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Critics argue offset schemes like this offer tech giants a license to pollute

Microsoft has expanded its deal with Stockholm Exergi to buy 500,000 tonnes of permanent carbon removal annually over ten years. Critics argue such deals give polluters cover rather than drive real climate action.…

English regulators have approved a new law firm that uses AI instead of lawyers to offer services for as little as $2.67, as the technology continues to disrupt industries from finance to accounting. From a report: Garfield AI, which was founded by a former London litigator and a quantum physicist, is an online tool that allows businesses and individuals such as tradespeople to chase debts owed to them at a substantially lower cost than the average lawyer's fees. Its AI assistant guides claimants through the small claims court process, including creating "polite chaser" letters for $2.67 and filing documents such as claim forms for $67, and can also produce arguments for claimants to use at trial. AI models are increasingly encroaching on legally sensitive tasks in high-paying sectors such as law and finance, potentially undercutting fees in high-volume work. Garfield received approval from the Solicitors Regulation Authority, the legal regulator for England and Wales, in March, in a move the latter hailed as a "landmark moment" for the industry.

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(If only that would keep folks off unsanctioned chat app side quests)

The US Department of Defense (DoD) is overhauling its "outdated" software procurement systems, and insists it's putting security at the forefront of decision-making processes.…

Microsoft has unveiled a substantial AI-focused update for Windows 11 and Copilot+ PCs, introducing features that leverage neural processing units across the operating system. The update centers on AI-powered helpers across core Windows apps, with an intelligent agent in Settings that can locate and adjust options via natural voice commands. Key additions include expanded Click To Do functionality, allowing users to draft Word content based on screen context, engage Reading Coach, or send details directly to Excel tables. The Photos app gains a relight feature with support for three customizable light sources, while Paint adds object selection and text-to-sticker generation. Snipping Tool will automatically detect and crop prominent screen content, adding text extraction and color picking capabilities. System-level enhancements include an updated Start menu with phone companion integration, AI-powered actions in File Explorer for content summarization, and text generation in Notepad with new formatting options. Most features will debut first on Windows Insider builds for Snapdragon-powered Copilot+ PCs before expanding to systems with AMD or Intel chips. Several tools, including Ask Copilot and Reading Coach, are already available to Insiders.

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Easyjson library's presence in numerous open source projects alarms security biz

Easyjson, a software library for serializing data in Golang applications, is maintained by developers affiliated with Russia's VK Group.…

BrianFagioli writes: Fedora Linux is now officially available as a Windows Subsystem for Linux (WSL) distribution! That's right, folks, following prior testing, you can now run Fedora 42 natively inside Windows using WSL. As someone who considers Fedora to be my favorite Linux distribution, this is a pretty exciting development. Installing it is simple enough. Just open up a terminal and type wsl --install FedoraLinux-42 to get started. After that, launch it with wsl -d FedoraLinux-42 and set your username. No password is required by default, and you'll automatically be part of the wheel group, meaning you can use sudo right out of the gate.

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Reddit's Steve Huffman isn't mincing words about what he found when he came back as CEO in 2015: a company full of idealists who weren't exactly killing themselves with hard work. "We were really idealistic, and that's been good in many ways, but we were also idealistic about not being a business," Huffman said on the "Prof G Pod" podcast. "Wrapped up in some of that idealism was also not working very hard," he added. Huffman sees this as a Silicon Valley disease: "It's almost an entitlement of, 'I work at these companies, but I don't have to work very hard and I'm here for myself.'"

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Brussels rolls out €500M plan to lure boffins with grants and actual respect for research

The European Commission (EC) is looking to make Europe the home of science by tempting researchers and scientists to relocate to the continent amid a more hostile stance toward academic freedom in the US.…

Recent college graduates face the worst job market in decades, with unemployment reaching 5.8%, according to recently released New York Federal Reserve data. The "recent-grad gap" - the difference between unemployment rates of young college graduates versus the overall labor force - has hit its lowest point in four decades, indicating college graduates are facing unusual difficulties securing employment. (The New York Federal Reserve said labor conditions for recent college graduates have "deteriorated noticeably" in the past few months.) Even graduates from elite MBA programs are struggling to find work, while law school applications have surged as young people seek shelter from the difficult job market. Economists are attributing the decline to three potential factors: incomplete recovery from pandemic disruptions, diminishing returns on college education, and possibly AI replacing entry-level positions. "When you think about what generative AI can do, it's the kind of things that young college grads have done," said David Deming, a Harvard economist. "They read and synthesize information and data. They produce reports and presentations."

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Most people in the United States rely on federal science in their daily lives but don't realize it, a new nationwide poll of U.S. adults shows. NPR: The poll was conducted in early April by the Association of Science and Technology Centers, the association for science museums and other educational science centers in the U.S. The poll found that on a weekly basis more than 90% of people use weather forecasts, job market reports, food safety warnings and other information that is based on federal science. But only 10% of respondents are concerned that cuts to federal support for science might impact their access to such information. The Trump administration has made deep budget and personnel cuts to federal agencies that collect weather data and do safety inspections at factories that make food and prescription drugs, among many science-related functions. The association conducted the poll to understand current attitudes about science in the U.S. and inform how their member institutions, which include science museums, aquariums and zoos, can better serve the public.

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Data giant backs federal austerity push, saying it's 'the right thing' for US

Palantir, the controversial US surveillance and analytics firm, says it welcomes scrutiny of government spending by the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), the controversial cost-cutting agency led by Elon Musk.…

Amazon has updated its Kindle iOS app with a new "Get Book" button that redirects users to complete purchases through their mobile browser, taking advantage of recent App Store rule changes. The update follows Judge Yvonne Gonzalez Rogers' April 30th ruling in Epic Games v. Apple, which bars Apple from collecting a 27% commission on purchases made outside apps or restricting how developers direct users to alternative payment options. Previously, iOS users had to visit Amazon's website through a browser to buy Kindle books -- a workaround implemented after Apple's 2011 rule changes required developers to remove links to external purchasing options. Apple has appealed the ruling but is complying in the interim.

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Microsoft has instituted a stringent new performance management system that places ousted employees on a two-year rehiring block list and categorizes their departures as "good attrition," Business Insider reported Tuesday, citing internal documents. The company now tracks staff departures it considers beneficial, mirroring Amazon's "unregretted attrition" metric, though no specific targets have been established yet. Microsoft recently terminated 2,000 underperforming employees without severance and implemented a new performance improvement plan (PIP). Employees facing performance issues now must choose between entering the PIP or accepting a "Global Voluntary Separation Agreement" with 16 weeks of pay. Further reading: Microsoft Offers Underperformers Cash To Quit.

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Feldman calls US's AI Diffusion rules ‘bad policy’

Cerebras Systems' dinner-plate-sized chips currently power the latest AI inference offerings from Meta and, soon, those of IBM, but US trade policy weighs heavy on its prospects worldwide.…

Azure Virtual Desktop App attach users might want to sit this one out for a bit longer

Microsoft is celebrating the milestone of Windows 11 24H2 reaching broad availability with… yet another "known issue." This time, it is related to Azure Virtual Desktop applications.…

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Reuters: OpenAI has agreed to buy artificial intelligence-assisted coding tool Windsurf for about $3 billion, Bloomberg News reported on Monday, citing people familiar with the matter. The deal has not yet closed, the report added. Windsurf, formerly known as Codeium, had recently been in talks with investors including General Catalyst and Kleiner Perkins to raise funding at a $3 billion valuation, according to Bloomberg News. The report notes that the deal "would be OpenAI's largest acquisition to date," further complementing ChatGPT's coding capabilities.

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From ubiquitous go-to system for early Noughties startups to a legacy like no other

Before Donald Trump became US president and the UK left the EU – both arguably the result of a new kind of online politics – a rather nervous-looking Mark Zuckerberg shuffled out onto a Harvard University lecture hall floor to offer some insight into the inner workings of a website he had created less than two years earlier.…

Too much hot air brings down Manchester Uni based neural network project

Exclusive The brain-inspired SpiNNaker machine at Manchester University suffered an overheating incident over the Easter weekend that will send a chill down the spines of datacenter administrators.…

'Trust us, we're from Trumpland' may not help Microsoft as much as it hopes

Opinion It is a nation's first duty to protect its citizens from harm. A fine maxim, and one we can all agree on, even in these disagreeable times. Sadly, that's as far as it goes. What the harm is and how to protect against it is where light turns to heat.…

"Another year, yet another Hugo Awards-adjacent controversy?" writes Gizmodo's Cheryl Eddy, reporting that three key organizers of the 2025 Seattle Worldcon resigned after backlash over the use of ChatGPT to vet program participants. From the report: In a post on Bluesky co-signed by Hugo administrator Nicholas Whyte, deputy Hugo administrator Esther MacCallum-Stewart, and World Science Fiction Society division head Cassidy, the trio announced they were resigning from their roles ahead of the Seattle event, which takes place in August. "We want to reaffirm that no LLMs or generative AI have been used in the Hugo Awards process at any stage," the statement read in part, which might turn the heads of anyone who is a) interested in the Hugos, but b) not up on the latest controversy. However, plenty of people in the community are well aware of what's been going on. A quick journey to the blog File 770 will bring you up to speed, as will a visit to Seattle Worldcon 2025's own site, which on April 30 shared a post clarifying exactly what role AI played in the upcoming event. [...] However, as File 770 pointed out, the damage has apparently already been done: the use of ChatGPT in any capacity in connection to Worldcon created a furor on social media. It also inspired at least one Hugo nominee to remove their book from contention: Yoon Ha Lee, whose Moonstorm was named a Lodestar Award finalist, which honors YA releases. In a May 1 post on Bluesky, the author linked to the April 30 Worldcon blog post noted above, and noted he was withdrawing the title from consideration. Then, in a post shared today responding to File 770's latest post announcing the resignations, the author wrote âoeAll respect and I'm grateful to them for their work, sorry [things] came to this pass." Seattle Worldcon 2025 takes place August 13-17; the Hugo Awards will be handed out August 16.

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