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Shovels in the dirt at Fab 3 as Fab 2’s 3nm ramp charges in several quarters early

TSMC says it will ramp up production at its second fab site in Arizona earlier than initially expected as it looks to shift nearly a third of its leading-edge wafer output stateside.…

The Verge's Emma Roth reports: The News/Media Alliance, a trade association behind major news publishers, announced that it has "successfully secured" the removal of 12ft.io, a website that helped users bypass paywalls online. The trade association says 12ft.io's webhost took down the site on July 14th "following the News/Media Alliance's efforts." 12ft.io -- or 12 Foot Ladder -- also allowed users to view webpages without ads, trackers, or pop-ups by disguising a user's browser as a web crawler, giving them unfettered access to a webpage's contents. Software engineer Thomas Millar says he created the site when he realized "8 of the top 10 links on Google were paywalled" when doing research during the pandemic. [...] In its announcement, News/Media Alliance says 12ft.io "offered illegal circumvention technology" that allowed users to access copyrighted content without paying for it. The organization adds that it will take "similar actions" against other sites that let users get around paywalls. The News Media Alliance recently called Google's AI Mode "theft." (Like many chatbots, Google's AI Mode eliminates the need to visit a website, starving publishers of the pageviews they need to be compensated for their work.) "Publishers commit significant resources to creating the best and most informative content for consumers, and illegal tools like 12ft.io undermine their ability to financially support that work through subscriptions and ad revenue," News/Media Alliance president and CEO Danielle Coffey said in the press release. "Taking down paywall bypassers is an essential part of ensuring we have a healthy and sustainable information ecosystem."

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An anonymous reader quotes a report from NBC News: Mark Zuckerberg and current and former directors and officers of Meta Platforms agreed on Thursday to settle claims seeking $8 billion for the damage they allegedly caused the company by allowing repeated violations of Facebook users' privacy, a lawyer for the shareholders told a Delaware judge on Thursday. The parties did not disclose details of the settlement and defense lawyers did not address the judge, Kathaleen McCormick of the Delaware Court of Chancery. McCormick adjourned the trial just as it was to enter its second day and she congratulated the parties. The plaintiffs' lawyer, Sam Closic, said the agreement just came together quickly. Billionaire venture capitalist Marc Andreessen, who is a defendant in the trial and a Meta director, was scheduled to testify on Thursday. Shareholders of Meta sued Zuckerberg, Andreessen and other former company officials including former Chief Operating Officer Sheryl Sandberg in hopes of holding them liable for billions of dollars in fines and legal costs the company paid in recent years. The Federal Trade Commission fined Facebook $5 billion in 2019 after finding that it failed to comply with a 2012 agreement with the regulator to protect users' data. The shareholders wanted the 11 defendants to use their personal wealth to reimburse the company. The defendants denied the allegations, which they called "extreme claims." "This settlement may bring relief to the parties involved, but it's a missed opportunity for public accountability," said Jason Kint, the head of Digital Content Next, a trade group for content providers. "Facebook has successfully remade the 'Cambridge Analytica' scandal about a few bad actors rather than an unraveling of its entire business model of surveillance capitalism and the reciprocal, unbridled sharing of personal data. That reckoning is now left unresolved."

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Robinhood CEO Vlad Tenev has said that the majority of his company's new code is written by AI, with "close to 100%" of engineers using AI code editors. Speaking on the 20VC podcast, Tenev estimated around 50% of new code at the trading platform is AI-generated. Tenev said the 50% figure is imprecise due to advanced "agentic" code editors that have made it difficult to distinguish human-written from AI-generated code. The company has progressed from GitHub Copilot to Cursor and now Windsurf, where "nearly all of the code is written by AI," he said. Tenev estimated only a "minority" of new code at Robinhood is written by humans.

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Mozilla will ship WebGPU support in Firefox 141 when the browser launches July 22, bringing graphics processing capabilities that Chrome users have had since 2023. The initial release supports Windows only, with Mac, Linux, and Android planned for the coming months. WebGPU provides web content direct access to graphics processors for high-performance computation and rendering in games and complex 3D applications. Chrome gained WebGPU support with version 113 in 2023, while Safari 26 is expected to add the feature this fall. Firefox's implementation uses the WGPU Rust crate, which translates web requests into native commands for Direct3D 12, Metal, or Vulkan.

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Three perfect 10s in the last month - ISE, ISE, baby

Cisco has issued a patch for a critical 10 out of 10 severity bug in its Identity Services Engine (ISE) and ISE Passive Identity Connector (ISE-PIC) that could allow an unauthenticated, remote attacker to run arbitrary code on the operating system with root-level privileges. …

British universities face mounting financial pressures with four in ten institutions running deficits, according to the Office for Students regulator. Half have closed courses to save money, while Durham and Newcastle each shed 200 staff members. Lancaster's cost-saving plan could eliminate one in five academic positions. The crisis, writes Economist, stems from frozen tuition fees for English students, which will rise by only a few percent in August for the first time in eight years.

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OpenAI launched ChatGPT agent Thursday, an AI tool that can complete multi-step tasks including online shopping, creating PowerPoint presentations, and generating spreadsheets. The agent combines capabilities from two existing OpenAI services: Operator, which can browse and interact with websites like a human, and Deep Research, which handles complex online research tasks. The tool runs on a new AI model developed specifically for agent capabilities and can perform tasks such as planning meals and ordering ingredients online, booking restaurant reservations, and creating slide decks based on competitor analysis. In demonstrations, the agent successfully browsed Etsy for vintage lamps under $200 with free shipping and automatically added items to a shopping cart. ChatGPT agent is immediately available to Pro, Plus, and Team subscribers, with Enterprise and Education users gaining access later this summer. The tool requires user permission before making purchases or performing "irreversible" actions like sending emails. The startup, however, has cautioned that the agent "is far from perfect" and can take several minutes to complete tasks.

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Sony removed the tiltable screen from its new RX1R III full-frame compact camera to maintain similar dimensions to the previous model, despite adding numerous new features and charging $5,100 for the device, The Verge reports. The company increased the camera's size by only 2.5mm in height and 15.5mm in depth while incorporating the high-resolution sensor from the A7R V, Sony's latest autofocus tracking system, a longer-lasting battery, and a proper electronic viewfinder. Sony integrated the top dials and hot shoe into the body for a sleeker appearance. The camera's compact design prevents the inclusion of lens or sensor-based image stabilization. The Verge points out that Leica also added a tilt screen to its Q3 model after users requested the feature, despite the design compromise required.

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Maybe finish ripping and replacing your telco networks first?

Uncle Sam has decided it's time to free US-connected undersea cables from Chinese influence.…

Linking can be helpful – but not always… while disinformation can spread like a virus

Beware: the people behind PuTTY, the renowned FOSS SSH client for Windows, are not the same people as those behind the PUTTY.ORG website.…

A California federal judge has ruled that three authors suing Anthropic for copyright infringement can represent writers nationwide whose books the AI startup allegedly pirated to train its Claude chatbot. U.S. District Judge William Alsup said the authors can bring a class action on behalf of all U.S. writers whose works Anthropic allegedly downloaded from pirate libraries LibGen and PiLiMi to create a repository of millions of books in 2021 and 2022. Alsup said Anthropic may have illegally downloaded as many as 7 million books from the pirate websites, which could make it liable for billions of dollars in damages if the authors' case succeeds.

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Cancer death rates in the U.S. have fallen by approximately one-third since the 1990s when adjusted for age, according to data cited in a new analysis of global cancer trends. The decline represents a steady, year-over-year reduction that began in the early 1990s and continues across developed countries. Prevention efforts have contributed substantially to the decline. Reduced smoking rates in wealthy nations prevented more than 3 million cancer deaths since 1975 in America alone. Britain's HPV vaccination program, launched in 2008 for teenage girls, produced a 90% reduction in cervical cancer rates among women in their 20s within 15 years. Treatment advances have transformed outcomes for specific cancers. Childhood leukemia, once virtually fatal, now has a five-year survival rate above 90%. Researchers have identified inexpensive drugs with cancer-prevention properties, including aspirin, which cuts bowel cancer risk in half for patients with Lynch syndrome. Future progress faces obstacles, however, including high treatment costs and planned cuts to the National Cancer Institute under the Trump administration. China overtook America as the primary source of cancer research in 2025.

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Uber said Thursday it will partner with electric vehicle maker Lucid Group and autonomous driving startup Nuro to deploy robotaxis using Lucid Gravity SUVs equipped with Nuro Driver technology on its ride-sharing network. The companies plan to launch the first vehicles in late 2026 in an unidentified major US city and deploy at least 20,000 robotaxis over six years. Uber will make multi-hundred-million dollar investments in both partners, including $300 million for Lucid to upgrade its assembly line for integrating Nuro hardware into Gravity vehicles.

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Non-competitive £220M datacenter deal with tax collector tops £510M pile of public money

Fujitsu has been awarded around £510 million ($682 million) in UK public sector contracts since a TV dramatization of the Horizon Post Office scandal – including a recent £220 million ($294 million) deal with the UK tax collector, awarded without competition.…

Major US theater chains including Cinemark, Regal and Marcus have held preliminary talks about jointly marketing their big-screen theaters to compete with Imax, according to Bloomberg. The discussions have focused on setting shared standards for the chains' "premium large-format" theaters, with options including uniting around a new brand name or adding an industrywide designation that would serve as a stamp of approval for their locations. The chains are motivated by Imax's growing influence in the industry, as the company consistently generates more than 10% of the box office for blockbusters despite operating only 372 US locations. AMC Entertainment, the largest chain and biggest operator of Imax screens in the US, is not participating in the deliberations, the report added.

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Computer scientist Peter Gutmann tells The Reg why it's 'bollocks'

The US National Institute for Standards and Technology (NIST) has been pushing for the development of post-quantum cryptographic algorithms since 2016.…

New spin on speculative decoding works with any model - now built into Transformers

We all know that AI is expensive, but a new set of algorithms developed by researchers at the Weizmann Institute of Science, Intel Labs, and d-Matrix could significantly reduce the cost of serving up your favorite large language model (LLM) with just a few lines of code.…

VMware is overhauling its partner program again under Broadcom's direction, drastically reducing the number of authorized partners -- especially small and mid-size ones -- while ending the white label program by October 31, 2025. The Register reports: Australian IT service provider Interactive outlined the changes on Wednesday in a post that explained the changes with the following five points: - Partner Reduction: The new program significantly reduces the number of authorized partners, being a by-invitation-only program. As a result on July 15, 2025 VCSP partners who are not invited to participate in the new Program for VCSP partners will be sent a notice of non-renewal. - Transition Period Until 31 October, 2025: Non-invited partners can continue to transact until 31 October 2025. After that date, they may only service existing VCSP commitment contracts for the remainder of the current term. No new commitment contracts or renewals will be accepted for those partners. - White Label Program Ending: Broadcom is also sunsetting the White Label model on 31 October 2025. The same transitional commercial conditions apply to White Label contracts as stated above. - Immediate Impact: Departing partners are encouraged to work with authorized VCSP partners to ensure a smooth transition for customers who seek to renew a service at the end of their current term. - Shift Toward Hyperscale Private Compute: Broadcom is reshaping its vision for private compute, whereby VMware Cloud Foundation 9 underpins a small number [of] hyperscale private cloud platforms in each region. A future where customers buy managed infrastructure from partners like Interactive to support their compute requirements. Interactive also warned that customers whose partners are no longer part of the partner program could expect the change to effect: - Your ability to renew licenses through your existing partner - The support and service quality you've come to expect - Potential delays or confusion during upcoming renewals or service requests - Potential cost increases as partner consolidation may led additional costs for migration and re-onboarding, and reduced bundling options that previously allowed for greater cost efficiencies VMware also told The Register that "Non-renewing partners can continue to support their existing customers until the end of their current commit contract term including co-termed capacity orders. Non-renewing partners are encouraged to work with authorized VCSP partners to ensure a smooth transition for customers who seek to renew a service at the end of their current term." Making matters worse: VMware on Tuesday divulged three critical flaws in eights of its products rated 9.3/10.

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The universe contains more matter than antimatter, and a paper hints at one reason for that happy disparity

Scientists have analyzed data gathered from CERN’s Large Hadron Collider to advance our understanding of why anything exists.…