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The best way to innovate in gaming is to have good margins, that's according to Microsoft chief executive Satya Nadella. He made the comments during an interview days after Bloomberg reported that Microsoft has expected unrealistic profit margins from its gaming division, which the report suggested was a likely reason for studio closures, game cancelations and thousands of layoffs at Xbox. Nadella used the word "innovation" at least five times during the interview but never offered specifics about what he meant by it. He said Microsoft needs to "invent, maybe, some new interactive media" because gaming's competition is short-form video rather than other games. The CEO described Microsoft's new gaming strategy as being "everywhere, on every platform" after comparing the company's game publishing business to Microsoft Office. He said "the biggest gaming business is the Windows business" and added that he is looking forward to "the next console, the next PC gaming."

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Hedge fund Apollo has reached a deal to sell AOL to Italian tech holding group Bending Spoons in a deal valued at roughly $1.5 billion, Axios reported Wednesday From the report: AOL still drives hundreds of millions of dollars of free cash flow. Bending Spoons CEO Luca Ferrari said AOL has around 30 million monthly active users across its email and web content properties. That "incredibly loyal user base," as he called it, could be better served with greater investments in AOL's product and user experience, he noted. [...] Bending Spoons is a privately held Italian holding company that acquires assets with large user bases and invests in their turnaround with technology improvements. The company tends to sit on their investments long term after acquiring them. Some of the other companies Bending Spoons has acquired include Vimeo, Evernote, WeTransfer, Brightcove.

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The Big Four biz’s big fat fail exposed a boatload of secrets online

A Dutch cybersecurity outfit says its lead researcher recently stumbled upon a 4TB+ SQL Server backup file belonging to EY exposed to the web, effectively leaking the accounting and consulting megacorp's secrets.…

schwit1 writes: China has enacted a new law regulating social media influencers, requiring them to hold verified professional qualifications before posting content on sensitive topics such as medicine, law, education, and finance, IOL reported. The new law went into effect on Saturday. The regulation was introduced by the Cyberspace Administration of China (CAC) as part of its broader effort to curb misinformation online. Under the new rules, influencers must prove their expertise through recognized degrees, certifications, or licenses before discussing regulated subjects. Major platforms such as Douyin (China's TikTok), Bilibili, and Weibo are now responsible for verifying influencer credentials and ensuring that content includes clear citations, disclaimers, and transparency about sources. Audiences expect influencers to be both creative and credible. Yet when they blur the line between opinion and expertise, the impact can be severe. A single misleading financial tip could wipe out someone's savings. A viral health trend could cause real harm. That's why many believe it's time for creators to acknowledge the weight of their influence. However, China's new law raises deeper questions: Who defines "expertise"? What happens to independent creators who challenge official narratives but lack formal credentials? And how far can regulation go before it suppresses free thought?

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Noncitizens, prepare to have your mugshot stored for up to 75 years

Planning to visit the United States in the near future? If so, get ready to have your picture taken – and stored for decades – upon both entry and exit under a new Customs and Border Protection rule.…

Computer scientists at the University of Pennsylvania have proved that pricing algorithms can drive up prices even when they lack the capacity to collude. Aaron Roth and four colleagues studied so-called no-swap-regret algorithms, which are designed to minimize losses and were previously thought to guarantee competitive pricing. The researchers found that when such an algorithm faces an opponent using a nonresponsive strategy -- one that randomly selects from predetermined price probabilities without reacting to competitor moves -- both players can end up in equilibrium at high prices. Neither has an incentive to switch strategies because their profits are nearly equal and as high as possible under the circumstances. The nonresponsive strategy cannot express threats because it does not respond to opponent behavior, yet it effectively coaxes the learning algorithm into raising prices. Mallesh Pai, an economist at Rice University not involved in the research, said the finding matters because regulators have no clear grounds to intervene without evidence of threats or agreements. Roth conceded however that he lacks a solution to the regulatory challenge his team identified.

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TypeScript was ranked top programming language

The Indian software developer community will outgrow the US's by 2030, GitHub's Octoverse 2025 report shows. However, today, the United States remains in the lead.…

Oscar-winning author and performer would prefer Copilot did not offer her writing assistance

Dame Emma Thompson's expletive-laden takedown of AI writing assistants may strike a chord with frustrated users everywhere.…

Nvidia became the world's first $5 trillion company on Wednesday after its stock climbed 5% in early Wall Street trading to push its market capitalization to $5.13 trillion. The Silicon Valley chipmaker reached the milestone three months after hitting $4 trillion and three years after it was valued at roughly $400 billion before the debut of ChatGPT. Nvidia chief executive Jensen Huang said Tuesday that Nvidia had secured half a trillion dollars in orders for its AI chips over the next five quarters. The stock had already gained 5% on Tuesday and added more than $200 billion to its market value. President Donald Trump said Wednesday he planned to discuss Nvidia's Blackwell chip with China's President Xi Jinping when the two leaders meet later this week. Nvidia's latest generation of graphics processing units is not currently available in China because of US export controls. The company's shares have risen more than 85% in the past six months.

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GPU giant teams with partners to create digital twin blueprint for next-gen datacenters

Nvidia unveiled Omniverse DSX at its GTC event in Washington DC — a blueprint for designing and operating gigawatt-scale AI datacenters using digital twin technology.…

Bill Gates is retreating from his earlier warnings about climate change. The Microsoft co-founder now argues that what he called the "doomsday view of climate change" has caused the climate community to focus too heavily on near-term emissions goals and divert resources from addressing poverty and disease in the world's poorest countries. In a blog post, Gates wrote that climate change will have serious consequences but will not lead to humanity's demise. He acknowledges that some climate advocates will call him a hypocrite given his own carbon footprint and his 2021 book warning that climate change could be as deadly as COVID-19 by mid-century and five times as deadly by 2100. The poorest countries receive less than 1% of rich countries' budgets at their highest level and that this share is shrinking as wealthy nations cut aid and low-income countries struggle with debt, he wrote. Rising temperatures are now inevitable and that the current consensus suggests Earth's average temperature will be between two and three degrees Celsius higher than 1850 levels by 2100.

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Bosses banking on automation? 55% will regret those job cuts

Many organizations rushing to cut staff in the name of AI efficiency are expected to quietly rehire those roles – often "offshore or at lower salary."…

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Politico: Sen. Tom Cotton wasn't fast enough in 2022 to block Senate passage of legislation that would make daylight saving time permanent. Three years later, he wasn't about to repeat that same mistake. The Arkansas Republican was on hand Tuesday afternoon to thwart a bipartisan effort on the chamber floor to pass a bill that would put an end to changing the clocks twice a year, including this coming Sunday. [...] A cross-party coalition of lawmakers has been trying for years to make daylight saving time the default, which would result in more daylight in the evening hours with less in the morning, plus bring to a halt to biannual clock adjustments. President Donald Trump endorsed the concept this spring, calling the changing of the clocks "a big inconvenience and, for our government, A VERY COSTLY EVENT!!!" His comments coincided with a hearing, then a markup, of Scott's legislation in the Senate Commerce Committee. It set off an intense lobbying battle in turn, pitting the golf and retail industries -- which are advocating for permanent daylight saving time -- against the likes of sleep doctors and Christian radio broadcasters -- who prefer standard time. "If permanent Daylight Savings Time becomes the law of the land, it will again make winter a dark and dismal time for millions of Americans," said Cotton in his objection to a request by Sen. Rick Scott (R-Fla.) to advance the bill by unanimous consent. "For many Arkansans, permanent daylight savings time would mean the sun wouldn't rise until after 8:00 or even 8:30am during the dead of winter," Cotton continued. "The darkness of permanent savings time would be especially harmful for school children and working Americans."

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Keeping track of checks, 1990s style

The early versions of Windows NT were the last hurrah for the Windows 3.1-esque Program Manager. But getting the Windows 95 shell into the codebase occasionally required using CAPITAL LETTERS.…

Emails confirm payroll and bank details lifted in cyberattack on US subsidiary

Global marketing giant Dentsu is writing to current and former staff after a cyberattack on a subsidiary led to bank, payroll, and other sensitive data being stolen.…

60% of government services rely on Amazon, Google, or Microsoft's clouds

The UK government will publish a plan for handling future cloud outages after last week's AWS failure knocked out several departments.…

ICO fined Bharat Singh Chand £200,000 after receiving 19,138 complaints

Britain's data watchdog has fined a sole trader £200,000 for nearly a million spam texts targeting people in debt – almost 20 pence per message.…

Onboard cores use a Linux stack based on Ubuntu

Ubuntu Summit One of the more unexpected talks at last week's Ubuntu Summit 25.10 in London was by Antonio Salvemini of Bolt Graphics, who introduced the company's forthcoming range of Zeus graphics accelerator hardware. These are very unlike any conventional GPUs – or indeed anything else.…

Longtime Slashdot reader zuki writes: According to a recent report over at Tom's Hardware, a number of those among early buyers who have been able to put the highly-coveted $4,000.00 DGX Spark mini-AI workstation through its paces are reporting throttling at 100W (rather than the advertised 240W capacity), spontaneous reboots, and thermal issues under sustained load. The workstation came under fire after John Carmack, the former CTO of Oculus VR, began raising questions about its real-world performance and power draw. "His comments were enough to draw tech support from Framework and even AMD, with the offer of an AMD-driven Strix Halo-powered alternative," reports Tom's Hardware. "What's causing this suboptimal performance, such as a firmware-level cap or thermal throttling, is not clear," the report adds. "Nvidia hasn't commented publicly on Carmack's post or user-reported instability. Meanwhile, several threads on Nvidia's developer forums now include reports of GPU crashes and unexpected shutdowns under sustained load."

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Dangles £100K for someone to fix £23B tech mess

The UK government is on the hunt for a new CTO after incumbent David Knott announced his departure, citing family reasons.…