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'Online platforms can rely on our app,' says Commish, 'there are no more excuses'

The European Commission has recommended EU member states adopt an age verification app designed to protect children from harmful online content.…

After Hashicorp co-founder blasts the source shack and numbers slide

Microsoft's code hosting shack Github has published a lengthy mea culpa about its availability and reliability woes - one that includes the words "we are sorry."…

An anonymous reader quotes a report from NBC News: The Food and Drug Administration on Friday granted a quick review of three experimental psychedelic drugs meant to treat major depression and post-traumatic stress disorder. It's the latest move by the Trump administration signaling a shift in policy toward treatments that also give users a high -- coming a day after the Justice Department said it would ease restrictions on state-licensed medical marijuana. UK-based biotech company Compass Pathways said Friday it has received an expedited review for its experimental form of synthetic psilocybin for treatment-resistant depression. In a press release the company cited two large, phase 3 studies that had "generated positive data." Usona Institute, headquartered in Wisconsin, also said it's received a voucher for its work with psilocybin to treat major depressive disorder. In an email, a Usona spokesperson said the company expects the review process to last one to two months after it submits its application. "The voucher expedites the timeline only; it does not alter scientific or regulatory standards," the spokesperson wrote. New York-based Transcend Therapeutics has also been granted a priority review voucher for its experimental drug methylone for PTSD, Blake Mandell, the company's chief executive officer, said. "There's a battle still raging in their mind that we don't fully understand biochemically," FDA Commissioner Marty Makary said. "When you see something that looks promising for a community that is suffering with mental health illness, despair and suicidal ideation, you can't help but recognize that." Makary told NBC News that with the priority voucher program, the agency could potentially approve the first psychedelic drug by the end of summer.

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32 phone calls, 17 email chains, a 5-day ordeal, and no help during the daddy of all stuffups, claim those affected

GoDaddy is currently investigating claims that it handed complete control of a valid 27-year-old domain to another customer, without requiring them to pass any authentication processes or upload any supporting documents.…

Expert says it could push customers and partners to work with undocumented APIs

SAP is prohibiting the use of its APIs to integrate with AI systems outside its endorsed architectures, raising concerns that it is locking out third-party AI tools from customers' SAP data.…

Linux vendor touts European independence while rate limits, Chromium popups, and cold sparks steal the show

BORK!BORK!BORK! The keynote gods are a fickle bunch, as SUSE discovered at its annual shindig in Prague. What should have been a slick edge demo instead served up error pages to unsuspecting attendees, while keynote presentations attracted some unwelcome visitors.…

fjo3 shares a report from The Times: More than two-thirds of babies under two use screens, a report has found, and some are exposed for up to eight hours a day. Nearly a third of newborns were found to be watching screens for more than three hours a day, while almost 20 percent of infants of four to 11 months used screens for more than an hour a day. The report comes after the government issued guidance that children under two do not use screens at all, apart from communal activities such as video-calling relatives. In a review of the current research, researchers found evidence linking screen time to poorer outcomes for children, including an increased risk of obesity, short-sightedness, sleep and behavioural difficulties, and later challenges with friendships. [...] The research also revealed why children and parents use screens, with families reporting children doing so for educational purposes, entertainment, play and to communicate and bond with others. Parents, meanwhile, used screens to occupy or distract children, which helped caregivers to complete domestic duties, paid employment and other caring responsibilities. Nearly a quarter of parents -- 23.6 percent -- either had no childcare or were not aware of the government's early years offer.

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Yet another reason not to feast on OpenClaw

Thirty ClawHub skills published by a single author are silently co-opting AI agents and creating a mass cryptocurrency mining swarm – without any malware or user consent.…

Bemoans frequent outages that mean he’ll move Ghostty elsewhere

Hashicorp co-founder Mitchell Hashimoto has decided GitHub is so unstable it is “no longer a place for serious work,” and will therefore move his current project elsewhere.…

Elon Musk testified on day two of his trial against OpenAI, saying he helped create the company as a nonprofit counterweight to Google and would not have backed it if the goal had been private profit. CNBC reports: Musk on Tuesday was the first witness called to testify in the trial. He spoke about his upbringing, his many companies, his role in founding OpenAI and his understanding of its structure. Musk said in his testimony that he was not opposed to the creation of a small for-profit subsidiary, "as long as the tail didn't wag the dog." Musk said he was motivated to start OpenAI to serve as a counterweight to Google. He got the idea after an argument he had with Google co-founder Larry Page, who called Musk a "speciesist for being pro-human," he testified. "I could have started it as a for profit and I chose not to," Musk said on the stand. Earlier, attorneys for Musk and OpenAI presented their opening arguments to the jury. Musk's lead trial lawyer, Steven Molo, delivered the opening statement for the Tesla and SpaceX CEO. OpenAI lawyer William Savitt gave the opening statement for the AI company, Altman and Brockman. OpenAI has characterized Musk's lawsuit as a baseless "harassment campaign." The company said Monday in a post on X that it "can't wait to make our case in court where both the truth and the law are on our side." During his testimony on Tuesday, Musk repeatedly emphasized that he founded OpenAI to serve as a counterweight to Google. He said he got the idea after an argument about AI safety with Google co-founder Larry Page, who Musk said called him "a speciesist for being pro-human." Musk said he was concerned Page was not taking AI safety seriously, so he wanted there to be an nonprofit, open source alternative to Google. "I could have started it as a for profit and I chose not to," Musk said on the stand. Further reading: Elon Musk and OpenAI CEO Sam Altman Head To Court

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Haneda airport will start testing humanoid robots, because everything that gets a plane flying was designed for our species

Your next holiday memory might involve humanoid robots losing your luggage.…

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: University of Oregon chemist Christopher Hendon loves his coffee -- so much so that studying all the factors that go into creating the perfect cuppa constitutes a significant area of research for him. His latest project: discovering a novel means of measuring the flavor profile of coffee simply by sending an electrical current through a sample beverage. The results appear in a new paper published in the journal Nature Communications. [...] The coffee industry typically uses a method for measuring the refractive index of coffee -- i.e., how light bends as it travels through the liquid -- to determine strength, but it doesn't capture the contribution of roast color to the overall flavor profile. So for this latest study, Hendon decided to focus on roast color and beverage strength, the two variables most likely to affect the sensory profile of the final cuppa. His solution turned out to be quite simple. Hendon repurposed an electrochemical tool called a potentiostat, typically used to test battery and fuel cell performance. Hendon used the tool to measure how electricity interacted with the liquid. He found that this provided a better measurement of the flavor profile. He even tested it on four different samples of coffee beans and successfully identified the distinctive signature of a batch that had failed the roaster's quality-control process. Granted, one's taste in coffee is fairly subjective, so Hendon's goal was not to achieve a "perfect" cup but to give baristas a simple tool to consistently reproduce flavor profiles more tailored to a given customer's taste. "It's an objective way to make a statement about what people like in a cup of coffee," said Hendon. "The reason you have an enjoyable cup of coffee is almost certainly that you have selected a coffee of a particular roast color and extracted it to a desired strength. Until now, we haven't been able to separate those variables. Now we can diagnose what gives rise to that delicious cup." Outside of his latest electrical-current experiment, Christopher Hendon's coffee research has shown that espresso can be made more consistently by modeling extraction yield -- how much coffee dissolves into the final drink -- and controlling water flow and pressure. He also found that static electricity from grinding causes fine coffee particles to clump, which disrupts brewing. The solution: adding a small squirt of water to beans before grinding (known as the Ross droplet technique) to reduce that static, cut clumping and waste, and lead to a stronger, more consistent espresso.

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At AI Dev 26 x SF, code slingers confront their relationship with AI

More than 3,000 software developers from around the world gathered in San Francisco on Tuesday to learn what will become of software development in the AI era.…

Apple's Vision Pro has been used in what's described as the world's first cataract surgery performed with the headset. MacRumors reports: [New York opthalmologist] Dr. Eric Rosenberg of SightMD completed the initial procedure in October 2025 and has since performed hundreds of additional cases using ScopeXR, a surgical platform he co-developed for Apple's mixed reality device. ScopeXR streams live feeds from 3D digital surgical microscopes directly into the Vision Pro, which lets the surgeon view the operative field in stereoscopic 3D while overlaying preoperative diagnostic data. The platform also supports real-time remote collaboration, allowing surgeons to virtually join procedures and see exactly what the operating surgeon sees. "We are now able to bring the world's best surgeon into any operating room, at any hour, from anywhere on the planet," said Dr. Rosenberg in a company press release. "From residents performing their first cases to surgeons facing unexpected complications, this technology democratizes access to expertise and that will save vision."

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No sense in OpenAI stressing over its cloud bills if Oracle can't get the lights on

Close on the heels of a report that OpenAI has missed revenue targets and may not be able to pay its future bills, compute partner Oracle is keeping calm and carrying on with a massive new datacenter complex in the New Mexico desert.…

Sony is reportedly rolling out a 30-day online check-in requirement for some digital PS4 and PS5 games, meaning players could temporarily lose access if their console does not reconnect to renew the license. Tom's Hardware reports: In the info page of an affected game, you'd see a new validity period and a "remaining time" deadline. At first, this seemed like a software bug, but now PlayStation Support has confirmed its authenticity to multiple users. PlayStation owners are furious about the change. From what we've seen, this DRM is intended for digital game copies. It works by instating a mandatory online check-in where you have to connect to the internet within a rolling 30-day window or risk losing access to the game. Afterward, you can still restore access, but you'll need an internet connection to renew the game's license first. So far, it seems like only games installed after the recent March firmware update are affected. Affected customers report that setting your PS4 or PS5 as the primary console doesn't alleviate this check-in policy either. No matter what, any game you download from now on will feature this new requirement, effectively eliminating the concept of offline play for even single-player titles.

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PERM filings require employers to show American workers had a fair shot at the role

The US Department of Justice has accused data and AI platform provider Cloudera of abusing a program designed to give permanent residency to foreign workers who take tough-to-fill positions by creating a parallel hiring process that dumped the applications of Americans to a non-functional email address. …

Apple is adding a new App Store subscription option that lets developers offer lower monthly prices in exchange for a 12-month commitment. "This model will allow developers to offer discounted rates to customers in exchange for more predictable long-term revenue," reports TechCrunch. "This also caters to how many developers have already been marketing their annual subscriptions in their apps." From the report: Often, app developers will display the lower monthly price to highlight the discount the customer would receive if they purchase the annual subscription instead of the monthly option. If the user is on the fence about a longer-term commitment, the notion that they're getting a better deal can help to push them toward the annual option. Now, Apple is essentially formalizing what these developers were already doing, which allows it to also craft a set of policies around how these subscription offers are to be displayed so as not to mislead customers about the true cost of the deals. However, the option will not be available to developers in the United States or Singapore at launch. While Apple didn't offer an explanation for this, it's still in App Store litigation in the U.S. around the specifics of the court's ruling in its case with Epic Games around how Apple can charge for subscriptions. Apple likely doesn't want to complicate the matter further until that matter is finalized. Singapore, meanwhile, also has a sophisticated payments market with strong consumer rules, which is why it may have been left out of the initial release.

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Altman's gaggle of GPTs now available in limited preview in an AWS region near you

OpenAI's top models are officially available on Amazon Web Services' Bedrock managed inference and agent platform.…

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Wired: For its famous intractability, the Bloomberg Terminal has long inspired devotion, bordering on obsession. Among traders, the ability to chart a path through the software's dizzying scrolls of numbers and text to isolate far-flung information is the mark of a seasoned professional. But as a greater mass of data is fed into the Terminal -- not only earnings and asset prices, but weather forecasts, shipping logs, factory locations, consumer spending patterns, private loans, and so on -- valuable information is being lost. "It has become more and more untenable," says Shawn Edwards, chief technology officer at Bloomberg. "You miss things, or it takes too long." To try to remedy the problem, Bloomberg is testing a chatbot-style interface for the Terminal, ASKB (pronounced ask-bee), built atop a basket of different language models. The broad idea is to help finance professionals to condense labor-intensive tasks, and make it possible to test abstract investment theses against the data through natural language prompts. As of publication, the ASKB beta is open to roughly a third of the software's 375,000 users; Bloomberg has not specified a date for a full release. Wired spoke with Edwards at Bloomberg's palatial London headquarters in early April, where he shared several examples of what ASKB can do. "With ASKB, I can create workflow templates. I can write a long query, and say, 'Hey, here's all the data I'm going to need. Give me a synopsis of the bull and bear cases, what the Street is saying, what the guidance is.' Now, I want to schedule [the workflows] or trigger them when I see this or that condition in the world." As for what separates mediocre traders from the best, assuming both have access to the same data, Edwards said: "These tools are not magical. They don't make an average [employee] all of a sudden great. The difference will be your ideas. In the hands of experts, it allows them to do better analysis, deeper research -- to sift through 10 great ideas when they might have only had time for one. If you're a mediocre analyst, they'll be 10 mediocre ideas."

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