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Investors cash in as design firm goes public after takeover dreams dashed

Figma is offering 36,937,080 shares of Class A common stock at $33 apiece, in an initial public offering that values the web design tool developer at $19.3 billion.…

Government officials say they are monitoring the situation

A major supplier of healthcare equipment to the UK's National Health Service and local councils is on the verge of collapse 16 months after falling victim to cyber criminals.…

Crew-11 prepares for liftoff on Musk rocket while Boeing's Calamity Capsule remains grounded

The next International Space Station (ISS) crew is set to launch today, commanded by an astronaut who gave up her Crew-9 seat to make way for the Boeing Starliner test team.…

Startup’s workaround reuses stuck compute slots to rein in runaway function costs

Vercel claims it's slashed AWS Lambda costs by up to 95 percent by reusing idle instances that would otherwise rack up charges while waiting on slow external services like LLMs or databases.…

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Reuters: Australia said on Wednesday it will add YouTube to sites covered by its world-first ban on social media for teenagers, reversing an earlier decision to exempt the Alphabet-owned video-sharing site and potentially setting up a legal challenge. The decision came after the internet regulator urged the government last month to overturn the YouTube carve-out, citing a survey that found 37% of minors reported harmful content on the site, the worst showing for a social media platform. "I'm calling time on it," Prime Minister Anthony Albanese said in a statement highlighting that Australian children were being negatively affected by online platforms, and reminding social media of their social responsibility. "I want Australian parents to know that we have their backs." The decision broadens the ban set to take effect in December. YouTube says it is used by nearly three-quarters of Australians aged 13 to 15, and should not be classified as social media because its main activity is hosting videos. "Our position remains clear: YouTube is a video sharing platform with a library of free, high-quality content, increasingly viewed on TV screens. It's not social media," a YouTube spokesperson said by email.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Deal for legacy applications support reaches £322M as they continue to be decommissioned

UK tax collector His Majesty's Revenue and Customs (HMRC) has awarded Capgemini a £107 million support and services deal, without competition, under a relationship that started more than twenty years ago.…

UK's Online Safety Act kicks off about as well as everyone expected

Analysis With the UK's Online Safety Act (OSA) now in effect, it was only a matter of time before tech-savvy under-18s figured out how to bypass the rules and regain access to adult content.…

Ground control to Majorana

Deep dive The journal Science is preparing to remove an editorial expression of concern that cast doubt on a five-year-old Microsoft quantum computing research paper.…

sciencehabit shares a report from Science.org: Peacocks have a secret hidden in their brightly colored tail feathers: tiny reflective structures that can amplify light into a laser beam. After dyeing the feathers and energizing them with an external light source, researchers discovered they emitted narrow beams of yellow-green laser light. They say the study, published this month in Scientific Reports, offers the first example of a laser cavity in the animal kingdom. [...] Scientists have long known that peacock feathers also exhibit "structural color" -- nature's pigment-free way to create dazzling hues. Ordered microstructures within the feathers reflect light at specific frequencies, leading to their vivid blues and greens and iridescence. But Florida Polytechnic University physicist Nathan Dawson and his colleagues wanted to go a step further and see whether those microstructures could also function as a laser cavity. After staining the feathers with a common dye and pumping them with soft pulses of light, they used laboratory instruments to detect beams of yellow-green laser light that were too faint to see with the naked eye. They emerged from the feathers' eyespots, at two distinct wavelengths. Surprisingly, differently colored parts of the eyespots emitted the same wavelengths of laser light, even though each region would presumably vary in its microstructure. Just because peacock feathers emit laser light doesn't mean the birds are somehow using this emission. But there are still ramifications, Dawson says. He suggests that looking for laser light in biomaterials could help identify arrays of regular microstructures within them. In medicine, for example, certain foreign objects -- viruses with distinct geometric shapes, perhaps -- could be classified and identified based on their ability to be lasers, he says. The work also demonstrates how biological materials could one day yield lasers that could be put safely into the human body to emit light for biosensing, medical imaging, and therapeutics. "I always like to think that for many technological achievements that benefit humans," Dawson says, "some organism somewhere has already developed it through some evolutionary process."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Italian operator calls for lawmakers to wake up to the critical role played by peering

Internet Exchange Points are an underappreciated resource that all internet users rely on, but governments have unfortunately ignored them, despite their status as critical infrastructure.…

But may face competition in its core smartphone segment as Samsung says it’s found a premium handset-maker who wants its Exynos SoCs

Chip design firm Qualcomm says it’s in “advanced discussions” with a hyperscale customer who wants its silicon to use in datacenters but may lose a major mobile customer to Samsung.…