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A fairly comprehensive look at the early personal computer culture reveals that from 1975 through early 1977, personal computers remained "almost exclusively the province of hobbyists who loved to play with computers and found them inherently fascinating," according to newly surfaced historical research. When BYTE magazine launched in 1975, its cover called computers "the world's greatest toy," reflecting the recreational rather than practical focus of early adopters. A BYTE magazine survey from late 1976 showed these pioneers were remarkably homogeneous: 72% held at least a bachelor's degree, had a median annual income of $20,000 ($123,000 in 2025 dollars), and were overwhelmingly male at 99%. Rather than developing practical software applications, early users gravitated toward games, particularly Star Trek simulations that appeared frequently in magazine advertisements and user group demonstrations. The hobbyist community organized around local clubs like the famous Homebrew Computer Club, retail stores, and specialized magazines that helped establish what one researcher calls "a mythology of the microcomputer." This narrative positioned hobbyists as democratizing heroes who "ripped the computer and the knowledge of how to use it from the hands of the priests, sharing freedom and power with the masses," challenging what they termed the "computer priesthood" of institutional gatekeepers. This self-contained hobbyist culture would soon be "subsumed by a larger phenomenon" as businessmen began targeting mass markets in 1977.

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Japan Post has launched a "digital address" system that links seven-digit combinations of numbers and letters to physical addresses. From a report: Under the system, users can input these seven-digit codes on online shopping websites, and their addresses will automatically appear on the sites. People can obtain digital addresses by registering with Japan Post's Yu ID membership service. Their digital addresses will not change even if their physical addresses change. Their new addresses will be linked to the codes if they submit notices of address changes.

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Open source in-process OLAP system launches rival to Iceberg and Delta Lake table format, and more

With a combined market value of around $150 billion, Snowflake and Databricks have divergent visions on how to get customers' analytics and machine learning tools to their data, which is often spread across different systems.…

The recent surge in cyberattacks is pushing cyber insurers toward a fundamental reassessment of premium pricing, Bloomberg reports, with industry analysts warning of an impending "inflection point" that could reshape the market. Marks & Spencer's impending $404 million hit to its operating profit from a recent hack underscores claims that will "attract intense scrutiny from insurers," according to cybersecurity expert Adam Casey. While incidents like this might not trigger immediate premium hikes across the board, they might likely contribute to an upward pricing trend. Panmure Liberum analyst Abid Hussain said that premiums have recently been falling as policy coverage has tightened, but the industry now faces a critical decision point. "There's going to be another step change, either in the policy wording or in the premiums, or both," Hussain said.

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Project shutdowns at Mozilla are not encouraging, though

Another month, another new version of Firefox, with several handy changes. The future is less certain, though.…

Sales of blue book exam booklets have surged dramatically across the nation as professors turn to analog solutions to prevent ChatGPT cheating. The University of California, Berkeley reported an 80% increase in blue book sales over the past two academic years, while Texas A&M saw 30% growth and the University of Florida recorded nearly 50% increases this school year. The surge comes as students who were freshmen when ChatGPT launched in 2022 approach senior year, having had access to AI throughout their college careers.

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Great swathes of the planet's oceans have become darker in the past two decades, according to researchers who fear the trend will have a severe impact on marine life around the world. From a report: Satellite data and numerical modelling revealed that more than a fifth of the global ocean darkened between 2003 and 2022, reducing the band of water that life reliant on sunlight and moonlight can thrive in. The effect is evident across 75m sq km (30m sq miles) of ocean, equivalent to the land area of Europe, Africa, China and North America combined, and disturbs the upper layer of water where 90% of marine species live. Dr Thomas Davies, a marine conservationist at the University of Plymouth, said the findings were a "genuine cause for concern," with potentially severe implications for marine ecosystems, global fisheries and the critical turnover of carbon and nutrients in the oceans. Most marine life thrives in the photic zones of the world's oceans, the surface layers that allow sufficient light through for organisms to exploit. While sunlight can reach a kilometre beneath the waves, in practice there is little below 200 metres.

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IT leaders in region eyeing American hyperscalers escape hatch

Amid the economic uncertainty of Trump 2.0, dependence on American tech has become a growing concern for many businesses, and a survey of 1,000 IT leaders claims that data sovereignty is now one of the most pressing issues.…

An anonymous reader shares a report: Without seeking approval of the San Francisco Board of Education, Superintendent of Schools Maria Su plans to unveil a new Grading for Equity plan on Tuesday that will go into effect this fall at 14 high schools and cover over 10,000 students. The school district is already negotiating with an outside consultant to train teachers in August in a system that awards a passing C grade to as low as a score of 41 on a 100-point exam. Were it not for an intrepid school board member, the drastic change in grading with implications for college admissions and career readiness would have gone unnoticed and unexplained. It is buried in a three-word phrase on the last page of a PowerPoint presentation embedded in the school board meeting's 25-page agenda. The plan comes during the last week of the spring semester while parents are assessing the impact of over $100 million in budget reductions and deciding whether to remain in the public schools this fall. While the school district acknowledges that parent aversion to this grading approach is typically high and understands the need for "vigilant communication," outreach to parents has been minimal and may be nonexistent. The school district's Office of Equity homepage does not mention it and a page containing the SFUSD definition of equity has not been updated in almost three years. Grading for Equity eliminates homework or weekly tests from being counted in a student's final semester grade. All that matters is how the student scores on a final examination, which can be taken multiple times. Students can be late turning in an assignment or showing up to class or not showing up at all without it affecting their academic grade. Currently, a student needs a 90 for an A and at least 61 for a D. Under the San Leandro Unified School District's grading for equity system touted by the San Francisco Unified School District and its consultant, a student with a score as low as 80 can attain an A and as low as 21 can pass with a D.

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The latest in a long line of techies to face Putin’s wrath

A Russian programmer will face the next 14 years in a "strict-regime" (high-security) penal colony after a regional court ruled he leaked sensitive data to Ukraine.…

A former Minnesota waitress unknowingly helped North Korean workers steal $17.1 million in wages from over 300 American companies through an elaborate remote work scheme, federal prosecutors said this week. Christina Chapman operated a "laptop farm" from her home, managing dozens of computers that allowed North Koreans using stolen U.S. identities to work as legitimate tech employees. The FBI estimates this broader infiltration involves thousands of North Korean workers generating hundreds of millions annually for the sanctions-hit regime. Chapman, recruited via LinkedIn in 2020 to serve as "the U.S. face" for overseas IT workers, handled logistics including receiving company laptops, installing remote access software, and processing falsified employment documents. The North Korean workers accessed the devices daily from overseas, with some maintaining jobs for months or years at major American corporations. Chapman earned just under $177,000 before the FBI raided her Arizona operation in October 2023, seizing over 90 computers. She pleaded guilty in February to wire fraud, identity theft, and money laundering charges, facing up to nine years in prison at her July sentencing.

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Researchers develop visual model testing benchmark and find models weak for medical reasoning

AI is not ready to make clinical diagnoses based on radiological scans, according to a new study.…

Easy, medium, and the sledgehammer approach – or any combination you fancy

hands on If you're thinking about switching to Linux but there are a few Windows apps you just can't do without, you do have options… and some of them are free.…

Steven J. Vaughan-Nichols writes in an op-ed for The Register: I use AI a lot, but not to write stories. I use AI for search. When it comes to search, AI, especially Perplexity, is simply better than Google. Ordinary search has gone to the dogs. Maybe as Google goes gaga for AI, its search engine will get better again, but I doubt it. In just the last few months, I've noticed that AI-enabled search, too, has been getting crappier. In particular, I'm finding that when I search for hard data such as market-share statistics or other business numbers, the results often come from bad sources. Instead of stats from 10-Ks, the US Securities and Exchange Commission's (SEC) mandated annual business financial reports for public companies, I get numbers from sites purporting to be summaries of business reports. These bear some resemblance to reality, but they're never quite right. If I specify I want only 10-K results, it works. If I just ask for financial results, the answers get... interesting. This isn't just Perplexity. I've done the exact same searches on all the major AI search bots, and they all give me "questionable" results. Welcome to Garbage In/Garbage Out (GIGO). Formally, in AI circles, this is known as AI model collapse. In an AI model collapse, AI systems, which are trained on their own outputs, gradually lose accuracy, diversity, and reliability. This occurs because errors compound across successive model generations, leading to distorted data distributions and "irreversible defects" in performance. The final result? A Nature 2024 paper stated, "The model becomes poisoned with its own projection of reality." [...] We're going to invest more and more in AI, right up to the point that model collapse hits hard and AI answers are so bad even a brain-dead CEO can't ignore it. How long will it take? I think it's already happening, but so far, I seem to be the only one calling it. Still, if we believe OpenAI's leader and cheerleader, Sam Altman, who tweeted in February 2024 that "OpenAI now generates about 100 billion words per day," and we presume many of those words end up online, it won't take long.

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Space broadband and space-linked phones all very well, but someone's got to track them

Satellites have evolved, thanks to SpaceX's Starlink and incomer AST SpaceMobile pumping out high-speed broadband and cellular services for everyday phones delivered from low Earth orbit (LEO) hardware.…

And it's all your fault

There is growing dissatisfaction over cloud computing, according to Gartner, and much of this can be put down to unrealistic expectations or customers simply not implementing the tech properly.…

More cases about 2015 software swindle stuck in legal traffic jam

Germany’s Braunschweig Regional Court has reportedly sentenced four Volkswagen executives to jail over “Dieselgate” – the 2015 scandal in which the automaker was found to have fudged software used to test its vehicles’ pollution emissions.…

In an interview with Wired (paywalled), OnePlus co-founder and Nothing CEO, Carl Pei, said the future of smartphones will center around the OS and AI to get things done -- rendering traditional apps a thing of the past. 9to5Google reports: Pei says that Nothing's strength is in "creativity," adding that "the creative companies of the past" such as Apple "have become very big and very corporate, and they're no longer very creative." He then dives into what else but AI, explaining that Nothing wants to create the "iPod" of AI, saying that Apple built a product that simply built a better user experience: "If you look back, the iPod was not launched as 'an MP3 player with a hard disk drive.' The hard disk drive was merely a means to a better user experience. AI is just a new technology that enables us to create better products for users. So, our strategy is not to make big claims that AI is going to change the world and revolutionize smartphones. For us, it's about using it to solve a consumer problem, not to tell a big story. We want the product to be the story." Pei then says that he doesn't see the current trend of AI products -- citing wearables such as smart glasses -- as the future of the technology. Rather, he sees the smartphone as the most important device for AI "for the foreseeable future," but as one that will "change dramatically." According to Pei, the future of the smartphone is one without apps, with the experience instead just revolving around the OS and what it can do and how it can "optimize" for the user, acting as a proactive, automated agent and that, in the end, the user "will spend less time doing boring things and more time on what they care about."

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SimpleHelp was the vector for the attack

DragonForce ransomware infected a managed service provider, and its customers, after attackers exploited security flaws in remote monitoring and management tool SimpleHelp.…

Yet is happy with its ninth flight, which Musk’s rocket Co. designed to severely stress its rockets

SpaceX’s Starship has failed, again.…