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California's legislature this week approved a bill to let renters opt out of bulk-billing arrangements that force them to pay for Internet service from a specific provider. ArsTechnica: The bill says that by January 1, a landlord must "allow the tenant to opt out of paying for any subscription from a third-party Internet service provider, such as through a bulk-billing arrangement, to provide service for wired Internet, cellular, or satellite service that is offered in connection with the tenancy." If a landlord fails to do so, the tenant "may deduct the cost of the subscription to the third-party Internet service provider from the rent," and the landlord would be prohibited from retaliating. The bill passed the state Senate in a 30-7 vote on Wednesday but needs Gov. Gavin Newsom's signature to become law. It was approved by the state Assembly in a 75-0 vote in April. Assemblymember Rhodesia Ransom, a Democratic lawmaker who authored the bill, told Ars today that lobby groups for Internet providers and real estate companies have been "working really hard" to defeat it. But she expects Newsom will approve. "I strongly believe that the governor is going to look at what this bill provides as far as protections for tenants and sign it into law," Ransom said in a phone interview.

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Climate change? No worry - we can solve that later, argues Doug Burgum

You would think that the government official responsible for safeguarding the US' natural resources would be opposed to abandoning climate change mitigation pledges in favor of firing up fossil fuels to power AI development. …

Top AI chipmakers count on faster, denser, more efficient memory to boost training

AMD and Nvidia have already announced their next-gen datacenter GPUs will make the leap to HBM4, and if SK Hynix has its way, it’ll be the one supplying the bulk of it.…

An anonymous reader shares a report: European Union countries have shelved plans to approve a new climate change target next week, after pushback from governments including France and Germany over plans to quickly land a deal, three EU diplomats told Reuters on Friday. Countries are discussing a legally-binding target to cut net EU greenhouse gas emissions by 90% by 2040, from 1990 levels - with a share of this covered by buying foreign carbon credits. The European Commission has said this would offer investors certainty and keep Europe on track for net zero emissions by 2050. Climate change has made Europe the world's fastest-warming continent, unleashing deadly heatwaves and record-breaking wildfires. But EU governments are divided over how ambitious to be in tackling global warming, as governments also try to increase defence spending and support struggling industries.

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The OIG says the Cyber Incentive program was rife with 'fraud, waste, and abuse'

The US Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) mismanaged a program designed to retain skilled security professionals so badly that auditors have concluded it left the agency "unable to adequately protect the Nation from cyber threats." …

US colleges face a prolonged enrollment decline beginning this fall as high school graduating classes shrink for the first time since the Great Recession. The incoming freshman class marks the start of a 13% drop in high school graduates through 2041, falling from 3.9 million to 3.4 million students. The decline stems from reduced birth rates during the 2008 financial crisis and subsequent years. Regional four-year institutions in the Northeast and Midwest states face potential applicant pool contractions of 15% or more. Small liberal arts colleges, comprising 40% of the higher education market, are particularly vulnerable. 40% of private colleges posted financial losses in 2023. Top-ranked schools in the US News top 50 are expected to experience minimal impact due to sustained national demand for limited seats.

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A similar vuln on Apple devices was used against 'specific targeted users'

Samsung has fixed a critical flaw that affects its Android devices - but not before attackers found and exploited the bug, which could allow remote code execution on affected devices.…

US retail coffee prices surged 21% year-over-year in August, the largest annual increase since October 1997, according to Thursday's Consumer Price Index. The monthly 4% jump marks the steepest rise in 14 years. Trump administration tariffs on major coffee exporters -- 50% on Brazil, 20% on Vietnam, and 10% on Colombia -- are driving costs higher as 99% of US coffee consumption relies on imports. J.M. Smucker plans its third price increase this winter for Folgers and Cafe Bustelo brands after raising prices in May and August. New Orleans chain French Truck Coffee has implemented a 4% tariff surcharge. Starbucks expects peak cost impacts in 2026 due to its advance purchasing practices. KPMG chief economist Diane Swonk predicts prices will exceed historical records as Brazilian tariff effects reach retail shelves.

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Gartner survey of Fortune 500 corps shows very few are planning to replace human support staff

ai-pocalypse You'll be able to talk to a human when you need help for many years to come. A new Gartner study shows that fears about AI replacing humans with bots in call centers are unfounded, at least among Fortune 500 companies.…

Smart glasses development has expanded beyond Meta, Google and Apple to include dozens of manufacturers across three distinct categories, UploadVR reports. HTC launched its Vive Eagle glasses in Taiwan this month at $550, while Solos' AirGo V2 arrives in Q4 2025 for $300. The market segments into displayless models featuring cameras and AI assistants, heads-up display glasses providing contextual information overlays and true AR glasses capable of spatial object positioning. Chinese manufacturers dominate the sub-$100 segment. Snap plans consumer AR glasses for 2026. Amazon is reportedly developing two HUD models targeting delivery drivers and consumers for mid-2026 release.

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Keith Rabois, co-founder and newly minted board chair of Opendoor, said remote work and a "bloated" workforce have been a drag on the online real estate platform's culture, as he vowed to slash headcount. CNBC: "There's 1,400 employees at Opendoor. I don't know what most of them do. We don't need more than 200 of them," Rabois told CNBC's "Squawk on the Street" on Friday.

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Get ready for a fight over who steers the global standard for vulnerability identification

The Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) nearly let the Common Vulnerabilities and Exposures (CVE) program lapse earlier this year, but a new "vision" document it released this week signals that it now wants more control over the global standard for vulnerability identification.…

A anonymous reader shares a report: Microsoft AI launched its first in-house models last month, adding to the already complicated relationship with its OpenAI partner. Now, Microsoft AI chief Mustafa Suleyman says the company is making "significant investments" in the compute capacity required to Microsoft's own future frontier models. "We should have the capacity to build world class frontier models in house of all sizes, but we should be very pragmatic and use other models where we need to," said Suleyman during Microsoft's employee-only town hall on Thursday. "We're also going to be making significant investments in our own cluster, so today MAI-1-preview was only trained on 15,000 H100s, a tiny cluster in the grand scheme of things." Suleyman hinted that Microsoft has ambitions to train models that are comparable to Meta, Google, and xAI's efforts on clusters that are "six to ten times larger in size" than what Microsoft used for its MAI-1-preview. "Much more to do, but it's good to take the first steps," said Suleyman.

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But it reads at about the speed of punch cards

Imagine replacing thousands of LTO-9 tapes with just one cartridge. It's possible – if a Chinese research team's experimental DNA tape storage system reaches its theoretical maximum capacity.…

An anonymous reader shares a report: Medical researchers at some institutions in Canada, the United States and Italy are using data created by artificial intelligence (AI) from real patient information in their experiments without the need for permission from their institutional ethics boards, Nature has learnt. To generate what is called 'synthetic data', researchers train generative AI models using real human medical information, then ask the models to create data sets with statistical properties that represent, but do not include, human data. Typically, when research involves human data, an ethics board must review how studies affect participants' rights, safety, dignity and well-being. However, institutions including the IRCCS Humanitas Research Hospital in Milan, Italy, the Children's Hospital of Eastern Ontario (CHEO) in Ottawa and the Ottawa Hospital, both in Canada, and Washington University School of Medicine (WashU Medicine) in St. Louis, Missouri, have waived these requirements for research involving synthetic data. The reasons the institutions use to justify this decision differ. However, the potential benefits of using synthetic data include protecting patient privacy, being more easily able to share data between sites and speeding up research, says Khaled El Emam, a medical AI researcher at the CHEO Research Institute and the University of Ottawa.

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Half of TRACERS satellite duo tripped up by power problems

After a month of receiving the silent treatment, controllers have regained contact with a TRACERS spacecraft that went offline shortly after launch.…

Google Tables, a work-tracking tool and competitor to the popular spreadsheet-database hybrid Airtable, is shutting down. TechCrunch: In an email sent to Tables users this week, Google said the app will not be supported after December 16, 2025, and advised that users export or migrate their data to either Google Sheets or AppSheet instead, depending on their needs. Launched in 2020, Tables focused on making project tracking more efficient with automation. It was one of the many projects to emerge from Google's in-house app incubator, Area 120, which at the time was devoted to cranking out a number of experimental projects. Some of these projects later graduated to become a part of Google's core offerings across Cloud, Search, Shopping, and more. Tables was one of those early successes: Google said in 2021 that the service was moving from a beta test to become an official Google Cloud product. At the time, the company said it saw Tables as a potential solution for a variety of use cases, including project management, IT operations, customer service tracking, CRM, recruiting, product development and more.

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Managarm, Asterinas, Xous – where disaffected code whisperers could go

Between Rust, new file systems, clashes between developers, systemd absorbing its functionality, and more, rumors of possible Linux forks are being muttered again. But there is another, better way.…

The Swiss government could soon require service providers with more than 5,000 users to collect government-issued identification, retain subscriber data for six months and, in many cases, disable encryption. From a report: The proposal, which is not subject to parliamentary approval, has alarmed privacy and digital-freedoms advocates worldwide because of how it will destroy anonymity online, including for people located outside of Switzerland. A large number of virtual private network (VPN) companies and other privacy-preserving firms are headquartered in the country because it has historically had liberal digital privacy laws alongside its famously discreet banking ecosystem. Proton, which offers secure and end-to-end encrypted email along with an ultra-private VPN and cloud storage, announced on July 23 that it is moving most of its physical infrastructure out of Switzerland due to the proposed law. The company is investing more than $117 million in the European Union, the announcement said, and plans to help develop a "sovereign EuroStack for the future of our home continent." Switzerland is not a member of the EU. Proton said the decision was prompted by the Swiss government's attempt to "introduce mass surveillance."

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Dorm management refuses to cover costs after payment system borked

More than a thousand university students in the Netherlands must continue to travel to wash their clothes after their building management company failed to bring its borked smart laundry machines back online.…