news aggregator

A United States District Court judge has approved a settlement between HP and customers who sued the company for firmware updates that prevented printers from working with non-HP ink cartridges. The class-action lawsuit, filed in December 2020, alleged HP "wrongfully compels users" to buy only HP ink by issuing updates that block competitors' cartridges. Under the settlement, HP admits no wrongdoing and won't pay monetary damages to affected customers, though it will pay $5,000 each to the three plaintiffs and $725,000 in attorneys' fees. HP has agreed to allow users of specific printer models impacted by the November 2020 update to decline firmware updates containing "Dynamic Security" features -- HP's term for technology that blocks cartridges using non-HP chips. The settlement applies only to 21 specific printer models, leaving numerous other HP printers subject to Dynamic Security restrictions. HP has previously paid millions in similar cases in Europe, Australia, and California related to printer bricking.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Tough Euro privacy rules include requirement for accurate info, watchdog told in formal complaint

​A Norwegian man was shocked when ChatGPT falsely claimed in a conversation he murdered his two sons and tried to kill a third - mixing in real details about his personal life.…

Google is introducing an AI-powered update to Gmail search that prioritizes "most relevant" results based on recency, frequent contacts, and most-clicked emails. The feature aims to help users more efficiently locate specific messages in crowded inboxes. The update is rolling out globally to personal Google accounts, with business accounts to follow at an unspecified date. Users will have the option to toggle between the new AI-powered "most relevant" search and the traditional reverse chronological "most recent" view.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Over the past two decades, school districts have spent billions equipping classrooms with laptops, yet students have fallen further behind on essential skills, Michael Bloomberg argues. With about 90% of schools now providing these devices, test scores hover near historic lows -- only 28% of eighth graders proficient in math and 30% in reading. Bloomberg notes technology's classroom push came from technologists and government officials who envisioned tailored curricula. Computer manufacturers, despite good intentions, had financial interests and profited substantially. The Google executive who questioned why children should learn equations when they could Google answers might now ask why they should write essays when chatbots can do it for them. Studies confirm traditional methods -- reading and writing on paper -- remain superior to screen-based approaches. Devices distract students, with research showing up to 20 minutes needed to refocus after nonacademic activities. As some districts ban smartphones during school hours, Bloomberg suggests reconsidering classroom computer policies, recommending locked carts for more purposeful use and greater transparency for parents about screen time. Technology's promise has failed while imposing significant costs on children and taxpayers, he writes. Bloomberg calls for a return to books and pens over laptops and tablets.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

A new AI system called Aardvark could deliver weather forecasts as accurate as those from advanced public weather services but run on desktop computers, according to a project unveiled Thursday and published in Nature. Developed by the UK's Alan Turing Institute with partners including Cambridge University, the European Centre for Medium-Range Weather Forecasts and Microsoft, Aardvark aims to make sophisticated forecasting accessible to countries with fewer resources, particularly in Africa. The system has already outperformed the US Global Forecast System on many variables in testing. Project leader Richard Turner noted the system is "completely open source" and not planned for commercialization by Microsoft.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Palming off the blame using an ‘unknown’ best practice didn’t go down well either

In patching the latest critical remote code execution (RCE) bug in Backup and Replication, software shop Veeam is attracting criticism from researchers for the way it handles uncontrolled deserialization vulnerabilities.…

IBM is laying off thousands of employees across the United States, with approximately 25% of staff at its Cloud Classic operation affected, The Register reports, citing a source. "Concrete numbers are being kept private," a source told the publication. "It is in the thousands." Staff reductions have occurred in Raleigh, North Carolina; New York; Dallas, Texas; and California, the report said. Affected departments include consulting, corporate social responsibility, cloud infrastructure, sales, and internal systems teams. The report adds: With regard to IBM Cloud Classic -- the infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS) outfit offering built on IBM's 2013 acquisition of SoftLayer -- another source told us: "It's a resource action. I don't know how many people are in IaaS classic. They don't typically make that information easy to find. What I can say is that they have been making a lot of changes to shift employment to India as much as possible." A third source, newly let go by Big Blue, said it was fair to characterize this a layoff. "Everyone I know that was affected, myself included, was simply offered a separation agreement," this individual said, estimating that 10 percent of the Cloud group (which is not the same as Cloud Classic) has been let go.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Not even the parts want to be associated with Elon's steel monster

Tesla has issued its eighth Cybertruck recall, this time over exterior trim panels that risk detaching while driving - the second time loose body trim has triggered a safety fix.…

Nvidia is selling its scarce RTX 5080 and 5090 graphics cards from a pop-up "food truck" at its GPU Technology Conference, where attendees paying over $1,000 for tickets can purchase the coveted hardware alongside merchandise. The company has only 2,000 cards available (1,000 each of RTX 5080 and 5090), released in small batches at random times during the three-day conference which concludes tomorrow.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Enterprise Edition to be offered on OCI inside Redmond's cloud

Oracle is expanding its database services on hyperscale clouds outside of its muscle-car Exadata system.…

Apple is undergoing a rare shake-up of its executive ranks, aiming to get its artificial intelligence efforts back on track after months of delays and stumbles, Bloomberg News reported Thursday, citing people familiar with the matter. From the report: Chief Executive Officer Tim Cook has lost confidence in the ability of AI head John Giannandrea to execute on product development, so he's moving over another top executive to help: Vision Pro creator Mike Rockwell. In a new role, Rockwell will be in charge of the Siri virtual assistant, according to the people, who asked not to be identified because the moves haven't been announced. Rockwell will report to software chief Craig Federighi, removing Siri completely from Giannandrea's command. Apple is poised to announce the changes to employees this week. The iPhone maker's senior leaders -- a group known as the Top 100 -- just met at a secretive, annual offsite gathering to discuss the future of the company. Its AI efforts were a key talking point at the summit, Bloomberg News has reported. The moves underscore the plight facing Apple: Its AI technology is severely lagging industry rivals, and the company has shown little sign of catching up. The Apple Intelligence platform was late to arrive and largely a flop, despite being the main selling point for the iPhone 16. Further reading: 'Something Is Rotten in the State of Cupertino'

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Meanwhile, open source video codec Ogg Theora stirs in its crypt

After a seven-year nap, version 3.0 of FOSS image editor GIMP is arriving with a splash, while a long-dormant open video format wakes from its slumbers and lumbers into beta.…

Cosmologists have uncovered stronger evidence that dark energy -- the mysterious force accelerating cosmic expansion -- may be weakening over time. The Dark Energy Spectroscopic Instrument (DESI) collaboration presented their latest findings at the Global Physics Summit in Anaheim, California, reinforcing their preliminary results from last year. The DESI team analyzed data from approximately 15 million galaxies collected over three years, more than doubling their previous dataset of 6 million galaxies. Combined with supernova observations and cosmic microwave background data, their analysis shows a 4.2-sigma deviation from the standard Lambda-CDM cosmological model, which assumes dark energy remains constant. "We are much more certain than last year that this is definitely a thing," said Seshadri Nadathur of the University of Portsmouth, a key DESI researcher. These findings align with recent independent results from the Dark Energy Survey (DES), which earlier this month reported a similar 3.2-sigma tension with Lambda-CDM -- a tension that disappears if dark energy is allowed to vary. If confirmed, evolving dark energy could fundamentally alter cosmologists' understanding of the universe's ultimate fate. Instead of expanding indefinitely until all particles become impossibly separated, the universe might follow alternative trajectories. "It challenges the fate of the universe," explained Mustapha Ishak-Boushaki from the University of Texas at Dallas. "It's game-changing." Moreover, these findings challenge the simplest explanation of dark energy as vacuum energy, which quantum physics suggests should remain constant. Instead, the results indicate unknown physics, possibly involving a new particle, a modification to Einstein's theory of gravity, or even a new fundamental theory. DESI will continue observing through 2026, eventually producing a final map expected to include 50 million galaxies, potentially providing definitive evidence for this cosmic paradigm shift.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Fix testing to stretch into the summer. When will aerospace giant decide enough is enough?

Comment The return of Crew-9 from the International Space Station (ISS) in a Crew Dragon has raised the question of what the future holds for Boeing's Calamity Capsule, also known as the CST-100 Starliner.…

Industry leaders want broader strategy, citing supply chain gaps, investment needs, and global trade uncertainty

European chipmakers want local politicians to look beyond the region's Chips Act and do more to support research and development, materials, and design, not just manufacturing.…

Pebble founder Eric Migicovsky has warned that the company's revived smartwatch line will face significant functionality limitations when paired with iPhones, blaming Apple's restrictive policies that favor its own Apple Watch. "It's impossible for a 3rd party smartwatch to send text messages, or perform actions on notifications (like dismissing, muting, replying) and many, many other things," Migicovsky wrote in a blog post, adding that the situation has "actually gotten worse over the last 8 years." A 2024 class action lawsuit cited in the post claims Apple has added further restrictions since iOS 13, including requiring users to display full content previews on their lock screens for notifications to reach third-party watches. Pebble is still developing an iOS app because 40% of potential customers use iPhones, he said. Migicovsky warned that the watch will "always appear to have less developed functionality on iOS than Android" and some features will arrive on Android first.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

How to avoid another SolarWinds, Log4j, and XZ Utils situation

Organizations concerned about software supply chain attacks should focus on role-based access control, system monitoring, and boundary protection, according to a new preprint paper on the topic.…

Wow, a government project that could be on time for once ... cos it's gonna be wayyyy more than a decade

The UK's National Cyber Security Centre (NCSC) today started the post-quantum cryptography (PQC) countdown clock by claiming organizations have ten years to migrate to a safer future.…

The credit-card market has quietly split in two, Atlantic argues in a new story: one offering generous benefits to wealthy Americans, the other offering expensive debt to the poor. Credit-card balances have reached an all-time high of $1.2 trillion, with serious delinquency rates climbing to their highest point since the Great Recession. "Transactors" pay off balances monthly and earn valuable rewards worth up to $3,000 annually in taxable income equivalent, while "revolvers" carry balances at a brutal 21.5% average APR. The poor subsidize the rich through two mechanisms: swipe fees that drive up retail prices by $1,700 annually for the average family, and late fees and interest charges that finance rewards programs. Interest revenue for credit-card companies has ballooned from $76 billion in 2020 to $170 billion in 2024. The economy now appears to be slowing down. High-income families are increasingly resembling working-class families in credit data, with three in five households earning over $80,000 annually carrying balances for more than a year. Card companies are now offering fewer cards to subprime borrowers, creating a troubling dilemma - while expensive credit cards are harmful, having no credit access might be worse. Bipartisan legislation now aims to cap interest rates and lower swipe fees.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Testing? We've heard of it

Users of Microsoft's email service might be feeling a distinct sense of déjà vu after the web version of Outlook last night blocked access to Exchange Online mailboxes.…