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CD Projekt Red's (CDPR) sequel to Cyberpunk 2077, which the studio is now calling Cyberpunk 2, has moved from a "conceptual phase" into preproduction, according to an earnings report released on Wednesday. The Verge: Cyberpunk 2 isn't the official title, CDPR senior PR manager Ola Sondej tells The Verge. "'Cyberpunk 2' just means it's another game in the Cyberpunk universe." The game has had the codename of "Project Orion" since it was announced in 2022. CDPR hasn't shared many details about the game, but did describe it on Wednesday as "the next big game set in the Cyberpunk universe." There are 96 developers working on the title as of April 30th, according to a slide deck. There's no official release date, either, though on an investor call, joint chief executive officer Michal Nowakowski said that the company would deliver the game "in due time."

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Also in preview: a settings backup feature to support OS upgrades

Microsoft is previewing a Windows Update orchestration platform for app developers and management tool vendors, aiming to centralize update scheduling across Windows 11 devices.…

Jensen be limbo, Jensen be quick, Jensen go under the Uncle Sam’s limbo stick

Over the past few years, Uncle Sam has made it progressively harder for US chip designers to flog their AI wares in China. But not impossible.…

An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Verge: Secretary of State Marco Rubio announced Wednesday that the U.S. would restrict visas for "foreign nationals who are responsible for censorship of protected expression in the United States." He called it "unacceptable for foreign officials to issue or threaten arrest warrants on U.S. citizens or U.S. residents for social media posts on American platforms while physically present on U.S. soil" and "for foreign officials to demand that American tech platforms adopt global content moderation policies or engage in censorship activity that reaches beyond their authority and into the United States." It's not yet clear how or against whom the policy will be enforced, but seems to implicate Europe's Digital Services Act, a law that came into effect in 2023 with the goal of making online platforms safer by imposing requirements on the largest platforms around removing illegal content and providing transparency about their content moderation. Though it's not mentioned directly in the press release about the visa restrictions, the Trump administration has slammed the law on multiple occasions, including in remarks earlier this year by Vice President JD Vance. The State Department's homepage currently links to an article on its official Substack, where senior advisor for the Bureau of Democracy, Human Rights, and Labor Samuel Samson critiques the DSA as a tool to "silence dissident voices through Orwellian content moderation." He adds, "Independent regulators now police social media companies, including prominent American platforms like X, and threaten immense fines for non-compliance with their strict speech regulations." "We will not tolerate encroachments upon American sovereignty," Rubio says in the announcement, "especially when such encroachments undermine the exercise of our fundamental right to free speech."

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According to Bloomberg's Mark Gurman (paywalled), this year's iOS update won't be called iOS 19. "Instead, Apple is planning to call it 'iOS 26' as part of a new year-based naming strategy," reports 9to5Mac. The new naming scheme will apply to all of Apple's software platforms. From the report: Bloomberg explains that Apple is making this change to "bring consistency to its branding and move away from an approach that can be confusing to customers and developers." The branding alignment comes as Apple is also reportedly planning dramatic redesigns for all of its platforms. The goal seems to be to unify everything both in terms of naming and design.

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'Everyone's holding their breath'

Interview It's hard to pinpoint exactly when the "culture of fear" began to permeate America's top cyber-defense agency.…

Telegram has partnered with xAI to integrate the Grok chatbot into its platform for one year, with xAI paying $300 million in cash and equity. Telegram will also receive 50% of subscription revenue from Grok. TechCrunch reports: Earlier this year, xAI made the Grok chatbot available to Telegram's premium users. It seems Grok might now be made available to all users. A video posted by [Telegram CEO Pavel Durov] on X suggested that Grok can be pinned on top of chats within the app, and users can also ask questions to Grok from the search bar. Notably, Meta has also integrated Meta AI into the search bar on Instagram and WhatsApp. The video also shows that you will be able to use Grok for writing suggestions, summarizing chats, links, and documents, and creating stickers. Grok will supposedly also help answer questions for businesses and assist with moderation.

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Prototype packs triple the energy density of lithium-ion, they claim

MIT boffins have built a prototype fuel cell using liquid sodium and air that could one day power aircraft, and may help capture carbon through its byproducts.…

An anonymous reader quotes a report from 9to5Google: Google Photos was announced at I/O 2015 and the company is now celebrating the app's 10th birthday with a redesign of the photo editor. Google is redesigning the Photos editor so that it "provides helpful suggestions and puts all our powerful editing tools in one place." It starts with a new fullscreen viewer that places the date, time, and location at the top of your screen. Meanwhile, it's now Share, Edit, Add to (instead of Lens), and Trash at the bottom. Once editing, Google Photos has moved controls for aspect ratio, flip, and rotate to be above the image. In the top-left corner, we have Auto Frame, which debuted in Magic Editor on the Pixel 9, to fill-in backgrounds and is now coming to more devices. Underneath, we get options for Enhance, Dynamic, and "AI Enhance" in the Auto tab. That's followed by Lighting, Color, and Composition, as well as a search shortcut: "You can use AI-powered suggestions that combine multiple effects for quick edits in a variety of tailored options, or you can tap specific parts of an image to get suggested tools for editing that area." The editor allows you to circle or "tap specific parts of an image to get suggested tools for editing that area." This includes the subject, background, or some other aspect. You then see the Blur background, Add portrait light, Sharpen, Move and Reimagine appear in the example below. We also see the redesigned sliders throughout this updated interface. This Google Photos editor redesign "will begin rolling out globally to Android devices next month, with iOS following later this year." We already know the app is set for a Material 3 Expressive redesign. Meanwhile, Google Photos is starting to roll out the ability to share albums with a QR code. This method makes for easy viewing and adding with people nearby. Google even suggests printing it out when in (physical) group settings. Google shared a few tips, tricks and tools for the new editor in a blog post.

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So much for buttering up ChatGPT with 'Please' and 'Thank you'

Google co-founder Sergey Brin claims that threatening generative AI models produces better results.…

Japanese police referred five individuals and a company to prosecutors last week for allegedly operating a website that published detailed movie plots without permission from rights holders. The Miyagi Prefectural Police Headquarters and Minamisanriku Police Station sent the case to the Sendai District Public Prosecutors Office on suspicion of violating the Copyright Act. The Content Overseas Distribution Association described the case as having "very few precedents for a corporation being referred to the prosecutor's office on suspicion of violating the Copyright Act, making this an extremely rare case." The website posted detailed content from films including "Godzilla Minus One" and four others copyrighted by Toho, "Shin Kamen Rider" and two others by Toei, "Neck" and one other by KADOKAWA, and "Shin Ultraman" by Tsuburaya Productions. The site listed more than 8,000 films with complete storylines, character names, dialogue, and scene descriptions.

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Data analytics and risk management biz says software dev platform breached, not itself

LexisNexis Risk Solutions (LNRS) is the latest big-name organization to disclose a serious cyberattack leading to data theft, with the number of affected individuals pegged at 364,333.…

The world faces an 80% probability of breaking another annual temperature record within the next five years, according to a forecast released Wednesday by the World Meteorological Organization and the UK Meteorological Office. The projections, derived from more than 200 computer simulations run by 10 global scientific centers, indicate an 86% chance that one of the next five years will surpass the 1.5 degrees Celsius warming threshold established by the Paris climate accord, with a 70% chance that the entire five-year period will average above that milestone. For the first time, the agencies identified a slight possibility that global annual temperatures could reach the more alarming 2 degrees Celsius benchmark before the decade's end.

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Latest kernel includes 14,612 changesets, Penguinistas been busy

Over the holiday weekend, Linus Torvalds released the latest Linux kernel – signalling the end of the line for 486-class chips.…

A fairly comprehensive look at the early personal computer culture reveals that from 1975 through early 1977, personal computers remained "almost exclusively the province of hobbyists who loved to play with computers and found them inherently fascinating," according to newly surfaced historical research. When BYTE magazine launched in 1975, its cover called computers "the world's greatest toy," reflecting the recreational rather than practical focus of early adopters. A BYTE magazine survey from late 1976 showed these pioneers were remarkably homogeneous: 72% held at least a bachelor's degree, had a median annual income of $20,000 ($123,000 in 2025 dollars), and were overwhelmingly male at 99%. Rather than developing practical software applications, early users gravitated toward games, particularly Star Trek simulations that appeared frequently in magazine advertisements and user group demonstrations. The hobbyist community organized around local clubs like the famous Homebrew Computer Club, retail stores, and specialized magazines that helped establish what one researcher calls "a mythology of the microcomputer." This narrative positioned hobbyists as democratizing heroes who "ripped the computer and the knowledge of how to use it from the hands of the priests, sharing freedom and power with the masses," challenging what they termed the "computer priesthood" of institutional gatekeepers. This self-contained hobbyist culture would soon be "subsumed by a larger phenomenon" as businessmen began targeting mass markets in 1977.

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Japan Post has launched a "digital address" system that links seven-digit combinations of numbers and letters to physical addresses. From a report: Under the system, users can input these seven-digit codes on online shopping websites, and their addresses will automatically appear on the sites. People can obtain digital addresses by registering with Japan Post's Yu ID membership service. Their digital addresses will not change even if their physical addresses change. Their new addresses will be linked to the codes if they submit notices of address changes.

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Open source in-process OLAP system launches rival to Iceberg and Delta Lake table format, and more

With a combined market value of around $150 billion, Snowflake and Databricks have divergent visions on how to get customers' analytics and machine learning tools to their data, which is often spread across different systems.…

The recent surge in cyberattacks is pushing cyber insurers toward a fundamental reassessment of premium pricing, Bloomberg reports, with industry analysts warning of an impending "inflection point" that could reshape the market. Marks & Spencer's impending $404 million hit to its operating profit from a recent hack underscores claims that will "attract intense scrutiny from insurers," according to cybersecurity expert Adam Casey. While incidents like this might not trigger immediate premium hikes across the board, they might likely contribute to an upward pricing trend. Panmure Liberum analyst Abid Hussain said that premiums have recently been falling as policy coverage has tightened, but the industry now faces a critical decision point. "There's going to be another step change, either in the policy wording or in the premiums, or both," Hussain said.

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Project shutdowns at Mozilla are not encouraging, though

Another month, another new version of Firefox, with several handy changes. The future is less certain, though.…

Sales of blue book exam booklets have surged dramatically across the nation as professors turn to analog solutions to prevent ChatGPT cheating. The University of California, Berkeley reported an 80% increase in blue book sales over the past two academic years, while Texas A&M saw 30% growth and the University of Florida recorded nearly 50% increases this school year. The surge comes as students who were freshmen when ChatGPT launched in 2022 approach senior year, having had access to AI throughout their college careers.

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