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President Trump signed a long-expected executive action on Thursday calling on U.S. Education Secretary Linda McMahon to "take all necessary steps to facilitate the closure of the Department of Education and return authority over education to the States and local communities." From a report: "We're going to be returning education, very simply, back to the states where it belongs," Trump said. "And this is a very popular thing to do, but much more importantly, it's a common sense thing to do, and it's going to work, absolutely." The move has been expected since early February, when the White House revealed its intentions but withheld the action until after McMahon's Senate confirmation. It now arrives more than a week after the Trump administration has already begun sweeping layoffs at the Education Department. According to the administration's own numbers, Trump inherited a department with 4,133 employees. Nearly 600 workers have since chosen to leave, by resigning or retiring. And last week, 1,300 workers were told they would lose their jobs as part of a reduction in force. That leaves 2,183 staff at the department -- roughly half the size it was just a few weeks ago. The order instructs McMahon to act "to the maximum extent appropriate and permitted by law," an acknowledgement that the department and its signature responsibilities were created by Congress and cannot legally be ended without congressional approval. That would almost certainly require 60 votes in the U.S. Senate to overcome a Democratic filibuster.

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Slop-making machine will feed unauthorized scrapers what they so richly deserve, hopefully without poisoning the internet

Cloudflare has created a bot-busting AI to make life hell for AI crawlers.…

LG is shutting down Art Lab, its NFT marketplace for TVs. From a report: In a notice posted to its website, LG says it has made the "difficult decision" to close the platform on June 17th. LG launched its Art Lab app during the NFT craze in 2022, billing it as a way to "buy, sell and enjoy high-quality digital artwork" from your TV. It added new digital art to the platform through "groundbreaking" NFT drops, which users could purchase by scanning a QR code to complete transactions through Wallypto, LG's crypto wallet app.

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Feds want harsher sentence for Paige Thompson, who pinched 100M customer records

Paige Thompson, the perpetrator of the Capital One data theft, may be sent back behind bars after an appeals court ruled her sentence of time served plus probation was too lenient.…

Broken commitment to deliver hyped Intelligence upgrade branded false advertising

Apple on Wednesday was sued in a US federal court for allegedly misrepresenting the AI capabilities of its Siri personal digital assistant.…

Scientists at Zhejiang University have created the world's smallest LED display, featuring pixels just 90 nanometers wide -- roughly the size of a typical virus and too tiny to be seen with optical microscopes. The breakthrough, described in Nature this week, uses perovskite semiconductors that maintain brightness even at microscopic scales, giving them an advantage over conventional LEDs. The research team, led by Baodan Zhao, also demonstrated a larger display with pixels measuring about 100 micrometers (human hair width) that successfully rendered images including a spinning globe.

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So much for that vacation

A US Department of Defense electrical engineer has turned his world upside down after printing 155 pages from 20 documents, all of which were marked top secret and classified, from his DoD workspace, brought them home with him – and was collared on his way to Mexico.…

A United States District Court judge has approved a settlement between HP and customers who sued the company for firmware updates that prevented printers from working with non-HP ink cartridges. The class-action lawsuit, filed in December 2020, alleged HP "wrongfully compels users" to buy only HP ink by issuing updates that block competitors' cartridges. Under the settlement, HP admits no wrongdoing and won't pay monetary damages to affected customers, though it will pay $5,000 each to the three plaintiffs and $725,000 in attorneys' fees. HP has agreed to allow users of specific printer models impacted by the November 2020 update to decline firmware updates containing "Dynamic Security" features -- HP's term for technology that blocks cartridges using non-HP chips. The settlement applies only to 21 specific printer models, leaving numerous other HP printers subject to Dynamic Security restrictions. HP has previously paid millions in similar cases in Europe, Australia, and California related to printer bricking.

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Tough Euro privacy rules include requirement for accurate info, watchdog told in formal complaint

​A Norwegian man was shocked when ChatGPT falsely claimed in a conversation he murdered his two sons and tried to kill a third - mixing in real details about his personal life.…

Google is introducing an AI-powered update to Gmail search that prioritizes "most relevant" results based on recency, frequent contacts, and most-clicked emails. The feature aims to help users more efficiently locate specific messages in crowded inboxes. The update is rolling out globally to personal Google accounts, with business accounts to follow at an unspecified date. Users will have the option to toggle between the new AI-powered "most relevant" search and the traditional reverse chronological "most recent" view.

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Over the past two decades, school districts have spent billions equipping classrooms with laptops, yet students have fallen further behind on essential skills, Michael Bloomberg argues. With about 90% of schools now providing these devices, test scores hover near historic lows -- only 28% of eighth graders proficient in math and 30% in reading. Bloomberg notes technology's classroom push came from technologists and government officials who envisioned tailored curricula. Computer manufacturers, despite good intentions, had financial interests and profited substantially. The Google executive who questioned why children should learn equations when they could Google answers might now ask why they should write essays when chatbots can do it for them. Studies confirm traditional methods -- reading and writing on paper -- remain superior to screen-based approaches. Devices distract students, with research showing up to 20 minutes needed to refocus after nonacademic activities. As some districts ban smartphones during school hours, Bloomberg suggests reconsidering classroom computer policies, recommending locked carts for more purposeful use and greater transparency for parents about screen time. Technology's promise has failed while imposing significant costs on children and taxpayers, he writes. Bloomberg calls for a return to books and pens over laptops and tablets.

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A new AI system called Aardvark could deliver weather forecasts as accurate as those from advanced public weather services but run on desktop computers, according to a project unveiled Thursday and published in Nature. Developed by the UK's Alan Turing Institute with partners including Cambridge University, the European Centre for Medium-Range Weather Forecasts and Microsoft, Aardvark aims to make sophisticated forecasting accessible to countries with fewer resources, particularly in Africa. The system has already outperformed the US Global Forecast System on many variables in testing. Project leader Richard Turner noted the system is "completely open source" and not planned for commercialization by Microsoft.

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Palming off the blame using an ‘unknown’ best practice didn’t go down well either

In patching the latest critical remote code execution (RCE) bug in Backup and Replication, software shop Veeam is attracting criticism from researchers for the way it handles uncontrolled deserialization vulnerabilities.…

IBM is laying off thousands of employees across the United States, with approximately 25% of staff at its Cloud Classic operation affected, The Register reports, citing a source. "Concrete numbers are being kept private," a source told the publication. "It is in the thousands." Staff reductions have occurred in Raleigh, North Carolina; New York; Dallas, Texas; and California, the report said. Affected departments include consulting, corporate social responsibility, cloud infrastructure, sales, and internal systems teams. The report adds: With regard to IBM Cloud Classic -- the infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS) outfit offering built on IBM's 2013 acquisition of SoftLayer -- another source told us: "It's a resource action. I don't know how many people are in IaaS classic. They don't typically make that information easy to find. What I can say is that they have been making a lot of changes to shift employment to India as much as possible." A third source, newly let go by Big Blue, said it was fair to characterize this a layoff. "Everyone I know that was affected, myself included, was simply offered a separation agreement," this individual said, estimating that 10 percent of the Cloud group (which is not the same as Cloud Classic) has been let go.

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Not even the parts want to be associated with Elon's steel monster

Tesla has issued its eighth Cybertruck recall, this time over exterior trim panels that risk detaching while driving - the second time loose body trim has triggered a safety fix.…

Nvidia is selling its scarce RTX 5080 and 5090 graphics cards from a pop-up "food truck" at its GPU Technology Conference, where attendees paying over $1,000 for tickets can purchase the coveted hardware alongside merchandise. The company has only 2,000 cards available (1,000 each of RTX 5080 and 5090), released in small batches at random times during the three-day conference which concludes tomorrow.

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Enterprise Edition to be offered on OCI inside Redmond's cloud

Oracle is expanding its database services on hyperscale clouds outside of its muscle-car Exadata system.…

Apple is undergoing a rare shake-up of its executive ranks, aiming to get its artificial intelligence efforts back on track after months of delays and stumbles, Bloomberg News reported Thursday, citing people familiar with the matter. From the report: Chief Executive Officer Tim Cook has lost confidence in the ability of AI head John Giannandrea to execute on product development, so he's moving over another top executive to help: Vision Pro creator Mike Rockwell. In a new role, Rockwell will be in charge of the Siri virtual assistant, according to the people, who asked not to be identified because the moves haven't been announced. Rockwell will report to software chief Craig Federighi, removing Siri completely from Giannandrea's command. Apple is poised to announce the changes to employees this week. The iPhone maker's senior leaders -- a group known as the Top 100 -- just met at a secretive, annual offsite gathering to discuss the future of the company. Its AI efforts were a key talking point at the summit, Bloomberg News has reported. The moves underscore the plight facing Apple: Its AI technology is severely lagging industry rivals, and the company has shown little sign of catching up. The Apple Intelligence platform was late to arrive and largely a flop, despite being the main selling point for the iPhone 16. Further reading: 'Something Is Rotten in the State of Cupertino'

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Meanwhile, open source video codec Ogg Theora stirs in its crypt

After a seven-year nap, version 3.0 of FOSS image editor GIMP is arriving with a splash, while a long-dormant open video format wakes from its slumbers and lumbers into beta.…

Cosmologists have uncovered stronger evidence that dark energy -- the mysterious force accelerating cosmic expansion -- may be weakening over time. The Dark Energy Spectroscopic Instrument (DESI) collaboration presented their latest findings at the Global Physics Summit in Anaheim, California, reinforcing their preliminary results from last year. The DESI team analyzed data from approximately 15 million galaxies collected over three years, more than doubling their previous dataset of 6 million galaxies. Combined with supernova observations and cosmic microwave background data, their analysis shows a 4.2-sigma deviation from the standard Lambda-CDM cosmological model, which assumes dark energy remains constant. "We are much more certain than last year that this is definitely a thing," said Seshadri Nadathur of the University of Portsmouth, a key DESI researcher. These findings align with recent independent results from the Dark Energy Survey (DES), which earlier this month reported a similar 3.2-sigma tension with Lambda-CDM -- a tension that disappears if dark energy is allowed to vary. If confirmed, evolving dark energy could fundamentally alter cosmologists' understanding of the universe's ultimate fate. Instead of expanding indefinitely until all particles become impossibly separated, the universe might follow alternative trajectories. "It challenges the fate of the universe," explained Mustapha Ishak-Boushaki from the University of Texas at Dallas. "It's game-changing." Moreover, these findings challenge the simplest explanation of dark energy as vacuum energy, which quantum physics suggests should remain constant. Instead, the results indicate unknown physics, possibly involving a new particle, a modification to Einstein's theory of gravity, or even a new fundamental theory. DESI will continue observing through 2026, eventually producing a final map expected to include 50 million galaxies, potentially providing definitive evidence for this cosmic paradigm shift.

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