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Nvidia and Google announced today a new cloud gaming plan called GeForce Now Fast Pass that is exclusive to Chromebooks. Anyone who purchases a new Chromebook will receive a year of the service included with their device at no additional charge. Fast Pass allows Chromebook owners to stream more than 2,000 games from their existing Steam, Epic or Xbox libraries. The service removes ads and lets users skip the queue that typically adds two minutes or more of wait time on GeForce Now's free tier. Users get 10 hours of cloud gaming each month. Up to five unused hours can roll over to the following month. Nvidia offers other paid plans starting at $9.99 per month that support higher resolutions, faster frame rates, RTX ray-tracing, and access to a larger game library that includes thousands of additional titles. The companies did not announce pricing for Fast Pass after the first year ends.

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A Centers for Disease Control and Prevention webpage that previously made the case that vaccines don't cause autism now says they might. WSJ: The contents of the webpage came up during Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. Senate confirmation process. Sen. Bill Cassidy (R., La.) in February said Kennedy had assured him that, if he was confirmed, the CDC would "not remove statements on their website pointing out that vaccines do not cause autism." The revised webpage says: "The claim 'vaccines do not cause autism' is not an evidence-based claim because studies have not ruled out the possibility that infant vaccines cause autism. Studies supporting a link have been ignored by health authorities." The new text posted Wednesday also notes that the Department of Health and Human Services has launched "a comprehensive assessment" to probe the causes of autism.

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Researchers tried to get ChatGPT to do evil, but it didn't do a good job

LLMs are getting better at writing malware - but they're still not ready for prime time.…

Microsoft's push to transform Windows into an "agentic OS" that allows AI agents to control PCs is drawing user backlash similar to the Windows 8 controversy, as the company marks the operating system's 40th anniversary this week, writes Tom Warren, a reporter at The Verge who has been covering Microsoft for nearly two decades. Windows chief Pavan Davuluri announced the agentic OS plans in a post on X last week and faced immediate criticism in hundreds of replies before they were locked days later. "It's evolving into a product that's driving people to Mac and Linux," one person wrote, while another asked for a return to Windows 7's "clean UI, clean icon, a unified control panel, no bloat apps, no ads, just a pure performant OS." Davuluri later responded to software engineer Gergely Orosz, saying "we care deeply about developers" and acknowledging Microsoft has "work to do on the experience, both on the everyday usability, from inconsistent dialogs to power user experiences." Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella told the Dwarkesh Podcast that the company's business "which today is an end user tools business, will become, essentially an infrastructure business in support of agents doing work." The Recall feature already spooked users when it was initially turned on by default before Microsoft reworked it to be opt-in. Navjot Virk, corporate vice president of Windows experiences, told The Verge that "every user can use [AI agents] when they're ready. It's their choice, they decide."

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LLM makers may be training on user chat with few privacy safeguards, lawmakers hear

The US House of Representatives has heard that LLM builders can exploit users’ conversations for further training and commercial benefit with little oversight or concern for privacy risks.…

Autonomous electric tractor startup Monarch Tractor -- which we covered in 2022 -- warned staff Thursday it may need to lay off more than 100 employees, or possibly even "shut down," according to a company-wide memo obtained by TechCrunch. The report adds: The memo comes after Monarch Tractor was already cutting some positions over the last few weeks at its California corporate facilities and remote teams in India and Singapore, according to multiple former employees who spoke with TechCrunch on the condition of anonymity. Monarch Tractor was founded in 2018 by a team that included a former top executive at Tesla's first gigafactory and Carlo Mondavi, a scion of the famous winemaking family. The company raised at least $220 million, including $133 million in 2024, as it pursued a goal of making "driver optional" autonomous tractors that could perform tasks at places like wineries and other fruit farms.

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If at first you don’t succeed, swing again - Big Tech certainly isn’t complaining

The Trump administration and congressional Republicans are trying again to eliminate state-level AI regulations in favor of a federal standard. The plan faces opposition from many state governments and civil-society organizations, while AI vendors have welcomed it.…

Android's Quick Share file transfer service can now work with Apple's AirDrop, allowing users to send files between iPhones and Android devices. Google has started rolling out the feature to its Pixel 10 family of smartphones. The cross-platform compatibility includes security protections that the company says independent security experts tested. Google said it built the feature in response to user requests for simpler file sharing between devices regardless of manufacturer. The company plans to expand availability to additional Android devices.

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EWS-powered email only for now, with calendars and contacts still on the to-do list

It's easy to forget in the FOSS world, but Exchange still runs most corporate email – and the new version of Thunderbird can talk to it directly.…

A federal judge in New York denied Disney's request to block Sling TV's short-term passes, which give viewers the ability to stream live content for as little as one day. From a report: In a ruling on Tuesday, US District Judge Arun Subramanian ruled that Disney didn't prove that Sling TV's passes caused "irreparable harm" to the entertainment giant, as reported earlier by Cord Cutters. Disney sued Sling shortly after the live TV streaming service started allowing viewers to purchase temporary access to its library of channels, starting at a single payment of $4.99 for a one-day pass. Several channels included in the package are owned by Disney, including ESPN, ESPN2, ESPN3, and Disney Channel. In its lawsuit, Disney argued that the passes violate an agreement with Sling TV that says the service must give subscribers access to its content through monthly subscriptions. However, Judge Subramanian argues that this claim isn't likely to succeed, as the contract doesn't stipulate a "minimum subscription length," adding that the agreement's "broad definition" of a subscriber "clearly covers users of the Passes."

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PowerShell script locked thousands of workers out of their accounts

An Ohio IT contractor has pleaded guilty to breaking into his former employer's systems and causing nearly $1 million worth of damage after being fired.…

Quick and dirty driver aims to undo slowdown introduced in OS patch

The Windows 11 October 2025 Update is still causing headaches for users of Microsoft's flagship operating system.…

Google and Microsoft are catching up, while Oracle and neoclouds are growing from a small base

The big three cloud companies are all growing thanks to an expanding market, but Amazon is under increasing pressure from Microsoft and Google, while newcomers are on the rise.…

Networking vendor claims rival helped portray it as a national-security risk in the US

TP-Link is suing rival networking vendor Netgear, alleging that the rival and its CEO carried out a smear campaign by falsely suggesting, it says, that the biz had been infiltrated by the Chinese government.…

An anonymous reader shares a report: For the past several years, America has been using its young people as lab rats in a sweeping, if not exactly thought-out, education experiment. Schools across the country have been lowering standards and removing penalties for failure. The results are coming into focus. Five years ago, about 30 incoming freshmen at UC San Diego arrived with math skills below high-school level. Now, according to a recent report from UC San Diego faculty and administrators, that number is more than 900 -- and most of those students don't fully meet middle-school math standards. Many students struggle with fractions and simple algebra problems. Last year, the university, which admits fewer than 30 percent of undergraduate applicants, launched a remedial-math course that focuses entirely on concepts taught in elementary and middle school. (According to the report, more than 60 percent of students who took the previous version of the course couldn't divide a fraction by two.) One of the course's tutors noted that students faced more issues with "logical thinking" than with math facts per se. They didn't know how to begin solving word problems. The university's problems are extreme, but they are not unique. Over the past five years, all of the other University of California campuses, including UC Berkeley and UCLA, have seen the number of first-years who are unprepared for precalculus double or triple. George Mason University, in Virginia, revamped its remedial-math summer program in 2023 after students began arriving at their calculus course unable to do algebra, the math-department chair, Maria Emelianenko, told me. "We call it quantitative literacy, just knowing which fraction is larger or smaller, that the slope is positive when it is going up," Janine Wilson, the chair of the undergraduate economics program at UC Davis, told me. "Things like that are just kind of in our bones when we are college ready. We are just seeing many folks without that capability." Part of what's happening here is that as more students choose STEM majors, more of them are being funneled into introductory math courses during their freshman year. But the national trend is very clear: America's students are getting much worse at math. The decline started about a decade ago and sharply accelerated during the coronavirus pandemic. The average eighth grader's math skills, which rose steadily from 1990 to 2013, are now a full school year behind where they were in 2013, according to the National Assessment of Educational Progress, the gold standard for tracking academic achievement. Students in the bottom tenth percentile have fallen even further behind. Only the top 10 percent have recovered to 2013 levels.

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An anonymous reader writes: U.S. wireless carrier Verizon said Thursday it will cut more than 13,000 jobs in its largest single layoff as it works to shrink costs and restructure operations. Verizon also said it plans to convert 179 corporate-owned retail stores into franchised operations and close one store. Verizon's new CEO, Dan Schulman, said in a note to employees the company would reduce its workforce by more than 13,000 employees across the organization, and significantly reduce outsourced and other outside labor expenses. Related: Delayed September report shows U.S. added 119,000 jobs, more than expected; unemployment rate at 4.4%

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Privacy cops say attack wasn't just bad luck but a result of sloppy homework

Canadian privacy watchdogs say that school boards must shoulder part of the blame for the PowerSchool mega-breach, not just the ed-tech giant that lost control of millions of student and staff records.…

An anonymous reader shares a report: A Microsoft executive is questioning why more people aren't impressed with AI, a week after the company touted the evolution of Windows into an "agentic OS," which immediately triggered backlash. "Jeez there so many cynics! It cracks me up when I hear people call AI underwhelming," tweeted Mustafa Suleyman, the CEO for Microsoft's AI group. Suleyman added that he grew up playing the old-school 2D Snake game on a Nokia phone. "The fact that people are unimpressed that we can have a fluent conversation with a super smart AI that can generate any image/video is mindblowing to me," he wrote.

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Pair say digital twin-powered scheduling will cut costs, shrink timelines for 10 planned reactors

Google and atomic power biz Westinghouse Electric claim that AI will speed construction and cut the cost of building the new US power plants it is planning in response to rising demands for energy to fuel AI.…

OpenAI won't say who audits its books. The company, which projects to hit an ARR of $20 billion this year and is valued at $500 billion, has committed to spending about $1.4 trillion on data centers over the next decade. It accounts for roughly two-thirds of unfulfilled contracts at Oracle and two-fifths at CoreWeave. Microsoft alone holds around $375 billion in unfulfilled contracts with OpenAI. Reuters reported the company may target a $1 trillion valuation for a potential IPO in coming years. Most companies at this scale use one of the Big Four accounting firms: Deloitte, EY, KPMG or PwC. OpenAI declined to comment to Financial Times. A person close to the organization told the publication the company has "an industry standard audit with one of the Big Four firms." The company's latest Form 990 filing lists Fontanello, Duffield, & Otake -- a small San Francisco accountancy firm -- as the paid preparer. The form does say an independent accountant audited the statements. Michael Burry, last night: "Can anyone name [OpenAI's] auditor?"

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