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An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: After sending cease-and-desist letters to VMware users whose support contracts had expired and who subsequently declined to subscribe to one of Broadcom's VMware bundles, Broadcom has started the process of conducting audits on former VMware customers. [...] Ars Technica reviewed a letter that a software provider and VMware user in the Netherlands received that is dated June 20 and informs the firm that it "has been selected for a formal audit of its use of VMware software and support services" [PDF]. The security professional who provided Ars with the letter asked to keep their name and their employers' name anonymous out of privacy concerns. The anonymous employee told Ars that their company had been a VMware customer for "about" a decade before deciding not to sign up for a new contract with Broadcom's VMware a year ago. The company had been using VMware Cloud Foundation and vSphere. "Our CEO decided to not extend the support contract because of the costs," the employee said. "This already impacts us security-wise because we can no longer get updates (unless the CVSS score is critical)." The letter notes that an auditing firm, Connor Consulting, which is headquartered in San Francisco and has offices around the globe, will perform a review of the company's "VMware deployment and entitlements, which may include fieldwork or remote testing and meetings with members of your accounting, licensing, and management information systems functions." The letter informs its recipient that someone from Connor will reach out and that the VMware user should respond within three business days. The letter, signed by Aiden Fitzgerald, director of global sales operations at Broadcom, claims that Broadcom will use its time "as efficiently and productively as possible to minimize disruption." Still, the security worker that Ars spoke with is concerned about the implications of the audit and said they "expect a big financial impact" for their employer. They added: "Because we are focusing on saving costs and are on a pretty tight financial budget, this will likely have impact on the salary negotiations or even layoffs of employees. Currently, we have some very stressed IT managers [and] legal department [employees] ..." The employee noted that they are unsure if their employer exceeded its license limits. If the firm did, it could face "big" financial repercussions, the worker noted.

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Apple will allow developers in the European Union to distribute iOS apps outside its App Store, the company said Thursday in a bid to avoid escalating fines from Brussels regulators. The policy change came on the deadline for Apple to comply with EU rules or face new financial penalties that can reach up to 5% of average daily worldwide revenue. The $3 trillion iPhone maker has been negotiating with the European Commission for two months after receiving a $585 million fine for breaching the EU's Digital Markets Act. The landmark legislation targets the power of Big Tech companies and requires Apple to open its mobile ecosystem to competitors. The second change, set to go into effect in January 2026, would replace the current "core technology fee" model -- a separate charge imposed on developers -- with a commission-based structure.

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PlayStation will continue withholding its first-party games from PlayStation Plus on launch day, despite Xbox offering day-one releases through Game Pass. Nick Maguire, PlayStation's vice president of global services, told Game File the company remains committed to its current approach of adding first-party titles to the subscription service 12 to 18 months after release. "We've sort of stayed true to our strategy across the board, where we're not looking to put games in day and date," Maguire said. PlayStation instead selects four to five independent games annually for day-one PlayStation Plus releases, a strategy Maguire described as "working really well across the platform."

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The Blue Screen of Death (BSOD) has held strong in Windows for nearly 40 years, but that's about to change. From a report: Microsoft revealed earlier this year that it was overhauling its BSOD error message in Windows 11, and the company has now confirmed that it will soon be known as the Black Screen of Death. The new design drops the traditional blue color, frowning face, and QR code in favor of a simplified black screen. The simplified BSOD looks a lot more like the black screen you'd see during a Windows update. But it will list the stop code and faulty system driver that you wouldn't always see during a crash dump. IT admins shouldn't need to pull crash dumps off PCs and analyze them with tools like WinDbg just to find out what could be causing issues. The company will roll out this new BSOD design in an update to Windows 11 "later this summer."

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An anonymous reader shares a report: Malaysia will ban plastic waste imports from the U.S. starting Tuesday because of America's failure to abide by the Basel Convention treaty on international waste transfers, in a move that could have significant consequences for California. Malaysia emerged as a major destination for U.S. waste after China banned American waste imports in 2018. California shipped 864 shipping containers, or more than 10 million pounds of plastic waste, to Malaysia in 2024, according to the Basel Action Network, an advocacy group. That was second only to Georgia among U.S. states. Under Malaysian waste guidelines announced last month, the country will no longer accept plastic waste and hazardous waste from nations that didn't ratify the Basel Convention, the international treaty designed to reduce the international movement of hazardous and other waste. The U.S. is one of just a handful of countries, including Fiji and Haiti, that hasn't signed the pact.

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Microsoft is preparing to release a private preview of Windows changes that will move antivirus and endpoint detection and response apps out of the Windows kernel, nearly a year after a faulty CrowdStrike update crashed 8.5 million Windows-based machines worldwide. The new Windows endpoint security platform is being developed in cooperation with CrowdStrike, Bitdefender, ESET, Trend Micro, and other security vendors. David Weston, Microsoft's vice president of enterprise and OS security, said dozens of partners have submitted papers detailing design requirements, some hundreds of pages long. The private preview will allow security vendors to request changes before the platform is finalized.

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Accenture is facing mounting challenges as AI threatens to disrupt the consulting industry the company helped build. The Dublin-based firm, which made its fortune advising clients on adapting to new technologies from the internet to cloud computing, now confronts the same predicament as generative AI reshapes business operations. The company's new generative AI contracts slowed to $100 million in the most recent quarter, down from $200 million per quarter last year. Technology partners including Microsoft and SAP are increasingly integrating AI directly into their offerings, allowing systems to work immediately without extensive consulting support. Newcomers like Palantir are embedding their own engineers with customers, enabling clients to bypass traditional consultants. Between 2015 and 2024, Accenture generated a 370% total return by helping companies navigate technological transitions. The firm reached a $250 billion valuation in February before losing $60 billion in market value. CEO Julie Sweet insists that the company is reorganizing around "reinvention services." A recent survey found 42% of companies abandoned most AI initiatives, up from 17% a year ago.

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Researchers at the University of Pennsylvania's Wharton School found that people who used large language models to research topics demonstrated weaker understanding and produced less original insights compared to those using Google searches. The study, involving more than 4,500 participants across four experiments, showed LLM users spent less time researching, exerted less effort, and wrote shorter, less detailed responses. In the first experiment, over 1,100 participants researched vegetable gardening using either Google or ChatGPT. Google users wrote longer responses with more unique phrasing and factual references. A second experiment with nearly 2,000 participants presented identical gardening information either as an AI summary or across mock webpages, with Google users again engaging more deeply and retaining more information.

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CareerBuilder + Monster, which once dominated the online recruitment industry, filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection this week and said it plans to sell its businesses. From a report: Created through the September merger of CareerBuilder and Monster, the Chicago-based company said it agreed to sell its job board operations, its most recognizable business, to JobGet, which has an app for so-called gig workers.

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Salesforce chief executive Marc Benioff said Thursday his company has automated a significant chunk of work with AI, another example of a firm touting labor-replacing potential of the emerging technology. From a report: "AI is doing 30% to 50% of the work at Salesforce now," Benioff said in an interview, pointing at job functions including software engineering and customer service. [...] Salesforce has said that use of AI internally has allowed it to hire fewer people. The San Francisco-based software company is focused on selling an AI product that promises to handle tasks such as customer service without human supervision. Benioff said that tool has reached about 93% accuracy, including for large customers such as Walt Disney.

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An anonymous reader quotes a report from the Associated Press: The head of the federal government agency that oversees Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac wants the mortgage giants to consider accepting a homebuyer's cryptocurrency holdings in their criteria for buying mortgages from banks. William Pulte, director of the Federal Housing Finance Agency, which oversees Fannie and Freddie, ordered the agencies Wednesday to prepare a proposal for consideration of crypto as an asset for reserves when they assess risks in single-family home loans. Pulte also instructed the agencies that their mortgage risk assessments should not require cryptocurrency assets to be converted to U.S. dollars. And only crypto assets that "can be evidenced and stored on a U.S.-regulated centralized exchange subject to all applicable laws" are to be considered by the agencies in their proposal, Pulte wrote in a written order, effective immediately. Pulte was sworn in as the head of FHFA in March. Public records show that as of January 2025, Pulte's spouse owned between $500,000 and $1 million of bitcoin and a similar amount of Solana's SOL token. [...] The policy change is meant to encourage banks to expand how they gauge borrowers' creditworthiness, in hopes that more aspiring homebuyers can qualify for a home loan. It also recognizes that cryptocurrencies have grown in popularity as an alternative to traditional investments, such as bonds and stocks. The agencies have to come up with their proposals "as soon as reasonably practical," according to the order. "This is a big win for advocates of cryptocurrencies who want crypto to be treated the same way as other assets are," said Daryl Fairweather, chief economist at Redfin. Currently, stock investments are treated as qualifying assets that count toward reserves that banks want borrowers to have. But assets that are more volatile, like individual stocks or crypto, may be discounted by lenders, Fairweather noted. "As long as lenders are appropriately discounting crypto based on volatility, it's fine that crypto investments count toward reserves," she said. Danielle Hale, chief economist at Realtor.com, added: "If Fannie and Freddie are going to accept cryptocurrency as collateral, that's a strong incentive for banks to shift their practices. Because people who might otherwise have to sell cryptocurrency to qualify -- and maybe that's a deal-breaker for them now -- under this new policy, they can qualify. It sort of expands the potential pool of eligible buyers."

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Italian utility A2A and French tech firm Qarnot have launched a data center in Brescia, Italy, that captures waste heat from servers and redirects it to a local district heating system. "The Brescia project is expected to meet the heating needs of more than 1,350 apartments and cut carbon dioxide emissions by 3,500 tons annually -- equivalent to the absorption capacity of over 22,000 trees," reports Reuters. From the report: "The rapid spread of data centers and the growing electrification of consumption require major investments in power grids. But data centers also offer a remarkable opportunity for cities with district heating networks," A2A CEO Renato Mazzoncini said at the inauguration. "In (the Italian region of) Lombardy alone, with projects already in the pipeline, we estimate that 150,000 apartments could be heated this way," Mazzoncini added.

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The James Webb Space Telescope has discovered its first new exoplanet, TWA 7b -- a young, low-mass planet about 100 times the mass of Earth, making it the lightest planet ever directly imaged beyond the solar system. Space.com reports: TWA 7b was discovered in the debris rings that surround the low-mass star CE Antilae, also known as TWA 7, located around 111 light-years from Earth. CE Antilae is a very young star, estimated to be around just a few million years old. If that seems ancient, consider the sun, a "middle-aged" star, is around 4.6 billion years old. [...] The disk of CE Antilae is divided into three distinct rings, one of which is narrow and bounded by two empty "lanes" mostly devoid of matter. When imaging this ring, the JWST spotted an infrared-emitting source, which the team of astronomers determined is most likely a young exoplanet. They then used simulations that confirmed the formation of a thin ring and a "hole" exactly where this planet is positioned, corresponding to JWST observations. The research has been published in the journal Nature.

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An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Guardian: Swarms of tiny robots, each no larger than a speck of dust, could be deployed to cure stubborn infected sinuses before being blown out through the nose into a tissue, researchers have claimed. The micro-robots are a fraction of the width of a human hair and have been inserted successfully into animal sinuses in pre-clinical trials by researchers at universities in China and Hong Kong. Swarms are injected into the sinus cavity via a duct threaded through the nostril and guided to their target by electromagnetism, where they can be made to heat up and catalyze chemical reactions to wipe out bacterial infections. There are hopes the precisely targeted technology could eventually reduce reliance on antibiotics and other generalized medicines. [...] The latest breakthrough, based on animal rather than human trials, involves magnetic particles "doped" with copper atoms which clinicians insert with a catheter before guiding to their target under a magnetic field. The swarms can be heated up by reacting to light from an optical fibre that is also inserted into the body as part of the therapy. This allows the micro-robots to loosen up and penetrate viscous pus that forms a barrier to the infection site. The light source also prompts the micro-robots to disrupt bacterial cell walls and release reactive oxygen species that kill the bacteria. The study, published in Nature Robotics, showed the robots were capable of eradicating bacteria from pig sinuses and could clear infections in live rabbits with "no obvious tissue damage." The researchers have produced a model of how the technology could work on a human being, with the robot swarms being deployed in operating theatre conditions, allowing doctors to see their progress by using X-rays. Future applications could include tackling bacterial infections of the respiratory tract, stomach, intestine, bladder and urethra, they suggested. "Our proposed micro-robotic therapeutic platform offers the advantages of non-invasiveness, minimal resistance, and drug-free intervention," they said.

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An anonymous reader shares a report: Meta escaped a first-of-its-kind copyright lawsuit from a group of authors who alleged the tech giant hoovered up millions of copyrighted books without permission to train its generative AI model called Llama. San Francisco federal Judge Vince Chhabria ruled Wednesday that Meta's decision to use the books for training is protected under copyright law's fair use defense, but he cautioned that his opinion is more a reflection on the authors' failure to litigate the case effectively. "This ruling does not stand for the proposition that Meta's use of copyrighted materials to train its language models is lawful," Chhabria said.

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Microsoft has been hit with a lawsuit by a group of authors who claim the company used their books without permission to train its Megatron artificial intelligence model. From a report: Kai Bird, Jia Tolentino, Daniel Okrent and several others alleged that Microsoft used pirated digital versions of their books to teach its AI to respond to human prompts. Their lawsuit, filed in New York federal court on Tuesday, is one of several high-stakes cases brought by authors, news outlets and other copyright holders against tech companies including Meta Platforms, Anthropic and Microsoft-backed OpenAI over alleged misuse of their material in AI training. [...] The writers alleged in the complaint that Microsoft used a collection of nearly 200,000 pirated books to train Megatron, an algorithm that gives text responses to user prompts.

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Aaron Sorkin is officially working on a sequel to The Social Network. From a report: Last year, the Oscar-winning writer revealed he was working on a film that would revisit the subject of Facebook, and Deadline has now reported that The Social Network Part II is in development at Sony Pictures yet isn't a "straight sequel." The original film, which traced the early days of Facebook and its creator Mark Zuckerberg, was directed by David Fincher. Sorkin is rumoured to be directing the follow-up. "I blame Facebook for January 6," he said in 2024 on a special edition of The Town podcast, live from Washington DC. When asked to explain why, he responded: "You're gonna need to buy a movie ticket." The Social Network was an adaptation of Ben Mezrich's book The Accidental Billionaires, and the sequel will be based on the Wall Street Journal series The Facebook Files. The 2021 investigation examined the damage caused by the social networking site and how internal findings had been buried. Subjects included the influence on the January 6 riot and the mental health of teenage users.

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U.S. lawmakers have reintroduced the bipartisan Open App Markets Act, aiming to curb Apple and Google's control over mobile app stores by promoting competition, supporting third-party marketplaces and sideloading, and safeguarding developer rights. AppleInsider reports: The Open App Markets Act seeks to do a number of things, including: - Protect developers' rights to tell consumers about lower prices and offer competitive pricing; - Protect sideloading of apps; - Promote competition by opening the market to third-party app stores, startup apps, and alternative payment systems; - Make it possible for developers to offer new experiences that take advantage of consumer device features; - Give consumers greater control over their devices; - Prevent app stores from disadvantaging developers; and - Establish safeguards to preserve consumer privacy, security, and safety. This isn't the first time we've seen this bill, either. In 2021, Senators Blumenthal, Klobuchar, and Blackburn had attempted to put forth the original version of the Open App Markets Act.However, the initial bill never made it to the floor for an office vote. Thanks to last-minute efforts by lobbying groups and appearances from chief executives, the bill eventually stalled out. While the two bills are largely similar, the revised version introduces several key differences. Notably, the new version includes new carve-outs aimed at protecting intellectual property and addressing potential national security concerns.There's also a new clause that would prohibit punitive actions against developers for enabling remote access to other apps. The clause addition harkens back to the debacle between Apple and most game streaming services -- though in 2024, Apple loosened its App Store guidelines to allow cloud gaming and emulation. There are a few new platform-protective clauses added, too. For instance, it would significantly lower the burden of proof for either Apple or Google to block platform access to a third-party app.Additionally, it reinforces the fact that companies like Apple or Google will not need to provide support or refunds for third-party apps installed outside of first-party app marketplaces. The full bill can be found here.

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Psylo, a new privacy-focused iOS browser by Mysk, aims to defeat digital fingerprinting by isolating each browser tab with its own IP address, unique fingerprinting defenses, and proxy-based encryption. "Psylo stands out as it is the only WebKit-based iOS browser that truly isolates tabs," Tommy Mysk told The Register. "It's not only about separate storage and cookies. Psylo goes beyond that." "This is why we call tabs 'silos.' It applies unique anti-fingerprinting measures per silo, such as canvas randomization. This way two Psylo tabs opening the same website would appear as though they originated on two different devices to the opened website." From the report: The company claims Psylo therefore offers better privacy than a VPN because the virtual networks mask the user's IP address but generally don't alter the data used for fingerprinting. Psylo, for example, will adjust the browser's time zone and browser language to match the geolocation of each proxy, resulting in more entropy that means fingerprints created by gathering data from silos will appear to be different. The Mysk devs' post states that some privacy-focused browsers like Brave also implement anti-fingerprinting measures like canvas randomization, but those are more effective on the desktop macOS app due to Apple's iOS restrictions. They claim that they were able to achieve better results on iOS by using a client-side JavaScript solution. Mysk designed Psylo to minimize the information available to its maker. It doesn't log personally identifiable information or browsing data that the curious could use to identify the user, the company claims, noting that it also doesn't have customer payment information, which is handled by Apple. There are no user accounts, only randomized identifiers to indicate active subscriptions. According to Tommy Mysk, the only subscriber data kept is bandwidth usage, which is necessary to prevent abuse. "We aggregate bandwidth usage based on a randomly generated ID that is created when a subscription is made," Mysk said. "The randomly generated ID is associated with the Apple subscription transaction. Apple doesn't share the identity of users making App Store purchases with developers." Asked whether Apple could identify users, Mysk said, "Theoretically and given a court order, Apple can figure out the randomly generated ID of the user in question. If we were to hand out the data associated with the randomly generated ID, it would only be the bandwidth usage of that user in the current month, and two months in the past. Older data is automatically deleted. "We don't associate any identifiable information with the randomly generated ID. We don't store IP addresses at all in every component of our system. We don't store websites visited by our users at all." The browser is only available on iOS and iPadOS, but Mysk says an Android version could be developed if there's enough interest. It costs $9.99 per month or $99 per year in the U.S.

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If Fedora drops 32-bit support, the gaming-focused Bazzite project would be forced to shut down, according to its founder Kyle Gospodnetich. "As much as I'd like this change to happen, it's too soon," said Gospodneitch in a post. "This change would kill off projects like Bazzite entirely right as Fedora is starting to make major headway in the gaming space. Neal Gompa already pointed out basic use cases that would be broken even if someone built the packages Steam itself needs to function." He continued: "It's also causing irreparable damage to Fedora from a PR standpoint. I have been inundated all day with people sharing news articles and being genuinely concerned Steam is gong to stop working on their Fedora/Bazzite machines. I would argue not only should this change be rejected, the proposal should be rescinded to limit further damage to Fedora as a project. Perhaps open a separate one to talk about changing build architecture to build fewer 32-bit packages?" When pushed further, Gospodnetich said: "I'm speaking as it's founder, if this change is actually made as it is written the best option for us is to just go ahead and disband the project."

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