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Early 2000s joke now serious problem for coffee shops in the Land of the Morning Calm

Take a look at the internet of decades past, and you'll find plenty of jokes about bringing a desktop computer to a coffee shop. For South Korean Starbucks stores, however, that old-time meme is anything but in the past.…

A countrywide study of smartphone users who relocated between US cities found that moving to more walkable environments increased daily walking by 1,100 steps on average. Stanford University researchers analyzed 248,266 days of step data from 5,424 users of the Azumio Argus smartphone app who relocated 7,447 times among 1,609 cities between March 2013 and February 2016. Participants who moved from cities at the 25th percentile of walkability to those at the 75th percentile sustained the increased activity levels for at least three months after relocation. The additional steps consisted predominantly of moderate-to-vigorous physical activity, with large walkability increases of 49-80 points associated with about one hour per week more of such activity. The study found that 42.5% of participants met national physical activity guidelines for moderate-to-vigorous activity after moving to highly walkable locations, compared to 21.5% before relocation. Computer simulations based on the data suggest that increasing all US cities to the walkability level of Chicago or Philadelphia could result in 36 million more Americans meeting aerobic physical activity guidelines.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Hurricane data, schmurricane data: Have you heard about that Sun burp?

The more our Earth-bound society learns to rely on electronics, the greater the risk that weather from the stars shatters our reality. That's why US government space watchers are seeking a company to help them operate the next generation of space weather satellites.…

Samsung has finally launched a TV featuring the company's new Micro RGB backlight technology. From a report: The 115-inch TV is first launching in South Korea for over $32,000, according to SamMobile, but Samsung says it's coming to the US next, followed by a wider global rollout with more size options. Samsung's Micro RGB technology is being positioned as an upgrade to Mini LED backlights that employ an array of tiny white or blue LEDs behind a TV's LCD panel. Micro RGB backlights instead use an ultra-fine pattern of individually controlled red, green and blue LEDs that are each less than than 100um in size. The new backlight is powered by Samsung's Micro RGB AI engine, which the company says "analyzes each frame in real time and automatically optimizes color output for a more lifelike and immersive picture." The technology allows for improved color accuracy and better contrast by precisely controlling the intensity of the individual LEDs, and Samsung says it can even boost the color in dull scenes, making them appear more vivid and immersive.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Redmond let dev code loose in production Windows, leading to the bug

Microsoft is having difficulty keeping development code out of the Windows event log after another message that users are advised to ignore turned up in the... event log.…

Young listeners are accelerating audio and video consumption, with an Economist/YouGov poll finding 31% of Americans aged 18-29 using faster-than-1x playback versus 8% among those 45 and older, as Apple, Spotify, newspapers' audio, Netflix, and YouTube expand speed controls, including YouTube's 4x for premium users. YouTube reports more than 900 years saved per day from fast playback; a meta-analysis led by University of Waterloo researchers finds minimal test-score change up to 1.5x and declines near or past 2x.

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How to pick the news sources you want to see more (and less)

hands on Even if you have your favorite sites bookmarked or type their URLs in through muscle memory, you probably still spend a lot of time looking for info on Google. Now, you can exert some control over which publishers appear in your results for news stories.…

Users want their customizations and their old models back

There has been more furious backpedalling from OpenAI following the company's ill-judged launch of GPT-5 and the removal of previous model selection.…

Microsoft has made "Pull Print" for Universal Print generally available, letting users authenticate at any registered printer to release queued jobs and reducing the chance that confidential pages sit unattended. The feature, also called "Universal Print Anywhere," supports two modes: direct print and secure release via QR codes that users scan with a phone camera or the Microsoft 365 app. Admins must register devices, enable secure release, and affix printed QR codes. Microsoft plans badge-based release.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

CVE-2017-11882 in discontinued Equation Editor still attracting keylogger campaigns despite software being killed off in 2018

Very few people are immune to the siren song of nostalgia, a yearning for a "better time" when this was all fields and kids respected their elders - and it looks like cyber criminals are no exception.…

China has established a lead in the field of open-source AI, a development that is reportedly sending jolts through both Washington and Silicon Valley. The nation's progress has become a significant event for American policymakers in the U.S. capital. The advancement has registered as a shock within Silicon Valley, the hub of the American technology industry. From the report: The overall performance of China's best open-weight model has surpassed the American open-source champion since November, according to research firm Artificial Analysis. The firm, which rates the ability of models in math, coding and other areas, found a version of Alibaba's Qwen3 beat OpenAI's gpt-oss. However, the Chinese model is almost twice as big as OpenAI's, suggesting that for simpler tasks, Qwen might consume more computing power to do the same job. OpenAI said its open-source model outperformed rivals of similar size on reasoning tasks and delivered strong performance at low cost.

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Reliant on two mega customers? Who says GPU-for-rent kingpin is a not a sustainable biz model?

Rent-a-GPU biz CoreWeave is still racking up eyewatering debts amid mounting net losses as it continues to burn cash on expanding datacenter capacity.…

Extreme heat is breaking temperature records across Europe, early measurements suggest, and driving bigger and stronger wildfires. From a report: In south-west France, records were broken on Monday in Angouleme, Bergerac, Bordeaux, Saint-Emilion and Saint-Girons. Meteo France said the "often remarkable, even unprecedented, maximum temperatures" in the region were 12C above the norm for the last few decades. In Croatia, air temperature records were set in Sibenik, at 39.5C, and Dubrovnik, at 38.9C, while large forest fires raged along its coasts and ripped through neighbouring countries in the Balkans. The day before, Hungary broke its daily maximum temperature record when a weather station in Korosladany hit 39.9C. The capital, Budapest, also broke its daily maximum record as it sweltered through 38.7C heat. Beyond Europe, dozens of temperature records were broken across Canada, and record-breaking heat above 50C in Iraq was blamed for a nationwide blackout. The heatwave in southern Europe comes as Nordic countries recover from unprecedentedtemperatures above 30C in the Arctic Circle this month.

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Hit the button and then go on your own voyage of printer discovery

Microsoft has made the "Pull Print" feature of Universal Print generally available, which means confidential print jobs should no longer appear in unintended locations.…

An anonymous reader shares a report: U.S. authorities have secretly placed location tracking devices in targeted shipments of advanced chips they see as being at high risk of illegal diversion to China, according to two people with direct knowledge of the previously unreported law enforcement tactic. The measures aim to detect AI chips being diverted to destinations which are under U.S. export restrictions, and apply only to select shipments under investigation, the people said. They show the lengths to which the U.S. has gone to enforce its chip export restrictions on China, even as the Trump administration has sought to relax some curbs on Chinese access to advanced American semiconductors. The trackers can help build cases against people and companies who profit from violating U.S. export controls, said the people who declined to be named because of the sensitivity of the issue.

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But despite the differences, all models excel at making errors and shouldn't be trusted

Generative AI coding models have common strengths and weaknesses, but express those characteristics differently due to variations in coding style.…

The vendor hops aboard GSA’s OneGov train, offering models from OpenAI, Google, Anthropic, and more

Not to be left behind in the flurry of government-wide AI purchasing deals, Box has signed a deal with the feds that'll inject some agentic AI into federal government systems. …

Windows 365 Reserve offers 10-day cloud PCs when your machine goes kaput – but you'll still need another device to access them

Microsoft is so confident in the reliability and security of its Windows 11 OS that it's now offering businesses the ability to quickly dump users onto temporary VMs in its cloud when, not if, their desktops and laptops break.…

Seven additional regions across England will now have access to the controversial tech

A fresh expansion of UK crimefighters' access to live facial recognition (LFR) technology is being described by officials as "an excellent opportunity for policing." Privacy campaigners diagree.…

Shock news: billionaire techpreneur is not a fan

Geek-turned-venture-capitalist Marc Andreessen has weighed in on the arguments surrounding the UK's Online Safety Act, accusing the UK government of leaking his input.…