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A mounting body of research is making it harder for companies to justify what most of them still do -- push experienced workers out the door just as they're hitting their professional peak. A 2025 study published in the journal Intelligence analyzed 16 cognitive, emotional and personality dimensions and found that while processing speed declines after early adulthood, other capabilities -- including the ability to avoid distractions and accumulated knowledge -- continue to improve, putting peak overall functioning between ages 55 and 60. AARP and OECD data back this up at the firm level: a 10-percentage-point increase in workers above 50 correlates with roughly 1.1% higher productivity. A 2022 Boston Consulting Group study found cross-generational teams outperform homogeneous ones. UK retailer B&Q staffed a store largely with older workers in 1989 and saw profits rise 18%. BMW implemented 70 ergonomic changes at a German plant in 2007 and recorded a 7% productivity gain. Yet an Urban Institute analysis of U.S. data from 1992 to 2016 found more than half of workers above 50 were pushed out of long-held jobs before they chose to retire.

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Moving 40% of semiconductor production to America is 'impossible' says vice premier

Taiwan's vice-premier has ruled out relocating 40 percent of the country's semiconductor production to the US, calling the Trump administration's goal "impossible."…

Euro watchdog says Zuckercorp blocked rival assistants, weighs emergency action to force 'em back in

Brussels has accused Meta of breaking EU competition rules by locking rival AI chatbots out of WhatsApp, opening the door to emergency action that could force the tech giant to let competitors back onto the platform.…

The blog OMG Ubuntu reports that a new version of the Raspberry Pi 4 Model B has been (quietly) introduced. "The key difference? It now uses a dual-RAM configuration." The Raspberry Pi 4 Model B (PCB 13a) adopts a dual-RAM configuration to 'improve supply chain flexibility' and manufacturing efficiency, per a company product change notice document. Earlier versions of the Raspberry Pi 4 use a single RAM chip on the top of the board. The new revision adds a second LPDDR4 chip to the underside, with a couple of passive components also moved over... In moving to a dual-chip layout, Raspberry Pi can combine two smaller — and marginally cheaper — modules to hit the same RAM totals amidst fluctuating component costs... This change will not impact performance (for better or worse). The Broadcom BCM2711 SoC has a 32-bit wide memory interface so the bandwidth stays identical; this is not doubling the memory bus, it's just a physical split, not a logical one. Plus, the new board is fully compatible with existing official accessories, HATs and add-ons. All operating systems that support the Pi 4 will work, but as the memory setup is different a new version of the boot-loader will need to be flashed first.

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Security devs forced to hide Boolean logic from overeager optimizer

FOSDEM 2026 The creators of security software have encountered an unlikely foe in their attempts to protect us: modern compilers.…

Average Swiss salaries dwarf those on offer across the rest of the continent

European techies looking for the biggest payday are far better off in Switzerland than anywhere else, with average salaries eclipsing all other countries on the continent.…

UK's pay-to-watch license fee gets inflation-linked hike amid funding debate

Brits will soon pay more to legally watch the BBC's output than to subscribe to some of the world's biggest streaming services, after the UK government confirmed the TV license fee will climb to £180 a year from April.…

Officials explore issue affecting infrastructure after CERT-EU detected suspicious activity

Brussels is digging into a cyber break-in that targeted the European Commission's mobile device management systems, potentially giving intruders a peek inside the official phones carried by EU staff.…

One-to-one and group messaging, encrypted VoIP calls, video conferencing – the open protocol handles them all

FOSDEM 2026 Amid growing interest in digital sovereignty and getting data out of the corporate cloud and into organizations' ownership, the Matrix open communication protocol is thriving.…

Sudo make me a star

Opinion Thirty years is a big ol' chunk of anyone's life. It can take you from new parent to new grandparent, from bright young thing to mid-life crisis, and from shaver to graybeard. In the case of Todd C Miller, one thing hasn't changed. He's been the sole maintainer of the Linux sudo utility. He's not giving up just yet, but he needs help and no help has come.…

"Elon Musk said on Sunday that SpaceX has shifted its focus to building a 'self-growing city' on the moon," reports Reuters, "which could be achieved in less than 10 years." SpaceX still intends to start on Musk's long-held ambition of a city on Mars within five to seven years, he wrote on his X social media platform, "but the overriding priority is securing the future of civilization and the Moon is faster." Musk's comments echo a Wall Street Journal report on Friday, stating that SpaceX has told investors it would prioritize going to the moon and attempt a trip to Mars at a later time, targeting March 2027 for an uncrewed lunar landing. As recently as last year, Musk said that he aimed to send an uncrewed mission to Mars by the end of 2026.

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You can fix all sorts of things with a paperclip, but not gullibility

Who, Me? You can fool some of the people some of the time, but The Register tries to entertain all of its readers most of the time and especially early on Monday mornings, when we present a new installment of "Who, Me?" – the reader-contributed column that shares your stories of workplace mayhem and mischief.…

Upgraders and home lab builders flaunt their memory-inflated wealth

The rising price of memory has produced an interesting phenomenon: technologists wondering if the memory they have installed in home labs, or bottom drawers, might make them rich.…

As Super Bowl Sunday comes to a close, America's National Football League "is challenging innovators to improve the facemask on football helmets to reduce concussions in the game," reports the Associated Press: The league announced on Friday at an innovation summit for the Super Bowl the next round in the HealthTECH Challenge series, a crowdsourced competition designed to accelerate the development of cutting-edge football helmets and new standards for player safety. The challenge invites inventors, engineers, startups, academic teams and established companies to improve the impact protection and design of football helmets through improvements to how facemasks absorb and reduce the effects of contact on the field... Most progress on helmet safety has come from improvements to the shell and padding, helping to reduce the overall rate of concussions. Working with the helmet industry, the league has brought in position-specific helmets, with those for quarterbacks, for example, having more padding in the back after data showed most concussions for QBs came when the back of the head slammed to the turf. But the facemask has mostly remained the same. This past season, 44% of in-game concussions resulted from impact to the player's facemask, up from 29% in 2015, according to data gathered by the NFL. "What we haven't seen over that period of time are any changes of any note to the facemask," [said Jeff Miller, the NFL's executive vice president overseeing player health and safety]... "Now we see, given the changes in our concussion numbers and injuries to players, that as changes are made to the helmet, fewer and fewer concussions are caused by hits to the shell, and more and more concussions as a percentage are by hits to the facemask..." Selected winners will receive up to $100,000 in aggregate funding, as well as expert development support to help move their concepts from the lab to the playing field. Winners will be announced in August, according to the article, "and Miller said he expected helmet manufacturers to start implementing any improvements into helmets soon after that."

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PLUS: China broadens cryptocurrency crackdown; Australian facial recognition privacy revisited; Singapore debuts electric VTOL; and more!

Asia In Brief The Commissioner of Police in the Indian city of Hyderabad, population 11 million, has called for AI agents to be issued with identity cards – or at least their digital equivalent.…

"How Chinese is your car?" asks the Wall Street Journal. "Automakers are racing to work it out." Modern cars are packed with internet-connected widgets, many of them containing Chinese technology. Now, the car industry is scrambling to root out that tech ahead of a looming deadline, a test case for America's ability to decouple from Chinese supply chains. New U.S. rules will soon ban Chinese software in vehicle systems that connect to the cloud, part of an effort to prevent cameras, microphones and GPS tracking in cars from being exploited by foreign adversaries. The move is "one of the most consequential and complex auto regulations in decades," according to Hilary Cain, head of policy at trade group the Alliance for Automotive Innovation. "It requires a deep examination of supply chains and aggressive compliance timelines." Carmakers will need to attest to the U.S. government that, as of March 17, core elements of their products don't contain code that was written in China or by a Chinese company. The rule also covers software for advanced autonomous driving and will be extended to connectivity hardware starting in 2029. Connected cars made by Chinese or China-controlled companies are also banned, wherever their software comes from... The Commerce Department's Bureau of Industry and Security, which introduced the connected-vehicle rule, is also allowing the use of Chinese code that is transferred to a non-Chinese entity before March 17. That carve-out has sparked a rush of corporate restructuring, according to Matt Wyckhouse, chief executive of cybersecurity firm Finite State. Global suppliers are relocating China-based software teams, while Chinese companies are seeking new owners for operations in the West. Thanks to long-time Slashdot reader schwit1 for sharing the article.

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But first, kernel 6.19 is upon us, with many goodies

Penguin emperor Linus Torvalds has announced the next version of the Linux kernel will be version 7.0, a matter of some small interest, because it continues his convention of not using version numbers he can’t count on his fingers and toes, and perhaps cements a numbering convention that sees kernel series end with version 19.…

"You can hear the hum of the drone," says a local newscaster, "but then the propellors come into contact with the building, chunks of the drone later seen falling down. The next video shows the drone on the ground, surrounded by smoke... "Amazon tells us there was minimal damage to the apartment building, adding they are working with the appropriate people to handle any repairs." But there were people standing outside, notes the woman who filmed the crash, and the falling drone "could've hit them, and they would've hurt." More from USA Today: Cesarina Johnson, who captured the collision from her window, told USA TODAY that the collision seemed to happen "almost immediately" after she began to record the drone in action... "The propellers on the thing were still moving, and you could smell it was starting to burn," Johnson told Fox 4 News. "And you see a few sparks in one of my videos. Luckily, nothing really caught on fire where it got, it escalated really crazy." According to the outlet, firefighters were called out of an abundance of caution, but the "drone never caught fire...." Amazon employees can be seen surveying the scene in the clip. Johnson told the outlet that firefighters and Amazon workers worked together to clean up before the drone was loaded into a truck. Another local news report points out Amazon only began drone delivery in the area late last year. The San Antonio Express News points out that America's Federal Aviation Administration "opened an investigation into Amazon's drone delivery program in November after one of its drone struck an Internet cable line in Waco."

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PLUS: OpenClaw teams with VirusTotal; Crypto kidnappings in France; Critical vulns at SmarterMail; And more

Infosec In Brief So-hot-right-now AI assistant OpenClaw, which is very much not secure right now, has teamed up with security scanning service VirusTotal.…

It's the first "AI" Super Bowl, argues the tech/business writer at Slate, with AI company advertisements taking center stage, even while consumers insist to surveyors that they're "mostly negative" about AI-generated ads. Last year AI companies spent over $1.7 billion on AI-related ads, notes the Washington Post, adding the blitz this year will be "inescapable" — even while surveys show Americans "doubt the technology is good for them or the world..." Slate wonders if that means history will repeat itself... The sheer saturation of new A.I. gambits, added to the mismatch with consumer priorities, gives this year's NFL showcase the sector-specific recession-indicator vibes that have defined Super Bowls of the past. 2022 was a pride-cometh-before-the-fall event for the cryptocurrency bubble, which collapsed in such spectacular fashion later that year — thanks largely to Super Bowl ad client Sam Bankman-Fried — that none of its major brands have ever returned to the broadcast. (... the coins themselves are once again crashing, hard.) Mortgage lender Ameriquest was as conspicuous a presence in the mid-2000s Super Bowls as it was an absence in the later aughts, having folded in 2007 when the risky subprime loans it specialized in helped kick off the financial crisis. And then there were all those bowl-game commercials for websites like Pets.com and Computer.com in 2000, when the dot-com rush brought attention to a slew of digital startups that went bust with the bubble. Does this Super Bowl's record-breaking A.I. ad splurge also portend a coming pop? Look at the business environment: The biggest names in the industry are swapping unimaginable stacks of cash exclusively with one another. One firm's stock price depends on another firm's projections, which depend on another contractor's successes. Necessary infrastructure is meeting resistance, and all-around investment in these projects is riskier than ever. And yet, the sector is still willing to break the bank for the Super Bowl — even though, time and again, we've already seen how this particular game plays out. People are using AI apps. And Meta has aired an ad where a man in rural New Mexico "says he landed a good job in his hometown at a Meta data center," notes the Washington Post. "It's interspersed with scenes from a rodeo and other folksy tropes, in one of . The TV commercial (and a similar one set in Iowa), aired in Washington, D.C., and a handful of other communities, suggesting it's aimed at convincing U.S. elected officials that AI brings job opportunities. But the Post argues the AI industry "is selling a vision of the future that Americans don't like." And they offer cite Allen Adamson, a brand strategist and co-founder of marketing firm Metaforce, who says the perennial question about advertising is whether it can fix bad vibes about a product. "The answer since the dawn of marketing and advertising is no."

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