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AI startup Perplexity on Tuesday offered to purchase Google's Chrome browser for $34.5 billion as it works to challenge the tech giant's web-search dominance. From a report: Perplexity's offer is significantly more than its own valuation, which is estimated at $18 billion. The company told The Wall Street Journal that several investors including large venture-capital funds had agreed to back the transaction in full. Estimates of Chrome's enterprise value vary widely but recent ones have ranged from $20 billion to $50 billion. U.S. District Judge Amit Mehta is weighing whether to force Google to sell the browser as a means of weakening Google's stranglehold on web search. Mehta last year ruled that Google illegally monopolized the search market and is expected to rule this month on how to restore competition.

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'Hung' is out and 'Unresponsive' is in, according to the Academy Software Foundation and the Alliance for OpenUSD

A Linux Foundation project has published an Inclusive Language Guide to recommend replacements for common tech terms deemed potentially offensive to some users.…

Spirit Airlines has warned investors that it may go out of business, just months after exiting bankruptcy. From a report: In a quarterly report filed with the Securities and Exchange Commission on Monday, it said there was "substantial doubt" over its "ability to continue as a going concern within 12 months." The budget airline said it was harder to make money because of weak demand for domestic leisure travel and "elevated domestic capacity," meaning increased competition on such routes. Spirit reported a net loss of $245.8 million for the second quarter of 2025, up from a $192.9 million loss for the second quarter of 2024.

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US cops yank servers, domains, and crypto from the Russia-linked gang - but the crooks remain at large

In a display of bureaucratic bravado, US law enforcement agencies say they've “disrupted” the BlackSuit ransomware gang (also known as Royal), freeing millions of dollars in virtual currency from its clutches.…

Elon Musk has threatened Apple with legal action over alleged antitrust violations related to rankings of the Grok AI chatbot app, which is owned by his AI startup xAI. From a report: "Apple is behaving in a manner that makes it impossible for any AI company besides OpenAI to reach #1 in the App Store, which is an unequivocal antitrust violation. xAI will take immediate legal action," Musk wrote in a post on his social media platform X. Apple declined to comment on Musk's threat. "Why do you refuse to put either X or Grok in your 'Must Have' section when X is the #1 news app in the world and Grok is #5 among all apps? Are you playing politics?" Musk said in another post.

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Long-term support release candidate arrives, general availability comes next month

Java 25, an LTS (long-term support) version, is now at release candidate (RC) stage with general availability scheduled for September 16.…

darwinmac writes: Firefox 141 rolled out a shiny new AI-powered smart tab grouping feature (it tries to auto-organize your tabs using a local model), but it turns out the local "Inference" process that powers it is acting like an energy-sucking monster. Users are reporting massive CPU spikes and battery drain and calling the feature "garbage" that's ruining their browsing experience.

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Designs scheduled for launch in 2026, developer kit for programmers out today

Chip designer Arm is bringing dedicated neural accelerator hardware to its GPU blueprints used in phones. It expects this to deliver higher quality visuals while boosting AI performance.…

Aside from glam, includes cool features like standalone GNOME Flashback session with no GNOME shell

Debian 13 has arrived, now with RISC-V and preconfigured "blends" right in the main installer.…

An anonymous reader quotes a report from MIT Technology Review: Physicists have created a new type of radar that could help improve underground imaging, using a cloud of atoms in a glass cell to detect reflected radio waves. The radar is a type of quantum sensor, an emerging technology that uses the quantum-mechanical properties of objects as measurement devices. It's still a prototype, but its intended use is to image buried objects in situations such as constructing underground utilities, drilling wells for natural gas, and excavating archaeological sites. [...] The glass cell that serves as the radar's quantum component is full of cesium atoms kept at room temperature. The researchers use lasers to get each individual cesium atom to swell to nearly the size of a bacterium, about 10,000 times bigger than the usual size. Atoms in this bloated condition are called Rydberg atoms. When incoming radio waves hit Rydberg atoms, they disturb the distribution of electrons around their nuclei. Researchers can detect the disturbance by shining lasers on the atoms, causing them to emit light; when the atoms are interacting with a radio wave, the color of their emitted light changes. Monitoring the color of this light thus makes it possible to use the atoms as a radio receiver. Rydberg atoms are sensitive to a wide range of radio frequencies without needing to change the physical setup... This means a single compact radar device could potentially work at the multiple frequency bands required for different applications. [Matthew Simons, a physicist at the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST), who was a member of the research team] tested the radar by placing it in a specially designed room with foam spikes on the floor, ceiling, and walls like stalactites and stalagmites. The spikes absorb, rather than reflect, nearly all the radio waves that hit them. This simulates the effect of a large open space, allowing the group to test the radar's imaging capability without unwanted reflections off walls.The researchers placed a radio wave transmitter in the room, along with their Rydberg atom receiver, which was hooked up to an optical table outside the room. They aimed radio waves at a copper plate about the size of a sheet of paper, some pipes, and a steel rod in the room, each placed up to five meters away. The radar allowed them to locate the objects to within 4.7 centimeters. The team posted a paper on the research to the arXiv preprint server in late June.

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Chip giant praises 'president's strong leadership,' promises to 'restore this great American company'

US President Donald Trump has now reversed his opinion of Intel chief Lip-Bu Tan following their meeting at the White House yesterday, hinting that the two will work more closely together.…

Scattered Spider, ShinyHunters, and Lapsus$ spent the weekend bragging to each other on a Telegram channel

Prolific cybercrime collectives Scattered Spider, ShinyHunters, and Lapsus$ appear to have come together in a new Telegram channel that shares news of their exploits.…

Automaker's answer to spate of car thefts is to charge customers for extra

Hyundai is charging UK customers £49 ($66) for a security upgrade to prevent thieves from bypassing its car locks.…

UK online reseller bought out of administration in -pre-pack agreement, say sources

London Stock Exchange-listed Fraser Group is understood to have bought struggling UK online tech bazaar Ebuyer from administrators in a pre-pack agreement, sources have told The Register.…

Microsoft’s AI-centric code editor and IDE adds the ability to rollback misguided AI prompts

The Microsoft Visual Studio Code (VS Code) team has rolled out version 1.103 with new features including GitHub Copilot chat checkpoints.…

Joburg and Warsaw among the hotspots for sprawling server farm construction

Lagos, Warsaw and Dubai are among the fastest growing cities for colocation services - with metro areas in the Asia-Pacific and EMEA regions expanding more rapidly than traditional datacenter hotspots.…

Researchers at Kyushu University have developed a solid-oxide fuel cell that operates at just 300C, less than half the usual operating temperature. The team was able to do this by engineering a "ScO6 highway" in the electrolyte, allowing protons to move quickly without losing performance. "The team expects that their new findings will lead to the development of low-cost, low-temperature SOFCs and greatly accelerate the practical application of these devices," said the researchers in a press release. Interesting Engineering reports: "While SOFCs are promising due to their high efficiency and long lifespan, one major drawback is that they require operation at high temperatures of around 700-800C (1292F-1472F)," added the researchers in a press release. Such heat requires costly, specialized heat-resistant materials, making the technology expensive for many applications. A lower operating temperature is expected to reduce these manufacturing costs. The team's success comes from re-engineering the fuel cell's electrolyte, the ceramic layer that transports protons (hydrogen ions) to generate electricity. Previously, scientists faced a trade-off. Adding chemical dopants to an electrolyte increases the number of available protons but also tends to clog the material's crystal lattice, slowing proton movement and reducing performance. The Kyushu team worked to resolve this issue. "We looked for oxide crystals that could host many protons and let them move freely -- a balance that our new study finally struck," stated Yamazaki. They found that by doping two compounds, barium stannate (BaSnO3) and barium titanate (BaTiO3), with high concentrations of scandium (Sc), they could create an efficient structure. Their analysis showed that the scandium atoms form what the researchers call a "ScO6 highway." This structure creates a wide and softly vibrating pathway through the material. "This pathway is both wide and softly vibrating, which prevents the proton-trapping that normally plagues heavily doped oxides," explained Yamazaki. The resulting material achieves a proton conductivity of more than 0.01 S/cm at 300C, a performance level comparable to conventional SOFC electrolytes that run at more than double the temperature. The research has been published in the journal Nature Materials.

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Legacy tech for nation's farmers must migrate ... contract swells to £245M

The UK's government department for agriculture and the countryside has upped the potential contract value on offer for cloud and datacenter hosting by more than £100 million.…

Home Office officials reportedly concede Brit government on back foot as Trump moves to protect US Big Tech players

Analysis The Home Office's war on encryption – its most technically complex and controversial aspect of modern policymaking yet – is starting to look like battlefield failure after more than ten years of skirmishes.…

Taskforce delivers damning interim report on next generation of energy generation

An independent taskforce commissioned by the UK government has warned of the nation's "unnecessarily slow, inefficient, and costly" approach to nuclear power (and weaponry).…