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An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: A California lawmaker halted an effort to pass a law that would force Internet service providers to offer $15 monthly plans to people with low incomes. Assemblymember Tasha Boerner proposed the state law a few months ago, modeling the bill on a law enforced by New York. It seemed that other states were free to impose cheap-broadband mandates because the Supreme Court rejected broadband industry challenges to the New York law twice. Boerner, a Democrat who is chair of the Communications and Conveyance Committee, faced pressure from Internet service providers to change or drop the bill. She made some changes, for example lowering the $15 plan's required download speeds from 100Mbps to 50Mbps and the required upload speeds from 20Mbps to 10Mbps. But the bill was still working its way through the legislature when, according to Boerner, Trump administration officials told her office that California could lose access to $1.86 billion in Broadband Equity, Access, and Deployment (BEAD) funds if it forces ISPs to offer low-cost service to people with low incomes. That amount is California's share of a $42.45 billion fund created by Congress to expand access to broadband service. The Trump administration has overhauled program rules, delaying the grants. One change is that states can't tell ISPs what to charge for a low-cost plan. The US law that created BEAD requires Internet providers receiving federal funds to offer at least one "low-cost broadband service option for eligible subscribers." But in new guidance from the National Telecommunications and Information Administration (NTIA), the agency said it prohibits states "from explicitly or implicitly setting the LCSO [low-cost service option] rate a subgrantee must offer." "All they would have to do to get exempted from AB 353 [the $15 broadband bill] would be to apply to the BEAD program," said Boerner. "Doesn't matter if their application was valid, appropriate, granted, or they got public money at the end of the day and built the projects -- the mere application for the BEAD program would exempt them from 353, if it didn't jeopardize from $1.86 billion to begin with. And that was a tradeoff I was unwilling to make." Another California bill in the Senate would encourage, not require, ISPs to offer cheap broadband by making them eligible for Lifeline subsidies if they sell 100/20Mbps service for $30 or less.

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Sotheby's also flogs off dinosaur skeleton for $26M

Videos The largest chunk of Mars yet discovered on Earth, a 54-pound (25kg) chunk of the Red Planet, has been purchased at auction for $5.3 million by an unknown bidder.…

Turn that Copilot or Scroll Lock key into a media control or extended character.

In the era of laptops and tenkeyless keyboards, many of us are living with fewer keys than we had years ago. But even on a small keyboard, you'll find keys that you just don't need. …

Surge CEO Edwin Chen says AI is creating "100x engineers" who can outperform traditional software developers by orders of magnitude. Chen argued that AI coding tools multiply the productivity gains already seen in Silicon Valley's "10x engineers," who can produce ten times the work of their colleagues through faster coding, harder work, and fewer distractions. Chen said AI efficiencies compound these factors to reach 100x productivity levels. The CEO, whose company reached $1 billion in revenue without venture capital funding, believes this could enable billion-dollar single-person companies, extending beyond the $10 million single-person startups that already exist.

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Testing shows RNGD chips up to 2.25x higher performance per watt than.... five-year-old Nvidia silicon

South Korean AI chip startup FuriosaAI scored a major customer win this week after LG's AI Research division tapped its AI accelerators to power servers running its Exaone family of large language models.…

The diner is now open in West Hollywood, and Musk wants to start a chain

video Facing declining sales and a tarnished reputation, EV manufacturer Tesla is looking to a new industry to generate some revenue: Fast-casual food service.…

The distro's greatest asset is arguably also its greatest weakness

If you installed the Firefox, LibreWolf, or Zen web browsers from the Arch User Repository (AUR) in the last few days, delete them immediately and install fresh copies.…

Microsoft has recruited more than 20 AI employees from Google's DeepMind research division, the newest front in a talent war being waged by Silicon Valley's tech giants as they jostle to gain an edge in the nascent technology. From a report: Amar Subramanya, the former head of engineering for Google's Gemini chatbot, is the latest to move to Microsoft from its rival, according to a post on his LinkedIn profile on Tuesday. "The culture here is refreshingly low ego yet bursting with ambition," he wrote, confirming his appointment as corporate vice-president of AI. Subramanya will join other DeepMind staff including engineering lead Sonal Gupta, software engineer Adam Sadovsky and product manager Tim Frank, according to people familiar with Microsoft's recruiting. The Seattle-based company has persuaded at least 24 staff to join in the past six months, they added.

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Fans say low usage no surprise when obscure but beloved feature disabled by default

GitHub has "paused" the removal of the command palette, which enables keyboard control of the GitHub web application, following developer protests.…

With more to come, no doubt

At least three Chinese groups are attacking on-premises SharePoint servers via a couple of recently disclosed Microsoft bugs, according to Redmond.…

Google users click on fewer website links when the search engine displays AI-generated summaries at the top of results pages, according to new research from the Pew Research Center. The study analyzed browsing data from 900 U.S. adults and found users clicked on traditional search result links during 8% of visits when an AI summary appeared, compared to 15% of visits without summaries. Users also rarely clicked on sources cited within the AI summaries themselves, doing so in just 1% of visits. The research found that 58% of respondents conducted at least one Google search in March 2025 that produced an AI summary, and users were more likely to end their browsing session entirely after encountering pages with AI summaries compared to traditional search results.

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Used stolen info to pitch for Chinese tech talent program

A Silicon Valley engineer has pleaded guilty to stealing thousands of trade secrets worth hundreds of millions of dollars, including crucial military technology.…

Roughly 10 to 25% of lung cancers worldwide now occur in people who have never smoked, according to researchers at the National Cancer Institute. Among certain groups of Asian and Asian American women, that share reaches 50% or more. Scientists studying 871 nonsmokers with lung cancer from around the world found that certain DNA mutations were significantly more common in people living in areas with high air pollution levels, including Hong Kong, Taiwan and Uzbekistan. The research, published in Nature this month, revealed that pollution both directly damages DNA and causes cells to divide more rapidly. The biology of cancer in nonsmokers differs from smoking-related cases and may require different prevention and detection strategies. Nonsmokers with lung cancer are more likely to have specific "driver" mutations that can cause cancer, while smokers tend to accumulate many mutations over time. Current U.S. screening guidelines recommend routine testing only for people ages 50 to 80 who smoked at least one pack daily for 20 years. Taiwan now offers screening for nonsmokers with family history after a nationwide trial detected cancer in 2.6% of participants.

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Wi-Fi spy with my little eye that same guy I saw at another hotspot

Researchers in Italy have developed a way to create a biometric identifier for people based on the way the human body interferes with Wi-Fi signal propagation.…

Banks are treating "buy now, pay later" services with suspicion and warn that heavy usage could hurt customers' chances of getting approved for mortgages or credit cards. FICO will begin factoring some BNPL loans from companies like Affirm and Klarna into credit scores later this year through its new scoring model. JPMorgan Chase and Capital One have banned customers from using credit cards to pay down BNPL installment loans, while one credit union actively calls members who use BNPL to counsel them against it. BNPL transaction volume is expected to reach $116.67 billion in 2025, up from $13.88 billion in 2020, according to Emarketer.

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Credulous minister claims MoU – not contract – with chatbot biz could help 'fix NHS' and 'drive economic growth'

The UK's Department for Science, Innovation & Technology (DSIT) is jumping into bed with chatbot biz OpenAI, signing a memorandum of understanding to expand OpenAI's footprint in the nation while inserting its tech firmly into the public sector.…

The estate of Mike Lynch, who died a year ago when his superyacht sank off the coast of Sicily, and his business partner owe Hewlett-Packard more than $944 million, a court has ruled. From a report: The US technology company has been seeking damages of up to $4.55 billion from the estate of the late tycoon, once hailed as the UK's answer to Microsoft founder Bill Gates, over its disastrous takeover of his British software company Autonomy. Lynch's estate has been estimated to be worth about $674 million and paying its share of the $944 million damages could leave it bankrupt. He and six others, including his 18-year-old daughter Hannah, died last August on a trip celebrating his acquittal on US fraud charges relating to HP's $11 billion takeover of Autonomy in 2011. However, HP won a separate six-year civil fraud case against Lynch and his former finance director Sushovan Hussain in the English high court in 2022, with Mr Justice Hildyard ruling that the US company had been induced into overpaying for the business.

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Admins urged to rotate machine keys, restart IIS after emergency fix

Microsoft has good news for administrators running SharePoint Server 2016. The cloud and software megacorp has published updates to close a gaping hole in the document management service.…

Google has announced OSS Rebuild, a new project designed to detect supply chain attacks in open source software by independently reproducing and verifying package builds across major repositories. The initiative, unveiled by the company's Open Source Security Team, targets PyPI (Python), npm (JavaScript/TypeScript), and Crates.io (Rust) packages. The system, the company said, automatically creates standardized build environments to rebuild packages and compare them against published versions. OSS Rebuild generates SLSA Provenance attestations for thousands of packages, meeting SLSA Build Level 3 requirements without requiring publisher intervention. The project can identify three classes of compromise: unsubmitted source code not present in public repositories, build environment tampering, and sophisticated backdoors that exhibit unusual execution patterns during builds. Google cited recent real-world attacks including solana/webjs (2024), tj-actions/changed-files (2025), and xz-utils (2024) as examples of threats the system addresses. Open source components now account for 77% of modern applications with an estimated value exceeding $12 trillion. The project builds on Google's hosted infrastructure model previously used for OSS Fuzz memory issue detection.

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The Keeling Curve, measured there, is irrefutable evidence of increasing CO2 emissions

Column When you don't like the message, what do you do? You shoot the messenger, of course.…