behind blockbuster films such as "My Neighbor Totoro" and "Spirited Away." In the last 24 hours, we've seen AI-generated images representing Studio Ghibli versions of Elon Musk, "The Lord of the Rings", and President Donald Trump. OpenAI CEO Sam Altman even seems to have made his new profile picture a Studio Ghibli-style image, presumably made with GPT-4o's native image generator. Users seem to be uploading existing images and pictures into ChatGPT and asking the chatbot to re-create it in new styles. OpenAI's latest update comes on the heels of Google's release of a similar AI image feature in its Gemini Flash model, which also sparked a viral moment earlier in March when people used it to remove watermarks from images. OpenAI's and Google's latest tools make it easier than ever to re-create the styles of copyrighted works -- simply by typing a text prompt. Together, these new AI image features seem to reignite concerns at the core of several lawsuits against generative AI model developers. If these companies are training on copyrighted works, are they violating copyright law? According to Evan Brown, an intellectual property lawyer at the law firm Neal & McDevitt, products like GPT-4o's native image generator operate in a legal gray area today. Style is not explicitly protected by copyright, according to Brown, meaning OpenAI does not appear to be breaking the law simply by generating images that look like Studio Ghibli movies. However, Brown says it's plausible that OpenAI achieved this likeness by training its model on millions of frames from Ghibli's films. Even if that was the case, several courts are still deciding whether training AI models on copyrighted works falls under fair use protections. "I think this raises the same question that we've been asking ourselves for a couple years now," said Brown in an interview. "What are the copyright infringement implications of going out, crawling the web, and copying into these databases?"

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sciencehabit quotes a report from Science.org: Whales sing, orcas squeal, and sea turtles croak. But sharks are more the strong, silent type. Now, researchers report the first evidence that sharks make sounds, too, described today in Royal Society Open Science. The animals may be making the sounds -- a series of clicking noises -- by snapping their flat rows of teeth, which are blunt for crushing prey. The sharks can hear mostly low-frequency noise, and the clicks they emit are higher pitched, which suggests they are not for communicating with other rigs. It's possible they are a defensive tactic. Marine mammals that eat rigs, such as leopard seals, can hear in the frequency range of the rig clicks, but the researchers question whether a few clicks would deter an attack. The sounds might be part of their response to being startled, the team says.

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