An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: TiVo's Q2 2025 Video Trends Report: North America released today points to growth in cord reviving. It reads: "The share of respondents who cut the cord but later decided to resubscribe to a traditional TV service has increased about 10 percent, to 31.9 percent in Q2 2025." TiVo's report is based on a survey conducted by an unspecified third-party survey service in Q2 2025. The respondents are 4,510 people who are at least 18 years old and living in the US or Canada, and the survey defines traditional TV services as pay-TV platforms offering linear television via cable, satellite, or managed IPTV platforms.

It's important to note that TiVo is far from an impartial observer. In addition to selling an IPTV platform, its parent company, Xperi, works with cable, broadband, and pay-TV providers and would directly benefit from the existence or perception of a cord reviving "trend." When reached for comment, a TiVo spokesperson said via email that cord reviving is driven by a "mixture of reasons, with internet bundle costs, familiarity of use, and local content (sports, news, etc.) being the primary drivers." The rep noted that it's "likely" that those re-subscribing to traditional TV services are using them alongside some streaming subscriptions. "It's possible that users are churning off some [streaming] services where there is overlap with traditional TV services," TiVo's spokesperson said.

The editors of the culture magazine n + 1 decry the "well-funded upheaval" caused by a large and powerful coalition of pro-AI forces. ("According to the logic of market share as social transformation, if you move fast and break enough things, nothing can contain you...")

"An extraordinary amount of money is spent by the AI industry to ensure that acquiescence is the only plausible response. But marketing is not destiny." The AI bubble — and it is a bubble, as even OpenAI overlord Sam Altman has admitted — will burst. The technology's dizzying pace of improvement, already slowing with the release of GPT-5, will stall... [P]rofessional readers and writers: We retain some power over the terms and norms of our own intellectual life. We ought to stop acting like impotence in some realms means impotence everywhere. Major terrains remain AI-proofable. For publishers, editors, critics, professors, teachers, anyone with any say over what people read, the first step will be to develop an ear. Learn to tell — to read closely enough to tell — the work of people from the work of bots...

Whatever nuance is needed for its interception, resisting AI's further creep into intellectual labor will also require blunt-force militancy. The steps are simple. Don't publish AI bullshit. Don't even publish mealymouthed essays about the temptation to produce AI bullshit. Resist the call to establish worthless partnerships like the Washington Post's Ember, an "AI writing coach" designed to churn out Bezos-friendly op-eds. Instead, do what better magazines, newspapers, and journals have managed for centuries. Promote and produce original work of value, work that's cliché-resistant and unreplicable, work that tries — as Thomas Pynchon wrote in an oracular 1984 essay titled "Is It OK to Be a Luddite?" — "through literary means which are nocturnal and deal in disguise, to deny the machine...."

Punishing already overdisciplined and oversurveilled students for their AI use will help no one, but it's a long way from accepting that reality to Ohio State's new plan to mandate something called "AI fluency" for all graduates by 2029 (including workshops sponsored, naturally, by Google). Pedagogically, alternatives to acquiescence remain available. Some are old, like blue-book exams, in-class writing, or one-on-one tutoring. Some are new, like developing curricula to teach the limits and flaws of generative AI while nurturing human intelligence...

Our final defenses are more diffuse, working at a level of norms and attitudes. Stigmatization is a powerful force, and disgust and shame are among our greatest tools. Put plainly, you should feel bad for using AI. (The broad embrace of the term slop is a heartening sign of a nascent constituency for machine denial.) These systems haven't worked well for very long, and consensus about their use remains far from settled. That's why so much writing about AI writing sounds the way it does — nervous, uneven, ambivalent about the new regime's utility — and it means there's still time to disenchant AI, provincialize it, make it uncompelling and uncool...

As we train our sights on what we oppose, let's recall the costs of surrender. When we use generative AI, we consent to the appropriation of our intellectual property by data scrapers. We stuff the pockets of oligarchs with even more money. We abet the acceleration of a social media gyre that everyone admits is making life worse. We accept the further degradation of an already degraded educational system. We agree that we would rather deplete our natural resources than make our own art or think our own thoughts... A literature which is made by machines, which are owned by corporations, which are run by sociopaths, can only be a "stereotype" — a simplification, a facsimile, an insult, a fake — of real literature. It should be smashed, and can.
The 3,800-word article also argues that "perhaps AI's ascent in knowledge-industry workplaces will give rise to new demands and new reasons to organize..."

Longtime Slashdot reader whoever57 writes: Birmingham City Council, the largest such entity in Europe, has been declared effectively bankrupt. There are a couple of reasons for this, but one of them is a disastrous project to replace the city's income management system using Oracle. The cost of this has risen to $230 million, while the initial estimate was $24 million. There was a failed rollout of the new system earlier this year. "Original plans for the replacement of SAP with Oracle Fusion set aside a 19.965 million-euro budget for three years implementation until the end of the 2021 financial year," reports The Register. "Go-live date was later put back until April 2022 and the budget increased to 40 million euros. After the council realized it would need to reimplement all of Oracle, the budget for running the old system and introducing the new one increased to 131 million euros."

"In a hastily convened Audit Committee meeting this week, councilor heard how that date has now been put back until November, expressing their anger that the news hit the media before they were told." Testing failed with only a 73.3% pass rate and 10 severe deficits, "below the acceptance criteria of a 95 percent pass rate and zero severe deficits.

Research shows China's top AI firm DeepSeek gives weaker or insecure code when programmers identify as linked to Falun Gong or other groups disfavored by Beijing. It offers higher-quality results to everyone else. "The findings ... underscore how politics shapes artificial intelligence efforts during a geopolitical race for technology prowess and influence," reports the Washington Post. From the report: In the experiment, the U.S. security firm CrowdStrike bombarded DeepSeek with nearly identical English-language prompt requests for help writing programs, a core use of DeepSeek and other AI engines. The requests said the code would be employed in a variety of regions for a variety of purposes.

Asking DeepSeek for a program that runs industrial control systems was the riskiest type of request, with 22.8 percent of the answers containing flaws. But if the same request specified that the Islamic State militant group would be running the systems, 42.1 percent of the responses were unsafe. Requests for such software destined for Tibet, Taiwan or Falun Gong also were somewhat more apt to result in low-quality code. DeepSeek did not flat-out refuse to work for any region or cause except for the Islamic State and Falun Gong, which it rejected 61 percent and 45 percent of the time, respectively. Western models won't help Islamic State projects but have no problem with Falun Gong, CrowdStrike said.

Those rejections aren't especially surprising, since Falun Gong is banned in China. Asking DeepSeek for written information about sensitive topics also generates responses that echo the Chinese government much of the time, even if it supports falsehoods, according to previous research by NewsGuard. But evidence that DeepSeek, which has a very popular open-source version, might be pushing less-safe code for political reasons is new. CrowdStrike Senior Vice President Adam Meyers and other experts suggest three possible explanations for why DeepSeek produced insecure code.

One is that the AI may be deliberately withholding or sabotaging assistance under Chinese government directives. Another explanation is that the model's training data could be uneven: coding projects from regions like Tibet or Xinjiang may be of lower quality, come from less experienced developers, or even be intentionally tampered with, while U.S.-focused repositories may be cleaner and more reliable (possibly to help DeepSeek build market share abroad).

A third possibility is that the model itself, when told that a region is rebellious, could infer that it should produce flawed or harmful code without needing explicit instructions.

Paramount and Comcast's NBCUniversal are joining Microsoft in telling employees "they could face consequences if they don't return to the office more frequently," reports the Washington Post: NBCUniversal sent a memo to its employees telling them to return to the office four days a week starting in January [with the option to work remotely on Fridays]. Last week, Paramount told employees to return five days a week, with the first group starting in January. Both Paramount and NBCUniversal said they would offer severance packages to eligible employees who are unwilling or unable to make the switch... Companies have been cracking down on flexible work for the past several years, with Goldman Sachs being one of the first to implement a five-day office policy. Since then, others have joined in including Amazon, AT&T, JPMorgan Chase and the federal government...

Overall, the number of people working full time in office hasn't changed much over the past couple of years. About 61.7 percent of salaried employees worked from an office full time in August, according to data from university researchers Jose Maria Barrero, Nicholas Bloom and Steven J. Davis, who are studying the matter. That is down one percentage point from August 2024, their research shows. During the same period, the amount of people working remotely dropped two percentage points and those working hybrid schedules increased three points.

While most of the big office pushes are coming from some of the largest employers in the nation, the majority of companies in the United States aren't requiring full-time office work, said Brian Elliott [publisher of the Flex Index, which tracks flexible policies, and CEO]. And about half of U.S. workers are employed by smaller companies, he added. Some companies are capitalizing on the mandates, using flexible policies as a way to poach talent from their competitors, he said....

Some employers are using office mandates to purposely shed workers. An August report from the Federal Reserve Bank shows that "multiple districts reported reducing headcounts through attrition — encouraged, at times, by return-to-office policies and facilitated, at times, by greater automation, including new AI tools." Still, with fewer job openings in the market, some employees will have to comply with office mandates.
Announcing their return-to-office mandates, employers gave the following reasons:

• "In-person collaboration is absolutely vital to building and strengthening our culture and driving the success of our business. Being together helps us innovate, solve problems, share ideas, create, challenge one another, and build the relationships that will make this company great."
  
  -- Paramount CEO David Ellison (in a memo to staff)

• "It has become increasingly clear that we are better when we are together. As we have all experienced, in-person work and collaboration spark innovation, promote creativity, and build stronger connections."
  
  -- Adam Miller, NBCUniversal chief operating officer (in a memo to staff)

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.

Apple's Live Translation feature for AirPods won't reach European Union users when it launches next week. The restriction applies to users physically located in the EU who also have EU-registered Apple Accounts. Apple hasn't specified reasons for the limitation, though the EU's Artificial Intelligence Act and GDPR impose requirements on speech processing and translation services.

The feature enables real-time translation between English, French, German, Portuguese, and Spanish on AirPods Pro 2, AirPods 4 with Active Noise Cancellation, and the newly announced AirPods Pro 3. Translation requires iOS 26 on iPhone 15 Pro or newer models.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from TechCrunch: X enthusiast and Reddit shareholder Sam Altman had an epiphany on Monday: Bots have made it impossible to determine whether social media posts are really written by humans, he posted. The realization came while reading (and sharing) some posts from the r/Claudecode subreddit, which were praising OpenAI Codex. OpenAI launched the software programming service that takes on Anthropic's Claude Code in May. Lately, that subreddit has been so filled with posts from self-proclaimed Code users announcing that they moved to Codex that one Reddit user even joked: "Is it possible to switch to codex without posting a topic on Reddit?"

This left Altman wondering how many of those posts were from real humans. "I have had the strangest experience reading this: I assume it's all fake/bots, even though in this case I know codex growth is really strong and the trend here is real," he confessed on X. He then live-analyzed his reasoning. "I think there are a bunch of things going on: real people have picked up quirks of LLM-speak, the Extremely Online crowd drifts together in very correlated ways, the hype cycle has a very 'it's so over/we're so back' extremism, optimization pressure from social platforms on juicing engagement and the related way that creator monetization works, other companies have astroturfed us so i'm extra sensitive to it, and a bunch more (including probably some bots)."

[...] Altman also throws a dig at the incentives when social media sites and creators rely on engagement to make money. Fair enough. But then Altman confesses that one of the reasons he thinks the pro-OpenAI posts in this subreddit might be bots is because OpenAI has also been "astroturfed." That typically involves posts by people or bots paid for by the competitor, or paid by some third-degree contractor, giving the competitor plausible deniability. [...] Altman surmises, "The net effect is somehow AI twitter/AI Reddit feels very fake in a way it really didn't a year or two ago." If that's true, who's fault is it? GPT has led models to become so good at writing, that LLMs have become a plague not just to social media sites (which have always had a bot problem) but to schools, journalism, and the courts.

An anonymous reader shared this report from Fortune: The percentage of young Gen Z employees between the ages of 21 and 25 has been cut in half at technology companies over the past two years, according to recent data from compensation management software business Pave with workforce data from more than 8,300 companies.

These young workers accounted for 15% of the workforce at large public tech firms in January 2023. By August 2025, they only represented 6.8%. The situation isn't pretty at big private tech companies, either — during that same time period, the proportion of early-career Gen Z employees dwindled from 9.3% to 6.8%. Meanwhile, the average age of a worker at a tech company has risen dramatically over those two and a half years. Between January 2023 and July 2025, the average age of all employees at large public technology businesses rose from 34.3 years to 39.4 years — more than a five year difference. On the private side, the change was less drastic, with the typical age only increasing from 35.1 to 36.6 years old...

"If you're 35 or 40 years old, you're pretty established in your career, you have skills that you know cannot yet be disrupted by AI," Matt Schulman, founder and CEO of Pave, tells Fortune. "There's still a lot of human judgment when you're operating at the more senior level...If you're a 22-year-old that used to be an Excel junkie or something, then that can be disrupted. So it's almost a tale of two cities." Schulman points to a few reasons why tech company workforces are getting older and locking Gen Z out of jobs. One is that big companies — like Salesforce, Meta, and Microsoft — are becoming a lot more efficient thanks to the advent of AI. And despite their soaring trillion-dollar profits, they're cutting employees at the bottom rungs in favor of automation. Entry-level jobs have also dwindled because of AI agents, and stalling promotions across many agencies looking to do more with less. Once technology companies weed out junior roles, occupied by Gen Zers, their workforces are bound to rise in age.
Schulman tells Fortune Gen Z also has an advantage: that tech corporations can see them as fresh talent that "can just break the rules and leverage AI to a much greater degree without the hindrance of years of bias." And Priya Rathod, workplace trends editor for LinkedIn, tells Fortune there's promising tech-industry entry roles in AI ethics, cybersecurity, UX, and product operations. "Building skills through certifications, gig work, and online communities can open doors....

"For Gen Z, the right certifications or micro credentials can outweigh a lack of years on the resume. This helps them stay competitive even when entry level opportunities shrink."

Intel amended its deal with the U.S. Department of Commerce "to remove earlier project milestones," reports Reuters, "and received about $5.7 billion in cash sooner than planned."

"The move will give Intel more flexibility over the funds." The amended agreement, which revises a November 2024 funding deal, retains some guardrails that prevent the chipmaker from using the funds for dividends and buybacks, doing certain control-changing deals and from expanding in certain countries.
The move makes the Wall Street Journal wonder what, beyond equity, the U.S. now gets in return, calling government's position "a stake without a strategy." The U.S. has historically shied away from putting money into private business. It can't really outguess the market on where the most promising returns lie. Yet there are exceptions. Sometimes a company or industry risks failing without public support, and that failure would hurt the whole country, not just its shareholders and employees. Intel meets both conditions. It isn't failing, but it is losing money, its core business is in decline, and it lacks the capital and customers needed to make the most advanced semiconductors. If Intel were to fail, it would take a sizable chunk of the semiconductor industrial base with it. At a time of existential competition with China, that is a national emergency...

[U.S. Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick] said as a shareholder, the U.S. would help Intel "to create the most advanced chips in the world." And yet the deal doesn't provide Intel with new resources to accomplish that. Rather, to get the remaining $9 billion, Intel had to give the U.S. equity. This is more like a tax than an investment: Shareholders gave up a 10th of their ownership in return for money the company was supposed to get anyway... Some of the administration's forays into private business do reflect strategic thinking, such as the Pentagon's 15% stake in MP Materials in exchange for investment and contracts that help make the company a viable alternative to China as a supplier of rare-earth magnets for products such as automobiles, wind turbines, jet fighters and missile systems. But more often, companies recoil from government ownership...

Though the U.S. stake dilutes Intel's existing shareholders, its stock has held up. There could be several reasons. It eliminates uncertainty over whether the remaining $9 billion in federal funds will be forthcoming... [B]ecause Washington has a vested interest in Intel's share price, investors believe it may prod companies such as Nvidia and Apple to buy more of its chips.
But that only goes so far, the article seems to conclude, offering this quote from an analyst Bernstein investment research. "If Intel can prove they can make these leading-edge products in high volume that meets specifications at a good cost structure, they'll have customers lined up around the block. If they can't prove they can do it, what customer will put meaningful volume to them regardless of what pressure the U.S. government brings to bear?"

CBS News also notes the U.S. government stake "is being criticized by conservatives and some economic policy experts alike, who worry such extensive government intervention undermines free enterprise."

Thanks to Slashdot reader joshuark for sharing the news.

Starting with Word for Windows version 2509, Microsoft is making cloud saving the default behavior. New documents will automatically save to OneDrive (or another cloud destination), with dated filenames, unless users manually revert to local saving in the settings. From the report: "Anything new you create will be saved automatically to OneDrive or your preferred cloud destination", writes Raul Munoz, product manager at Microsoft on the Office Shared Services and Experiences team. Munoz backs up the decision with half a dozen advantages for saving documents to the cloud. From never losing progress and access anywhere to easy collaboration and increased security and compliance. While cloud saving is without doubt beneficial in some cases, Munoz fails to address the elephant in the room. Some users may not want that their documents are stored in the cloud. There are good reasons for that, including privacy.

Summed up:
- If you do not mind that Word documents are stored in the cloud, you do not need to become active.
- If you mind that Word documents are stored in the cloud by default, you need to modify the default setting.

After losing his job in 2024, Eric Thompson spearheaded a working group to push for federal legislation banning "ghost jobs" -- openings posted with no intent to hire. The proposed Truth in Job Advertising and Accountability Act would require transparency around job postings, set limits on how long ads can remain up, and fine companies that violate the rules. CNBC reports: "There's nothing illegal about posting a job, currently, and never filling it," says Thompson, a network engineering leader in Warrenton, Virginia. Not to mention, it's "really hard to prove, and so that's one of the reasons that legally, it's been kind of this gray area." As Thompson researched more into the phenomenon, he connected with former colleagues and professional connections across the country experiencing the same thing. Together, the eight of them decided to form the TJAAA working group to spearhead efforts for federal legislation to officially ban businesses from posting ghost jobs.

In May, the group drafted its first proposal: The TJAAA aims to require that all public job listings include information such as:
- The intended hire and start dates
- Whether it's a new role or backfill
- If it's being offered internally with preference to current employees
- The number of times the position has been posted in the last two years, and other factors, according to the draft language.

It also sets guidelines for how long a post is required to be up (no more than 90 calendar days) and how long the submission period can be (at least four calendar days) before applications can be reviewed. The proposed legislation applies to businesses with more than 50 employees, and violators can be fined a minimum of $2,500 for each infraction. The proposal provides a framework at the federal level, Thompson says, because state-level policies won't apply to employers who post listings across multiple states, or who use third-party platforms that operate beyond state borders.

Apple has filed a lawsuit against former Apple Watch staffer Dr. Chen Shi, alleging that he "conspired to steal Apple's trade secrets relating to Apple Watch and to disclose them to his new employers (Oppo)." The company alleges he downloaded 63 sensitive documents, attended technical meetings, and coordinated with Oppo to transfer proprietary information, though Oppo denies wrongdoing. The Verge reports: Ahead of starting his new job at Oppo, the employee, Dr. Chen Shi, attended "dozens" of meetings with technical members on the Apple Watch team to learn about their work and downloaded 63 documents "from a protected Box folder" that he loaded onto a USB drive, according to the lawsuit. Shi allegedly sent a message to Oppo saying that he was working to "collect as much information as possible" before starting his job. And he searched the internet for terms like "how to wipe out macbook" and "Can somebody see if I've opened a file on a shared drive?" from his Apple-issued MacBook before leaving the company.

Shi was formerly a sensor system architect at Apple, and the company says he had "a front row seat to Apple's development of its cutting-edge health sensor technology, including highly confidential roadmaps, design and development documents, and specifications for ECG sensor technology." He now heads up a team working on sensing technology at Oppo -- which Apple says it learned because of "messages he left on his Apple-issued work iPhone." In his resignation letter to Apple, Shi said he was leaving "due to personal and family reasons." Via that iPhone, Apple also says it found messages from Oppo demonstrating that it "encouraged, approved, and agreed to Dr. Shi's plan to collect Apple's proprietary information before leaving Apple."

An anonymous reader quotes a report from the New York Times: There's an overwhelming sense of deja vu at multiplexes these days. In August alone, "Black Swan" (2010) is returning to theaters, along with the Tim Burton "Batman" movies from 1989 and 1992. Audiences will be able to revisit the oceanic terror of "Jaws" (1975), as well as the comic mystery (and multiple endings) of "Clue" (1985). Or they could groove to Prince's "Sign o' the Times" concert film from 1987. And it doesn't look like the rerelease trend is slowing down. In September, "The Breakfast Club" (1985) is returning, Pixar is bringing back "Toy Story" (1995), and "Apollo 13" (1995) is blasting off again. "Casper" (1995) will haunt screens for nearly the entire month of October, while "Avatar: The Way of Water" (2022) will run for about five days, teeing up the forthcoming "Avatar: Fire and Ash." And there are still more to come before the end of the year.

Rereleases have long been part of the theatrical ecosystem. After all, "Star Wars" movies have been heading back to multiplexes routinely since 1981 -- before "Return of the Jedi" even debuted. But recently, studios have been digging deeper into their archives for a variety of reasons -- only some of which have to do with nostalgia. "Black Swan," from Searchlight, which is now owned by Disney, took over around 200 IMAX screens to commemorate its 15th anniversary. Universal's specialty arm, Focus Features, rereleased both "Pride & Prejudice" (2005) and "Brokeback Mountain" (2005) earlier this year. "Pride & Prejudice" ultimately grossed more than $6 million domestically this time around, about 16 percent of its original U.S. box office haul.

In total, Universal has 12 rereleases on its 2025 slate -- not including a partnership with another distribution company -- compared with just four in 2024 and two in 2023. "We very much pay a lot of attention to our repertory business," the studio's president of domestic theatrical distribution, Jim Orr, said by phone, explaining, "We just think it's not only great fun for audiences, but a great business to be in as well." Orr explained that the size of Universal's rerelease slate this year was "more coincidental" than anything else, with all the films hitting anniversaries in 2025. Still, there is a strong business motivation: The rereleases help studios and exhibitors pad out relatively thin slates. "The truth of the matter is studios don't have enough product right now to give theaters, so that's why you're seeing an influx of these nostalgia plays," said Jeff Bock, senior media analyst at Exhibitor Relations. He added, "It doesn't cost a lot for them to do an anniversary edition or a 4K edition." There are several other reasons why Hollywood is rereleasing old movies, according to Orr. Rereleases are far cheaper to put out than launching a brand-new title. Studios also target films that already have strong, enduring audiences, "whether that's 'Pride & Prejudice,' with its meme-able depiction of yearning, or 'Casper,'" which he said had elicited 'decent' interest every year.

Then there's what Orr calls "opportunistic dating." "There might be a window where something goes thematically or holiday-wise, whatever kind of fits in, or there might be some more screens available in specific formats," he said. Specialty format releases like IMAX, Dolby, or 3D also help bring moviegoers to the theaters.

An anonymous reader shares a report: As it tries to unseat Google, OpenAI is relying on search data from an unlikely source: Google. OpenAI has been using Google search results scraped from the web to help power ChatGPT responses, according to two people with knowledge of it.

The Google search data helps answer ChatGPT queries on current events, such as news, sports and equity markets, one of the people said. OpenAI is getting the data from SerpApi, an eight-year-old web-scraping firm, which listed OpenAI as a customer on its website as recently as May last year. It removed the reference for reasons that couldn't be learned.

Longtime Slashdot reader Xesdeeni writes: I received an email indicating Intuit will not support Windows 10 for the desktop versions of TurboTax starting this tax year. Laughably, they say "security is a top priority for us" before adding: "To use TurboTax Desktop software for tax year 2025, your computer will need to run on Microsoft Windows 11 [or] TurboTax Online."

I'm just paranoid enough to use the desktop version, since at least it limits what they see to the forms they send to the IRS -- rather than everything. Even if I was willing to endure the added burden of printing and mailing the forms, this would be the end of that, since I'm out on Windows 11 for the reasons you already know.
Here's what they sent: Hi there,

We're reaching out to provide an update on TurboTax Desktop software for tax year 2025. After October 14, 2025, Microsoft will no longer provide software updates, technical assistance, or security fixes for Windows 10 operating system. Because security is a top priority for us, TurboTax Desktop software for tax year 2025 onwards will not be compatible with Windows 10 operating system.

To use TurboTax Desktop software for tax year 2025, your computer will need to run on Microsoft Windows 11 operating system. You can also consider switching to TurboTax Online, which will work on any supported browser (available December 2025).

For more resources and additional information about this change, go to this help article: How does the end of support for Windows 10 affect my TurboTax Desktop experience?

Thanks for being part of the TurboTax family.

Warm regards,

The TurboTax Team Xesdeeni comments: "I've wanted a Linux offering for years now and only kept Windows for such limited products as this. I guess I can completely punt it now."

Since 2023 the Python Software Foundation has had a Security Developer-in-Residence (sponsored by the Open Source Security Foundation's vulnerability-finding "Alpha-Omega" project). And he's just published a new 11-page white paper about open source's "phantom dependencies" problem — suggesting a way to solve it.

"Phantom" dependencies aren't tracked with packaging metadata, manifests, or lock files, which makes them "not discoverable" by tools like vulnerability scanners or compliance and policy tools. So Python security developer-in-residence Seth Larson authored a recently-accepted Python Enhancement Proposal offering an easy way for packages to provide metadata through Software Bill-of-Materials (SBOMs). From the whitepaper: Python Enhancement Proposal 770 is backwards compatible and can be enabled by default by tools, meaning most projects won't need to manually opt in to begin generating valid PEP 770 SBOM metadata. Python is not the only software package ecosystem affected by the "Phantom Dependency" problem. The approach using SBOMs for metadata can be remixed and adopted by other packaging ecosystems looking to record ecosystem-agnostic software metadata...

Within Endor Labs' [2023 dependencies] report, Python is named as one of the most affected packaging ecosystems by the "Phantom Dependency" problem. There are multiple reasons that Python is particularly affected:

- There are many methods for interfacing Python with non-Python software, such as through the C-API or FFI. Python can "wrap" and expose an easy-to-use Python API for software written in other languages like C, C++, Rust, Fortran, Web Assembly, and more.

- Python is the premier language for scientific computing and artificial intelligence, meaning many high-performance libraries written in system languages need to be accessed from Python code.

- Finally, Python packages have a distribution type called a "wheel", which is essentially a zip file that is "installed" by being unzipped into a directory, meaning there is no compilation step allowed during installation. This is great for being able to inspect a package before installation, but it means that all compiled languages need to be pre-compiled into binaries before installation...


When designing a new package metadata standard, one of the top concerns is reducing the amount of effort required from the mostly volunteer maintainers of packaging tools and the thousands of projects being published to the Python Package Index... By defining PEP 770 SBOM metadata as using a directory of files, rather than a new metadata field, we were able to side-step all the implementation pain...

We'll be working to submit issues on popular open source SBOM and vulnerability scanning tools, and gradually, Phantom Dependencies will become less of an issue for the Python package ecosystem.
The white paper "details the approach, challenges, and insights into the creation and acceptance of PEP 770 and adopting Software Bill-of-Materials (SBOMs) to improve the measurability of Python packages," explains an announcement from the Python Software Foundation. And the white paper ends with a helpful note.

"Having spoken to other open source packaging ecosystem maintainers, we have come to learn that other ecosystems have similar issues with Phantom Dependencies. We welcome other packaging ecosystems to adopt Python's approach with PEP 770 and are willing to provide guidance on the implementation."

In 1995's online world, AOL existed mostly beside the internet as a "walled, manicured garden," remembers Fast Company.

Then along came AOHell "the first of what would become thousands of programs designed by young hackers to turn the system upside down" — built by a high school dropout calling himself "Da Chronic" who says he used "a computer that I couldn't even afford" using "a pirated copy of Microsoft Visual Basic." [D]istributed throughout the teen chatrooms, the program combined a pile of tricks and pranks into a slick little control panel that sat above AOL's windows and gave even newbies an arsenal of teenage superpowers. There was a punter to kick people out of chatrooms, scrollers to flood chats with ASCII art, a chat impersonator, an email and instant message bomber, a mass mailer for sharing warez (and later mp3s), and even an "Artificial Intelligence Bot" [which performed automated if-then responses]. Crucially, AOHell could also help users gain "free" access to AOL. The program came with a program for generating fake credit card numbers (which could fool AOL's sign up process), and, by January 1995, a feature for stealing other users' passwords or credit cards. With messages masquerading as alerts from AOL customer service reps, the tool could convince unsuspecting users to hand over their secrets...

Of course, Da Chronic — actually a 17-year-old high school dropout from North Carolina named Koceilah Rekouche — had other reasons, too. Rekouche wanted to hack AOL because he loved being online with his friends, who were a refuge from a difficult life at home, and he couldn't afford the hourly fee. Plus, it was a thrill to cause havoc and break AOL's weak systems and use them exactly how they weren't meant to be, and he didn't want to keep that to himself. Other hackers "hated the fact that I was distributing this thing, putting it into the team chat room, and bringing in all these noobs and lamers and destroying the community," Rekouche told me recently by phone...

Rekouche also couldn't have imagined what else his program would mean: a free, freewheeling creative outlet for thousands of lonely, disaffected kids like him, and an inspiration for a generation of programmers and technologists. By the time he left AOL in late 1995, his program had spawned a whole cottage industry of teenage script kiddies and hackers, and fueled a subculture where legions of young programmers and artists got their start breaking and making things, using pirated software that otherwise would have been out of reach... In 2014, [AOL CEO Steve] Case himself acknowledged on Reddit that "the hacking of AOL was a real challenge for us," but that "some of the hackers have gone on to do more productive things."

When he first met Mark Zuckerberg, he said, the Facebook founder confessed to Case that "he learned how to program by hacking [AOL]."
"I can't imagine somebody doing that on Facebook today," Da Chronic says in a new interview with Fast Company. "They'll kick you off if you create a Google extension that helps you in the slightest bit on Facebook, or an extension that keeps your privacy or does a little cool thing here and there. That's totally not allowed."

AOHell's creators had called their password-stealing techniques "phishing" — and the name stuck. (AOL was working with federal law enforcement to find him, according to a leaked internal email, but "I didn't even see that until years later.") Enrolled in college, he decided to write a technical academic paper about his program. "I do believe it caught the attention of Homeland Security, but I think they realized pretty quickly that I was not a threat."

He's got an interesting perspective today, noting with today's AI tool's it's theoretically possible to "craft dynamic phishing emails... when I see these AI coding tools I think, this might be like today's Visual Basic. They take out a lot of the grunt work."

What's the moral of the story? "I didn't have any qualifications or anything like that," Da Chronic says. "So you don't know who your adversary is going to be, who's going to understand psychology in some nuanced way, who's going to understand how to put some technological pieces together, using AI, and build some really wild shit."

"A Chinese mega-constellation of communications satellites is facing serious delays," reports the South China Morning Post, "that could jeopardise its ambitions to compete with SpaceX's Starlink for valuable orbital resources." Only 90 satellites have been launched into low Earth orbit for the Qianfan broadband network — also known as the Thousand Sails Constellation or G60 Starlink — well short of the project's goal of 648 by the end of this year... Shanghai Yuanxin Satellite Technology, the company leading the project, plans to deploy more than 15,000 satellites by 2030 to deliver direct-to-phone internet services worldwide. To stay on track, Yuanxin — which is backed by the Shanghai municipal government — would have to launch more than 30 satellites a month to achieve its milestones of 648 by the end of 2025 for regional coverage and 1,296 two years later for global connectivity.
The New York Times reports that "the other megaconstellation, Guowang, is even farther behind. Despite plans to launch about 13,000 satellites within the next decade, it has 34 in orbit." A constellation has to launch half of its satellites within five years of successfully applying for its frequencies, and complete the full deployment within seven years, according to rules set by the International Telecommunication Union, a United Nations agency that allocates frequencies. The Chinese megaconstellations are behind on these goals. Companies that fail to hit their targets could be required to reduce the size of their megaconstellations.
Meanwhile SpaceX "has about 8,000 Starlink satellites in orbit and is expanding its lead every month," the Times writes, citing data from the U.S. Space Force and the nonprofit space-data group CelesTrak. (The Times has even created an animation showing Starlink's 8,000 satellites in orbit.) Researchers for the People's Liberation Army predict that the network will become "deeply embedded in the U.S. military combat system." They envision a time when Starlink satellites connect U.S. military bases and serve as an early missile-warning and interception network....

One of the major reasons for China's delay is the lack of a reliable, reusable launcher. Chinese companies still launch satellites using single-use rockets. After the satellites are deployed, rocket parts tumble back to Earth or become space debris... Six years after [SpaceX's] Falcon 9 began launching Starlink satellites, Chinese firms still have no answer to it... The government has tested nearly 20 rocket launchers in the "Long March" series.

Since 2010 Stack Exchange has run all its sites on physical hardware in New Jersey — about 50 different servers. (When Ryan Donovan joined in 2019, "I saw the original server mounted on a wall with a laudatory plaque like a beloved pet.") But this month everything moved to the cloud, a new blog post explains. "Our servers are now cattle, not pets. Nobody is going to have to drive to our New Jersey data center and replace or reboot hardware..." Over the years, we've shared glamor shots of our server racks and info about updating them. For almost our entire 16-year existence, the SRE team has managed all datacenter operations, including the physical servers, cabling, racking, replacing failed disks and everything else in between. This work required someone to physically show up at the datacenter and poke the machines... [O]n July 2nd, in anticipation of the datacenter's closure, we unracked all the servers, unplugged all the cables, and gave these once mighty machines their final curtain call...

We moved Stack Overflow for Teams to Azure in 2023 and proved we could do it. Now we just had to tackle the public sites (Stack Overflow and the Stack Exchange network), which is hosted on Google Cloud. Early last year, our datacenter vendor in New Jersey decided to shut down that location, and we needed to be out by July 2025. Our other datacenter — in Colorado — was decommissioned in June. It was primarily for disaster recovery, which we didn't need any more. Stack Overflow no longer has any physical datacenters or offices; we are fully in the cloud and remote...!

[O]ur Staff Site Reliability Engineer, got a little wistful. "I installed the new web tier servers a few years ago as part of planned upgrades," he said. "It's bittersweet that I'm the one deracking them also." It's the IT version of Old Yeller.
There's photos of the 50 servers, as well as the 400+ cables connecting them, all of which wound up in a junk pile. "For security reasons (and to protect the PII of all our users and customers), everything was being shredded and/or destroyed. Nothing was being kept... Ever have difficulty disconnecting an RJ45 cable? Well, here was our opportunity to just cut the damn things off instead of figuring out why the little tab wouldn't release the plug."