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Roku has launched Howdy, a new ad-free streaming service that costs $2.99 a month. The streaming platform says it offers 10,000 hours of content from Lionsgate, Warner Bros. Discovery and FilmRise, as well as its own, exclusive programming known as Roku Originals. CNBC reports: The service is available across the U.S. beginning Tuesday. [...] The new service runs alongside the Roku Channel, which will remain free. Howdy will initially be available on the Roku platform, and will later be rolled out on mobile and other platforms, the company said. "Priced at less than a cup of coffee, Howdy is ad-free and designed to complement, not compete with, premium services," said Roku founder and CEO Anthony Wood in the release.

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According to two sources Reuters spoke with, Intel is struggling with low yields in its next-gen 18A chip manufacturing process for its next PC chip, Panther Lake. Internal data suggests the company is far from reaching commercially viable production levels, leading some insiders to describe the effort as a "Hail Mary." Reuters reports: For months, Intel has promised investors it would increase manufacturing using a process it calls 18A. It spent billions of dollars developing 18A, including the construction or upgrades of several factories, with the goal of challenging Taiwan's chipmaking heavyweight, TSMC. Intel wants to round out its business designing chips that it largely makes in-house and TSMC helps it produce, with a contract manufacturing business that can compete with this key supplier. But whether Intel revives advanced chip production in the U.S. and gets its contract foundry on solid footing depends on closing the technology gap with TSMC. Early tests disappointed customers last year, but Intel has said its 18A is on track to make its "Panther Lake" laptop semiconductors at high volume starting in 2025, which include next-generation transistors and a more efficient way to deliver power to the chip. The chipmaker has hoped that producing such an advanced in-house chip would grow external interest in its foundry, at a time when new CEO Lip-Bu Tan has explored a major shift to course-correct that fledgling business, Reuters previously reported. Yet only a small percentage of the Panther Lake chips printed via 18A have been good enough to make available to customers, said the two people, who were briefed on the company's test data since late last year. The sources spoke on condition of anonymity because Intel did not authorize them to disclose such information. This percentage figure, known as yield, means Intel may struggle to make its high-end laptop chip profitably in the near future. [...] Intel in the past has aimed for a yield north of 50% before ramping production because starting any earlier risked damaging its profit margin, three of the sources said. Intel typically does not make the lion's share of its profit until yields reach roughly 70% to 80%, key for a chip as small as Panther Lake where many defects would make it a tough sell, the three people said. Profit also flows from market expansions and building up factory output, Intel said. An immense yield increase would be a tall task by Panther Lake's fourth-quarter launch, the two people with knowledge of Intel's manufacturing operation said. But without such a jump, Intel may have to sell some chips at a lower profit margin or at a loss, the two sources briefed on test data said. The company has warned it could exit leading-edge manufacturing entirely if it does not land external business for 14A, which is 18A's next-generation successor.

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They want you to use a Microsoft account, but we'll show you how to get around it

hands on Redmond really – and I mean really – wants you to log into Windows 11 with a Microsoft account.…

An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Verge: Google DeepMind is releasing a new version of its AI "world" model, called Genie 3, capable of generating 3D environments that users and AI agents can interact with in real time. The company is also promising that users will be able to interact with the worlds for much longer than before and that the model will actually remember where things are when you look away from them. [...] Genie 3 seems like it could be a notable step forward. Users will be able to generate worlds with a prompt that supports a "few" minutes of continuous interaction, which is up from the 10-20 seconds of interaction possible with Genie 2, according to a blog post. Google says that Genie 3 can keep spaces in visual memory for about a minute, meaning that if you turn away from something in a world and then turn back to it, things like paint on a wall or writing on a chalkboard will be in the same place. The worlds will also have a 720p resolution and run at 24fps. DeepMind is adding what it calls "promptable world events" into Genie 3, too. Using a prompt, you'll be able to do things like change weather conditions in a world or add new characters. The model is launching as "a limited research preview" available to "a small cohort of academics and creators," according to Google. It's "exploring" how to bring Genie 3 to "additional testers."

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GPT-OSS now available in 120 and 20 billion parameter sizes under Apache 2.0 license

OpenAI released its first open weights language models since GPT-2 on Tuesday with the debut of GPT-OSS.…

The social network disagrees with verdict and vows to explore all legal options

A jury has unanimously found Meta guilty of violating the California Invasion of Privacy Act by using data from menstruation and fertility app Flo to sell advertising to the social network.…

Standard DDR4 DRAM prices doubled between May and June 2025, with 8-gigabit units reaching $4.12 and 4-gigabit units hitting $3.14 -- the latter's highest level since July 2021, according to electronics trading companies cited by Nikkei Asia. The unprecedented single-month doubling follows speculation that Chinese manufacturer ChangXin Memory Technologies has halted DDR4 production to shift factories toward DDR5 memory for AI applications. DDR4 currently comprises 60% of desktop PC memory while DDR5 accounts for 40%, per Tokyo-based BCN research. Samsung Electronics, SK Hynix, and Micron Technology controlled 90% of the global DRAM market in Q2 2025.

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The U.S. Transportation Department is proposing new rules to speed deployment of drones beyond the visual line of sight of operators, a key change needed to advance commercial uses like package deliveries. From a report: "We are going to unleash American drone dominance," Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy said at a press conference on Tuesday. Under current rules, operators need to get individual waivers or exemptions to use drones without visual line of sight. The department said eliminating those requirements "will significantly expand the use-case for drone technologies in areas like: manufacturing, farming, energy production, filmmaking, and the movement of products including lifesaving medications." The proposal includes new requirements for manufacturers, operators, and drone traffic-management services to keep drones safely separated from other drones and airplanes. "It's going to change the way that people and products move throughout our airspace... so you may change the way you get your Amazon package, you may get a Starbucks cup of coffee from a drone," Duffy said.

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AI search biz insists its content capture and summarization is okay because someone asked for it

AI search biz Perplexity claims that Cloudflare has mischaracterized its site crawlers as malicious bots and that the content delivery network made technical errors in its analysis of Perplexity's operations.…

Nearly one-third of all retracted papers at PLoS ONE can be traced back to just 45 researchers who served as editors at the journal, an analysis of its publication records has found. Nature: The study, published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS), found that 45 editors handled only 1.3% of all articles published by PLoS ONE from 2006 to 2023, but that the papers they accepted accounted for more than 30% of the 702 retractions that the journal issued by early 2024. Twenty-five of these editors also authored papers in PLoS ONE that were later retracted. The PNAS authors did not disclose the names of any of the 45 editors. But, by independently analysing publicly available data from PLoS ONE and the Retraction Watch database, Nature's news team has identified five of the editors who handled the highest number of papers that were subsequently retracted by the journal. Together, those editors accepted about 15% of PLoS ONE's retracted papers up to 14 July.

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OpenAI has released two open-weight language models, marking the startup's first such release since GPT-2 in 2019. The models, gpt-oss-120b and gpt-oss-20b, can run locally on consumer devices and be fine-tuned for specific purposes. Both models use chain-of-thought reasoning approaches first deployed in OpenAI's o1 model and can browse the web, execute code, and function as AI agents. The smaller 20-billion-parameter model runs on consumer devices with 16 GB of memory. Gpt-oss-120B model will require about 80 GB of memory. OpenAI said the 120-billion-parameter model performs similarly to the company's proprietary o3 and o4-mini models. The models are available free on Hugging Face under the Apache 2.0 license after safety testing that delayed their March announcement.

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Tablets have also been growing for six straight quarters, says Canalys

Chromebook demand surged in the second quarter of 2025, Canalys reported Tuesday, but that doesn't necessarily mean permanent growth is on the horizon. …

The Government Accountability Office has issued reports criticizing the Department of Homeland Security, Environmental Protection Agency, and General Services Administration for failing to implement critical IT and cybersecurity recommendations. DHS leads with 43 unresolved recommendations dating to 2018, including seven priority matters. The EPA has 11 outstanding items, including failures to submit FedRAMP documentation and conduct organization-wide cybersecurity risk assessments. GSA has four pending recommendations. All three agencies failed to properly log cybersecurity events and conduct required annual IT portfolio reviews. The DHS' HART biometric program remains behind schedule without proper cost accounting or privacy controls, with all nine 2023 recommendations still open.

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Psst, wanna steal someone's biometrics?

black hat Critical security flaws in Broadcom chips used in more than 100 models of Dell computers could allow attackers to take over tens of millions of users' devices, steal passwords, and access sensitive data, including fingerprint information, according to Cisco Talos.…

Wikipedia editors have adopted a policy enabling administrators to delete AI-generated articles without the standard week-long discussion period. Articles containing telltale LLM responses like "Here is your Wikipedia article on" or "Up to my last training update" now qualify for immediate removal. Articles with fabricated citations -- nonexistent papers or unrelated sources such as beetle research cited in computer science articles -- also meet deletion criteria.

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CIOs at the EPA, DHS, and GSA are called out for failure to implement critical cybersecurity recommendations

The Government Accountability Office (GAO) scolded a trio of federal agencies on Monday because their CIOs haven't implemented IT-related recommendations designed to safeguard national cybersecurity. …

Palantir chief executive Alex Karp has told analysts and investors that the company treats Harvard, Princeton and Yale graduates the same as those without college degrees, calling employment at the data analytics firm "a new credential independent of class and background." During the earnings call Monday where Palantir reported its first billion-dollar revenue quarter, Karp said university graduates come to the company after being "engaged in platitudes" and claimed workers without college degrees sometimes create more value than degree holders using Palantir products. The company launched its Meritocracy Fellowship this spring to recruit talent outside traditional university pathways.

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Some pinpointed software nasties but were suspicious of printer drivers too

Researchers from the Universities of Guelph and Waterloo have discovered exactly how users decide whether an application is legitimate or malware before installing it – and the good news is they're better than you might expect, at least when primed to expect malware.…

An anonymous reader shares a report: Microsoft has published a new video that appears to be the first in an upcoming series of videos dubbed "Windows 2030 Vision," where the company outlines its vision for the future of Windows over the next five years. It curiously makes references to some potentially major changes on the horizon, in the wake of AI. This first episode features David Weston, Microsoft's Corporate Vice President of Enterprise & Security, who opens the video by saying "the world of mousing and keyboarding around will feel as alien as it does to Gen Z [using] MS-DOS." Right out of the gate, it sounds like he's teasing the potential for a radical new desktop UX made possible by agentic AI. Weston later continues, "I truly believe the future version of Windows and other Microsoft operating systems will interact in a multimodal way. The computer will be able to see what we see, hear what we hear, and we can talk to it and ask it to do much more sophisticated things."

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Tools vendor targets 'creators who've never coded' but devs will be wary

IDE and developer tools vendor JetBrains has released a private preview of Kineto, an AI-driven no-code platform for creators and small businesses.…