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Social media usage peaked in 2022 and has been on a steady decline since. An analysis of 250,000 adults across more than 50 countries by the digital audience insights company GWI found that adults aged 16 and older spent an average of two hours and 20 minutes per day on social platforms at the end of 2024. That figure is down almost 10% from 2022. The decline is most pronounced among teenagers and people in their twenties. Usage has traced a smooth curve upward and then downward over the past decade. This is not simply the unwinding of increased screen time during pandemic lockdowns. The data also captured a shift in how people use these platforms. The share of people who report using social media to stay in touch with friends, express themselves or meet new people has fallen by more than a quarter since 2014. Opening the apps reflexively to fill spare time has risen. North America is an exception to the global trend. Social media consumption there continues to climb. By 2024 it reached levels 15% higher than Europe. Meta and OpenAI recently announced new social platforms that will be filled with AI-generated short-form videos.

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Jeff Bezos told an audience on Friday that gigawatt-scale data centers will be built in space within the next ten to twenty years. The Amazon founder said these orbital facilities would eventually outperform their terrestrial counterparts because space offers uninterrupted solar power around the clock. Bezos was speaking in a fireside chat with Ferrari and Stellantis Chairman John Elkann. He said the giant training clusters needed for AI would be better built in space because there are no clouds, rain or weather to interrupt power generation. Bezos predicted that space-based data centers would beat the cost of Earth-based ones within a couple of decades. He described the shift as part of a broader pattern that has already occurred with weather satellites and communication satellites. The next steps would be data centers and then other kinds of manufacturing.

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Better hope that bubble doesn't pop

The Andreessen Horowitz venture capital firm (aka A16z) crunched startup spending data and found young firms stuffing AI into everything, while bigger businesses remain far more restrained.…

Air pollution increases the likelihood of people becoming frail in middle and old age, according to an international review of studies. The Guardian: The review team found 10 studies that looked at outdoor air pollution and frailty. The people studied came from 11 countries including China, the UK, Sweden, South Africa and Mexico. Two of the studies showed that men were more vulnerable than woman, with a stronger association between particle pollution and frailty. The risk of frailty increased with outdoor particle pollution. For the UK, this could mean about 10-20% of frailty cases are attributable to air pollution. Exposure to secondhand smoking was the environmental factor that presented the greatest risk of frailty. The risk of frailty was increased by about 60% for people who breathed other people's smoke at home. Using solid fuels for cooking or home heating also carried an extra risk of frailty. This was about half the risk of living with a smoker, based on studies from six countries.

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Pew Research: Public awareness of legal sports betting has grown in recent years -- and so has the perception that it is a bad thing for society and sports, according to a new Pew Research Center survey. Today, 43% of U.S. adults say the fact that sports betting is now legal in much of the country is a bad thing for society. That's up from 34% in 2022. And 40% of adults now say it's a bad thing for sports, up from 33%. Despite these increasingly critical views of legal sports betting, many Americans continue to say it has neither a bad nor good impact on society and on sports. Fewer than one-in-five see positive impacts. Meanwhile, the share of Americans who have bet money on sports in the past year has not changed much since 2022. Today, 22% of adults say they've personally bet money on sports in the past year. That's a slight uptick from 19% three years ago. This figure includes betting in any of three ways: 1. With friends or family, such as in a private betting pool, fantasy league or casual bet 2. Online with a betting app, sportsbook or casino 3. In person at a casino, racetrack or betting kiosk Further reading: Filipinos Are Addicted to Online Gambling. So Is Their Government.

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No automaker has matched Tesla's ability to deliver over-the-air software updates despite years of effort and billions in spending. Tesla introduced the technology in 2012 and issued 42 updates within six months, Jean-Marie Lapeyre, Capgemini's chief technology officer for automotive, told WIRED. Other automakers ship updates "maybe once a year," Lapeyre said. General Motors actually introduced OTA functionality first in 2010, two years before Tesla, but limited it to the OnStar telematics system. Traditional automakers treat software as one bolt-on component among many. Tesla and other digital-native brands like Rivian, Lucid and Chinese companies including BYD and Xpeng treat it as central. There are now 69 million OTA-capable vehicles in the United States, S&P Global estimates. More than 13 million vehicles were recalled in 2024 due to software-related issues, a 35 percent increase over the prior year. OTA updates cost automakers $66.50 per vehicle for each gigabyte of data, Harman Automotive estimates.

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Open source giant admits intruders broke into dedicated consulting instance, but insists core products untouched

What started as cyber crew bragging has now been confirmed by Red Hat: someone gained access to its consulting GitLab system and walked away with data.…

The Cybersecurity Information Sharing Act expired on Wednesday when the federal government shut down. The law had provided legal protections since 2015 for organizations to share cyber threat intelligence with federal agencies. Without these protections, private sector companies that control most U.S. critical infrastructure face potential legal risks when sharing information about threats. Sen. Gary Peters called the lapse "an open invitation to cybercriminals and hostile actors to attack our economy and our critical infrastructure." The intelligence sharing enabled by CISA 2015 helped expose Chinese campaigns including Volt Typhoon in 2023 and Salt Typhoon last year. Several cybersecurity firms pledged to continue sharing threat data despite the law's expiration. Halcyon and CrowdStrike confirmed they would maintain information sharing. Palo Alto Networks said it remained committed to public-private partnerships but did not specify whether it would continue sharing threat data. Multiple bipartisan reauthorization efforts failed before the shutdown. The House Homeland Security Committee had approved a 10-year extension last month.

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Analysts at Goldman Sachs Global Institute say training is starting to hit its limits, enterprise info troves may be last hope

Those spiffy AI systems that tech companies keep promising require mountains of training data, but high-quality sources may have already run out—unless enterprises can unlock the information trapped behind their firewalls, according to Goldman Sachs…

James Marriott, writing in a column: The world of print is orderly, logical and rational. In books, knowledge is classified, comprehended, connected and put in its place. Books make arguments, propose theses, develop ideas. "To engage with the written word," the media theorist Neil Postman wrote, "means to follow a line of thought, which requires considerable powers of classifying, inference-making and reasoning." As Postman pointed out, it is no accident, that the growth of print culture in the eighteenth century was associated with the growing prestige of reason, hostility to superstition, the birth of capitalism, and the rapid development of science. Other historians have linked the eighteenth century explosion of literacy to the Enlightenment, the birth of human rights, the arrival of democracy and even the beginnings of the industrial revolution. The world as we know it was forged in the reading revolution. Now, we are living through the counter-revolution. More than three hundred years after the reading revolution ushered in a new era of human knowledge, books are dying. Numerous studies show that reading is in free-fall. Even the most pessimistic twentieth-century critics of the screen-age would have struggled to predict the scale of the present crisis. In America, reading for pleasure has fallen by forty per cent in the last twenty years. In the UK, more than a third of adults say they have given up reading. The National Literacy Trust reports "shocking and dispiriting" falls in children's reading, which is now at its lowest level on record. The publishing industry is in crisis: as the author Alexander Larman writes, "books that once would have sold in the tens, even hundreds, of thousands are now lucky to sell in the mid-four figures." [...] What happened was the smartphone, which was widely adopted in developed countries in the mid-2010s. Those years will be remembered as a watershed in human history. Never before has there been a technology like the smartphone. Where previous entertainment technologies like cinema or television were intended to capture their audience's attention for a period, the smartphone demands your entire life. Phones are designed to be hyper-addictive, hooking users on a diet of pointless notifications, inane short-form videos and social media rage bait.

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Cupertino yanks ICEBlock citing safety risks for law enforcement

Apple has deep-sixed an app that tracks the movements of US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents – apparently bowing to government pressure.…

Longtime Slashdot reader theodp writes: Big Tech Told Kids to Code. The Jobs Didn't Follow, a New York Times podcast episode discussing how the promise of a six-figure salary for those who study computer science is turning out to be an empty one for recent grads in the age of AI, drew the ire of the co-founders of nonprofit Code.org, which -- ironically -- is pivoting to AI itself with the encouragement of, and millions from, its tech-giant backers. In a LinkedIn post, Code.org CEO and co-founder Hadi Partovi said the paper and its Monday episode of "The Daily" podcast were cherrypicking anecdotes "to stoke populist fears about tech corporations and AI." He also took to X, tweeting: "Today the NYTimes (falsely) claimed CS majors can't find work. The data tells the opposite story: CS grads have the highest median wage and the fifth-lowest underemployment across all majors. [...] Journalism is broken. Do better NYTimes." To which Code.org co-founder Ali Partovi (Hadi's twin), replied: "I agree 100%. That NYTimes Daily piece was deplorable -- an embarrassment for journalism."

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Overnight shutdown leaves thousands stuck as Oktoberfest crowds stretch city security

Munich Airport was temporarily closed last night following reports of drones buzzing around the area.…

Exploding valuations and mountains of debt co-exist with a US government shutdown. How long can we stay on the hype-cycle rollercoaster?

Analysis In an employee share sell-off this week, OpenAI achieved a nominal value of $500 billion. In terms of valuation, the posterchild of GenAI — which is yet to make a profit — left in its dust companies like Toyota, the world's largest automaker.…

Even spy-tech biz Palantir says 'steady on' as 2.76M Brits demand it be ditched

The British government has finally given more details about the proposed digital ID project, directly responding to the 2.76 million naysayers that signed an online petition calling for it to be ditched.…

Researchers suggest internet-facing portals are exposing 'thousands' of orgs

Oracle has finally broken its silence on those Clop-linked extortion emails, but only to tell customers what they already should have known: patch your damn systems.…

Modder crams working hardware into plastic shell and fires up Tetris

An enterprising nerd has taken LEGO's new Game Boy creation, performed some suitably geeky magic, and turned it into a real Game Boy.…

Snapchat will start charging users who exceed 5GB of saved Memories, with paid plans starting at $1.99/month for 100GB. "If your memories exceed this limit, you'll need to subscribe to one of its new Memories Storage plans," reports TechCrunch. From the report: The company told TechCrunch in an email that the introductory storage plan offers up to 100GB of storage for $1.99 per month. Snapchat+ users will get up to 250GB of storage as part of their $3.99 monthly subscription, while Snapchat Platinum users will get 5TB as part of their $15.99 monthly subscription. Snapchat explains that when it first launched Memories, it didn't expect it to grow to what it has today, as users have saved more than 1 trillion Memories on the platform. Snapchat will provide 12 months of temporary Memories storage for any Memories that exceed the 5GB storage limit. The company notes that users can download Memories directly to their devices. If you're over the limit, but don't sign up for a plan, your oldest Snaps will be saved, while the most recent ones that are over the storage limit will be deleted. Snapchat says the change won't affect most users, as the vast majority have under 5GB of Memories. It will mainly impact those with "thousands of Snaps," the company notes. "It's never easy to transition from receiving a service for free to paying for it, but we hope the value we provide with Memories is worth the cost," Snapchat wrote in a blog post. "These changes will allow us to continue to invest in making Memories better for our entire community."

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UK Power Networks trials Thermify's HeatHub boilers, swapping gas flames for clustered compute

Reusing heat from servers has gained momentum recent years, but UK Power Networks (UKPN) is taking an unusual approach: installing mini datacenters powered by Raspberry Pi hardware in customers homes to provide heating for families struggling with energy costs.…

Names, numbers, and reg plates exposed in latest auto industry cyber-shunt

Renault UK customers are being warned their personal data may be in criminal hands after one of its supplier was hacked.…