An anonymous reader shares a report: By now, the Forbes 30 Under 30 list has become more than a little notorious for the amount of entrants who go on to be charged with fraud.[...] Gokce Guven, a 26-year-old Turkish national and the founder and CEO of fintech startup Kalder, was charged last week with alleged securities fraud, wire fraud, visa fraud, and aggravated identity theft. The New York-based fintech startup -- which uses the "Turn Your Rewards into [a] Revenue Engine" tagline -- says it can help companies create and monetize individual rewards programs. The company was founded in 2022, and offers participating firms the opportunity to earn ongoing revenue streams via partner affiliate sales, Axios previously reported.

Guven was featured in last year's Forbes 30 Under 30 list. The magazine notes in the writeup that Guven's clients included major chocolatier Godiva and the International Air Transport Association, the trade organization that represents a majority of the world's airlines. Kalder also claims to have enjoyed the backing of a number of prominent VC firms. The U.S. Department of Justice alleges that, during Kalder's seed round in April of 2024, Guven managed to raise $7 million from more than a dozen investors after presenting a pitch deck that was rife with false information.

According to the government, Kalder's pitch deck claimed that there were 26 brands "using Kalder" and another 53 brands in "live freemium." However, officials say that, in reality, Kalder had, in many cases, only been offering heavily discounted pilot programs to many of those companies. Other brands "had no agreement with Kalder whatsoever -- not even for free services," officials said in a press release announcing the indictment. The pitch deck also "falsely reported that Kalder's recurring revenue had steadily grown month over month since February 2023 and that by March 2024, Kalder had reached $1.2 million in annual recurring revenue." The government also accuses Guven of having kept two separate sets of financial books.

The housing shortages plaguing Western cities today stem partly from the abandonment of a 19th century urban governance model that enabled cities like Berlin, New York and Chicago to expand rapidly while keeping real house prices flat and homes increasingly affordable.

A new analysis by Works in Progress argues that Victorian-era urban management wasn't laissez-faire but rather a system carefully designed to align private profit with public benefit. Infrastructure monopolies -- whether privately franchised, operated as concessions or municipally owned -- funded themselves entirely through user fees rather than public subsidies, and were structured so that building more capacity was the path to greater returns.

Landowners enjoyed a fundamental right to build when profitable, and height limits applied uniformly across entire cities rather than varying by neighborhood, meaning dense development remained legal everywhere. The system began collapsing after 1914, however. Inflation proved fatal to self-funding transport because governments found it politically impossible to raise controlled prices year after year. By the 1960s, trams had vanished from Britain, France and the U.S.

Meanwhile, differential zoning gradually banned densification in established neighborhoods, and rent controls decimated private homebuilding in many countries. In Britain, average house prices fell from twelve times earnings in 1850 to four times by 1914. They have since climbed back to nine times earnings. The article argues roughly 80% of postwar price increases trace directly to restrictions on building.

Phoronix's Michael Larabel is "reliving some of the best moments for Fedora Linux in 2025" by highlighting the year's most popular news around the distro. Throughout 2025, Fedora continued to lead upstream Linux innovation with bold changes like Wayland-only GNOME, newer kernels, architecture cleanups, and experimental features -- while openly grappling with controversial shifts such as dropping 32-bit support and modernizing long-standing subsystems.

"Fedora Linux this year continued in punctually shipping the very latest upstream Linux innovations from the freshest Wayland components to Linux kernel features and continuing to leverage other improvements in the open-source world," writes Larabel. "Fedora enjoyed the successful Fedora 42 and Fedora 43 releases this year, including going with Wayland-noly GNOME and further phasing of 32-bit packages. Fedora's KDE spin continued improving too and the Red Hat sponsored Linux distribution enjoyed a wealth of other improvements this year."

Toll roads are expanding across the U.S. as the traditional gas tax funding model for highways collapses. Indiana became the first state to authorize tolls on all of its existing interstate highways when Governor Mike Braun signed legislation in June.

The federal gas tax hasn't been raised since 1993. In fiscal 2024, the federal government spent $27 billion more on road maintenance than it collected from fuel taxes, and at state and local levels, fuel taxes covered barely a quarter of road spending. Drivers currently pay to access just 6,300 miles of America's roughly 160,000 miles of highway.

Most tolling projects have enjoyed bipartisan support -- Florida has more toll roads by distance than any other state, and Texas is second. But as Republicans embrace populism, the politics are shifting. In New York, almost all state Republicans fought congestion pricing, and President Donald Trump attempted to shut it down after taking office. Some Republicans now want to buy back pay-to-drive roads and make them free.

alternative_right shares a report from ScienceAlert: When's the last time you settled down with a good book, just because you enjoyed it? A new survey shows reading as a pastime is becoming dramatically less popular in the U.S., which correlates with an increased consumption of other digital media, like social media and streaming services. The survey was carried out by researchers from the University of Florida and the University of London, and charts a 40 percent decrease in daily reading for pleasure across the years 2003-2023, based on responses from 236,270 US adults.

"This is not just a small dip -- it's a sustained, steady decline of about 3 percent per year," says Jill Sonke, director for the Center for the Arts in Medicine at the University of Florida. "It's significant, and it's deeply concerning." The number of US people reading for pleasure every day peaked in 2004 at 28 percent, the researchers found, but by 2023 this was down to 16 percent. There was a silver lining though: those people who are still reading are reading for slightly longer on average.

Reading habits aren't changing across the board. The drops in reading for pleasure were higher in Black Americans, especially those with lower income, education levels, and who lived outside of cities. That speaks to problems beyond the rise of smartphones, tablets, and other screens, according to the researchers. Different life situations are leading to disparities in accessibility that don't help promote reading as a pastime. "Our digital culture is certainly part of the story," says Sonke. "But there are also structural issues -- limited access to reading materials, economic insecurity and a national decline in leisure time. If you're working multiple jobs or dealing with transportation barriers in a rural area, a trip to the library may just not be feasible." The findings have been published in the journal iScience.

ChatGPT now has nearly 700 million weekly users, OpenAI says. But after launching GPT-5 last week, critics bashed its less-intuitive feel, reports CNBC, "ultimately leading the company to restore its legacy GPT-4 to paying chatbot customers."

Yet GPT-5 was always about cracking the enterprise market "where rival Anthropic has enjoyed a head start," they write. And one week in, "startups like Cursor, Vercel, and Factory say they've already made GPT-5 the default model in certain key products and tools, touting its faster setup, better results on complex tasks, and a lower price." Some companies said GPT-5 now matches or beats Claude on code and interface design, a space Anthropic once dominated. Box, another enterprise customer, has been testing GPT-5 on long, logic-heavy documents. CEO Aaron Levie told CNBC the model is a "breakthrough," saying it performs with a level of reasoning that prior systems couldn't match...

Still, the economics are brutal. The models are expensive to run, and both OpenAI and Anthropic are spending big to lock in customers, with OpenAI on track to burn $8 billion this year. That's part of why both Anthropic and OpenAI are courting new capital... GPT-5 is significantly cheaper than Anthropic's top-end Claude Opus 4.1 — by a factor of seven and a half, in some cases — but OpenAI is spending huge amounts on infrastructure to sustain that edge. For OpenAI, it's a push to win customers now, get them locked in and build a real business on the back of that loyalty...

GPT-5 API usage has surged since launch, with the model now processing more than twice as much coding and agent-building work, and reasoning use cases jumping more than eightfold, said a person familiar with the matter who requested anonymity in order to discuss company data. Enterprise demand is rising sharply, particularly for planning and multi-step reasoning tasks.

GPT-5's traction over the past week shows how quickly loyalties can shift when performance and price tip in OpenAI's favor. AI-powered coding platform Qodo recently tested GPT-5 against top-tier models including Gemini 2.5, Claude Sonnet 4, and Grok 4, and said in a blog post that it led in catching coding mistakes. The model was often the only one to catch critical issues, such as security bugs or broken code, suggesting clean, focused fixes and skipping over code that didn't need changing, the company said. Weaknesses included occasional false positives and some redundancy.
JetBrains has also adopted GPT-5 as the default for its AI Assistant and for its new no-code tool Kineto, according to the article.

But Anthropic is still enjoying a great year too, with its annualized revenue growing 17x year-over-year (according to "a person familiar with the matter who requested anonymity")

Microsoft is updating its pricing approach for Online Services in Enterprise Agreements in the name of consistency and transparency, but could leave some customers paying more. From a report: Many customers, particularly larger ones, enjoy substantial discounts via volume licensing and the change, which will bring the Online Services pricing model into line with those already rolled out for services like Azure, "reflects our ongoing commitment to greater transparency and alignment across all purchasing channels." Online Services include products such as Dynamics 365 and Windows 365.

Exactly how big a discount customers enjoyed depends on the deal they scored. The change will mean that "pricing will align with the pricing published on Microsoft.com." According to Microsoft, "This change reduces licensing complexity, enabling partners to invest less time evaluating Microsoft pricing and programs and more time working with customers on their business needs. With simplified and standardized prices, partners can shift their focus to delivering unique services that will propel their customers' growth." The changes will take effect on November 1.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Dexerto: It's been ten years since YouTube first introduced its trending page in 2015, and the platform is finally sunsetting the program in favor of a new system. [...] As announced by YouTube in a support thread on July 10, 2025, the site is now set on introducing Charts, a new system for ranking popular content on its platform. "Back when we first launched the Trending page in 2015, the answer to 'What's trending?' was a lot simpler to capture with a singular list of viral videos that everyone was talking about," the post reads. "But today, trends consist of many videos created by many fandoms, and there are more micro-trends enjoyed by diverse communities than ever before."

As a result, YouTube says that its Trending page has seen "significantly" less traffic in the last five years, prompting them to make a change. Now, YouTube Charts will break up trends from one, all-encompassing page into separate, category-specific lists. The current Trending page will be moved to a Trending Now section, where the site's most popular content overall will be shown. However, viewers can now look for specific trends in certain categories on YouTube Charts for things like music videos, top podcasts, movie trailers and more. In the meantime, YouTube says that its Gaming Explore page will be home to trending gaming videos, and it will continue to serve personalized content to users via recommendations on their home feeds.

The Ladybird browser project is now officially tax-exempt as a U.S. 501(c)(3) nonprofit.

Started two years ago (by the original creator of SerenityOS), Ladybird will be "an independent, fast and secure browser that respects user privacy and fosters an open web." They're targeting Summer 2026 for the first Alpha version on Linux and macOS, and in May enjoyed "a pleasantly productive month" with 261 merged PRs from 53 contributors — and seven new sponsors (including coding livestreamer "ThePrimeagen").

And they're now recognized as a public charity: This is retroactive to March 2024, so donations made since then may be eligible for tax exemption (depending on country-specific rules). You can find all the relevant information on our new Organization page. ["Our mission is to create an independent, fast and secure browser that respects user privacy and fosters an open web. We are tax-exempt and rely on donations and sponsorships to fund our development efforts."]
Other announcements for May:

• "We've been making solid progress on Web Platform Tests... This month, we added 15,961 new passing tests for a total of 1,815,223."

• "We've also done a fair bit of performance work this month, targeting Speedometer and various websites that are slower than we'd like." [The optimizations led to a 10% speed-up on Speedometer 2.1.]

Brain rot — the inability to think deeply after too much scrolling on a phone — afflicts "plenty of people," writes the New York Times' lead consumer technology writer. [Alternate URL here.] He's suffering from it too — "These days, it's tough to even finish a book."

But is the answer just avoiding distractions with a stripped-down $600 phone "that barely does anything"? For a week he tested the Light Phone III... The newest version, which began shipping in March and is set for a broader release in July, can place calls, send texts, take photos, show map directions, play music and podcasts and not do much else. There is no web browser. There is also no app store, meaning there's no Uber to hail a ride, no Slack and no social media. There isn't even email... There were moments I enjoyed it. While waiting for a train, resting at the gym or eating alone, I was not tempted to stare at the phone screen, and I felt more mindful of my surroundings. Phone calls sounded nice and clear. The maps app did a fine job navigating me around town.

It reminded me of simpler times when we used phones primarily to converse before putting them away to focus on other tasks. But over the week, the downsides of a dumber phone chipped away at my enjoyment, and overall I felt more stressed and less capable. I suddenly found myself unable to get into a train station, look up the name of a new restaurant or control my garage door. Some of that has less to do with the Light Phone itself, which is a so-so product, and more to do with how society as a whole has become dependent on advanced smartphone features.
For example, his old smartphone supported virtual phone-based passes for mass transit and speedy access to his gym. (And his friends made phone of the Light Phone's photos.) But at least never felt tempted to check his email when out to dinner.

"While I admire the goal of the Light Phone, my experience demonstrates there's nothing we can realistically do or buy to bring us back to simpler times. So many aspects of our lives, including getting around town, working, paying for things and controlling home appliances, revolve around our highly capable smartphones.

"This Light Phone experiment reminded me of glamping: paying a lot to have an artificially crummier experience."

The New York Times notes that white-collar workers have faced higher unemployment than other groups in the U.S. over the past few years — along with slower wager growth.

Some economists wonder if this trend might be irreversible... and partly attributable to AI: After sitting below 4% for more than two years, the overall unemployment rate has topped that threshold since May... "We're seeing a meaningful transition in the way work is done in the white-collar world," said Carl Tannenbaum, the chief economist of Northern Trust. "I tell people a wave is coming...." Thousands of video game workers lost jobs last year and the year before... Unemployment in finance and related industries, while still low, increased by about a quarter from 2022 to 2024, as rising interest rates slowed demand for mortgages and companies sought to become leaner....

Overall, the latest data from the Federal Reserve Bank of New York show that the unemployment rate for college grads has risen 30% since bottoming out in September 2022 (to 2.6% from 2%), versus about 18% for all workers (to 4% from 3.4%). An analysis by Julia Pollak, chief economist of ZipRecruiter, shows that unemployment has been most elevated among those with bachelor's degrees or some college but no degree, while unemployment has been steady or falling at the very top and bottom of the education ladder — for those with advanced degrees or without a high school diploma. Hiring rates have slowed more for jobs requiring a college degree than for other jobs, according to ADP Research, which studies the labor market....

And artificial intelligence could reduce that need further by increasing the automation of white-collar jobs. A recent academic paper found that software developers who used an AI coding assistant improved a key measure of productivity by more than 25% and that the productivity gains appeared to be largest among the least experienced developers. The result suggested that adopting AI could reduce the wage premium enjoyed by more experienced coders, since it would erode their productivity advantages over novices... [A]t least in the near term, many tech executives and their investors appear to see AI as a way to trim their staffing. A software engineer at a large tech company who declined to be named for fear of harming his job prospects said that his team was about half the size it was last year and that he and his co-workers were expected to do roughly the same amount of work by relying on an AI assistant. Overall, the unemployment rate in tech and related industries jumped by more than half from 2022 to 2024, to 4.4% from 2.9%.
"Some economists say these trends may be short term in nature and little cause for concern on their own," the article points out (with one economist noting the unemployment rate is still low compared to historical averages).

Harvard labor economist Lawrence Katz even suggested the slower wage growth could reflect the discount that these workers accepted in return for being able to work from home.

Thanks to Slashdot reader databasecowgirl for sharing the article.

Australian company Cortical Labs has launched the CL1, the world's first commercial "biological computer" that merges human brain cells with silicon hardware to form adaptable, energy-efficient neural networks. New Atlas reports: Known as a Synthetic Biological Intelligence (SBI), Cortical's CL1 system was officially launched in Barcelona on March 2, 2025, and is expected to be a game-changer for science and medical research. The human-cell neural networks that form on the silicon "chip" are essentially an ever-evolving organic computer, and the engineers behind it say it learns so quickly and flexibly that it completely outpaces the silicon-based AI chips used to train existing large language models (LLMs) like ChatGPT.

"Today is the culmination of a vision that has powered Cortical Labs for almost six years," said Cortical founder and CEO Dr Hon Weng Chong. "We've enjoyed a series of critical breakthroughs in recent years, most notably our research in the journal Neuron, through which cultures were embedded in a simulated game-world, and were provided with electrophysiological stimulation and recording to mimic the arcade game Pong. However, our long-term mission has been to democratize this technology, making it accessible to researchers without specialized hardware and software. The CL1 is the realization of that mission." He added that while this is a groundbreaking step forward, the full extent of the SBI system won't be seen until it's in users' hands.

"We're offering 'Wetware-as-a-Service' (WaaS)," he added -- customers will be able to buy the CL-1 biocomputer outright, or simply buy time on the chips, accessing them remotely to work with the cultured cell technology via the cloud. "This platform will enable the millions of researchers, innovators and big-thinkers around the world to turn the CL1's potential into tangible, real-word impact. We'll provide the platform and support for them to invest in R&D and drive new breakthroughs and research." These remarkable brain-cell biocomputers could revolutionize everything from drug discovery and clinical testing to how robotic "intelligence" is built, allowing unlimited personalization depending on need. The CL1, which will be widely available in the second half of 2025, is an enormous achievement for Cortical -- and as New Atlas saw recently with a visit to the company's Melbourne headquarters -- the potential here is much more far-reaching than Pong. [...]

The Cleveland Review of Books ponders a new 697-page hardcover collection of American poet/author Kevin Killian's.... reviews from Amazon. (Over 2,000 of 'em — written over the course of 16 years.)
In 2012, he wrote three substantial paragraphs about the culinary perfection that can be found in a German Potato Salad Can (15 oz., Pack of 12). Often, he'd open with something like "as an American boy growing up in rural France." Killian grew up on Long Island, New York. He didn't take himself (or much else) too seriously....

[Killian] was also a member of the New Narrative Movement... Writers acknowledge the subjectivity of, and the author's active presence in, the text... Amazon reviews are a near-perfect vehicle for New Narrative's tenets... Killian camouflaged his reviews in the cadence of the Amazon everyman. He embraced all the stylistic quirks, choppy sentence fragments and run-ons, either darting from point to point like a distracted squirrel or leaning heavily into declarative statements.... About the biographer of Elia Kazan, he tells us, "Schickel is in love with the sound of his voice, and somewhere in the shredded coleslaw of his prose, a decent book lies unavailable to us, about the real Elia Kazan...."

[T]he writing can move from very funny to strangely poignant. One of my favorites, his review of MacKenzie Smelling Salts, begins with a tragically tongue-in-cheek anecdote about his Irish grandfather:

"My Irish grandfather used to keep a bottle of MacKenzie's smelling salts next to his desk. He was the principal at Bushwick High School (in Brooklyn, NY) in the 1930s and 1940s, before it became a dangerous place to live in, and way before Bushwick regained its current state of desirable area for new gentrification. And he kept one at home as well, in case of a sudden shock. At school, he would press the saturated cotton under the nostrils of poor girls who realized they were pregnant in health class, before he expelled them."

He ends with his own reasons for using smelling salts, citing wildly diverging examples: his grief upon learning of the death of Paul Walker from the Fast & Furious film franchise abuts Killian's disappointment at not being selected for the 2014 Whitney Biennial. Apparently, both were deeply traumatic experiences for Kevin... ["it took my wife a minute or two to locate the MacKenzie's, but passing it under my nose, as though she were my grandfather ministering to the pregnant girls of yore..."]

No one wants to be forgotten. I do not think it's a coincidence Killian started writing the reviews after his heart attack. Why did he keep going? Most likely, it was because he enjoyed the writing and got something out of it — pleasure, practice, and a bit of notoriety. But mainly, I think the project grew out of habit and compulsion. In a similar way, the graffiti art of Keith Haring, Jean-Paul Basquiat, and Banksy began in subway tunnels, one tag and mural at a time, until it grew into bodies of work collected and coveted by museums worldwide. In Killian's case, the global commerce platform was his ugly brick wall, his subway platform, and his train car. Coming away, I like to imagine him gleefully typing, manipulating the Amazon review forums into something that had little to do with the consumerism they had been created to support: Killian tagging a digital wall to remind everyone KEVIN WAS HERE.
The book reviewer points out that the collection's final review, for the memoir Never Mind the Moon: My Time at the Royal Opera House, is dated a month before Killian died.

"Unfortunately, the editors of this volume did not preserve the Helpful/Not Helpful ratings, only the stars."

Putting it all in perspective, the book critic notes that "In 2023, Amazon reported that one hundred million customers submitted one or more product reviews to the site. The content of most is dross, median." Though the critic then also acknowledges that "I haven't read any of Killian's other work."

In Friday's excerpt from Bill Gates' upcoming memoir, the Microsoft co-founder acknowledges that "It's impossible to overstate the unearned privilege I enjoyed. To be born in the rich U.S. is a big part of a winning birth-lottery ticket... Add to that my lucky timing..." The biggest part of my good fortune was being born to Bill and Mary Gates — parents who struggled with their complicated son but ultimately seemed to intuitively understand how to guide him. If I were growing up today, I probably would be diagnosed on the autism spectrum. During my childhood, the fact that some people's brains process information differently from others wasn't widely understood. (The term "neurodivergent" wouldn't be coined until the 1990s.) My parents had no guideposts or textbooks to help them grasp why their son became so obsessed with certain projects, missed social cues and could be rude and inappropriate without seeming to notice his effect on others.

What I do know is that my parents afforded me the precise blend of support and pressure I needed... Instead of allowing me to turn inward, they pushed me out into the world — to the baseball team, the Cub Scouts and other families' dinner tables. And they gave me constant exposure to adults, immersing me in the language and ideas of their friends and colleagues, which fed my curiosity about the world beyond school. Even with their influence, my social side would be slow to develop, as would my awareness of the impact I can have on other people. But that has come with age, with experience, with children, and I'm better for it. I wish it had come sooner, even if I wouldn't trade the brain I was given for anything...

I will never have my father's calm bearing, but he instilled in me a fundamental sense of confidence and capability. My mother's influence was more complex. Internalized by me, her expectations bloomed into an even stronger ambition to succeed, to stand out and to do something important. It was as if I needed to clear my mom's bar by such a wide margin that there would be nothing left to say on the matter. But, of course, there was always something more to be said. It was my mother who regularly reminded me that I was merely a steward of any wealth I gained. With wealth came the responsibility to give it away, she would tell me.

I regret that my mom didn't live long enough to see how fully I've tried to meet that expectation: she passed away in 1994, at age 64, from breast cancer. It would be my father in the years after my mom died who would help get our foundation started and serve as a co-chair for years, bringing the same compassion and decency that had served so well in his law career.
Proceeds from book sales will be donated to the nonprofit United Way Worldwide, in recognition of Mary's longtime work as a volunteer and board member with the organization.

Linux creator Linus Torvalds announced a playful giveaway for kernel contributors: he'll hand-build a guitar effects pedal for one lucky developer selected at random, using his holiday hobby skills with pedal kits. To qualify, developers must have a 2024 commit in Torvalds' kernel git tree and email him with the subject "I WANT A GUITAR PEDAL". He'll pick a winner at random, use his own money to buy a pedal kit from a company called Aion FX, and then 'build it with my own shaky little fingers, and send it to the victim by US postal services.'" The Register reports: The odd offer appeared in his weekly state-of-the-kernel post, which on Sunday US time informed the Linux world that release candidate (rc) seven for version 6.13 of the Linux kernel "is slightly bigger than normal, but considering the timing, it's pretty much where I would have expected, and nothing really stands out." Torvalds therefore expects version 6.13 to debut next week, meaning it will arrive after his preferred seven release candidates and without delays caused by the usual holiday-period slowdown. Torvalds then added a postscript in which he revealed that he often uses the holiday season to build LEGO, which he frequently receives for Christmas and his late December birthday.

He kept up that tradition last year, but "also ended up doing a number of guitar pedal kit builds" which he described as "LEGO for grown-ups with a soldering iron." [...] Torvalds doesn't play guitar, but did the builds "because I enjoy the tinkering, and the guitar pedals actually do something and are the right kind of "not very complex, but not some 5-minute 555 LED blinking thing.'" He enjoyed the experience and wants to build more pedals, so has decided to give one away to a random kernel developer -- both as an act of generosity and to "check to see if anybody actually ever reads these weekly rc announcements of mine." Torvalds rated his past pedal-building efforts a "good success so far" but warned entrants "I'm a software person with a soldering iron."

"I will test the result to the best of my abilities, and the end result may actually work ... but you should set your expectations along the lines of "quality kit built by a SW person who doesn't know one end of a guitar from the other.'"

The new movie Y2K is either a comedy or a disaster/horror film, according to Wikipedia. The film "imagines a turn of the century where the machines don't just glitch or stop working," writes the Hollywood Reporter. "They go full homicidal." With a cast that includes 1990s icons like Alicia Silverstone and the lead singer for the Napster-loving 1990s metal band Limp Bizkit, the movie "gives the '90s the ending it deserved," according to the article.

They interviewed the film's director (and co-writer and co-star) Kyle Mooney, best-known for SNL, starting by complimenting his fidelity to the tech of its day. "The film opens with a high schooler getting home and logging into AOL Instant Messenger, which is not a scene I think I've ever seen in another movie..." Mooney: All of my relationships, between 17 and 22 years old, were short-lived and spawned because I was most confident flirting on Instant Messager....

Q: The tech here is such a huge part of the story. Were there any logos or brands you had a tough time getting on camera?

Mooney: Definitely. This isn't really a spoiler, but Jaeden Martell's character's computer — the one that we open up with him logging into AOL — eventually turns into a robot. That was supposed to be an iMac. But I don't think Apple wanted their machines strangling people or whatever the robot does — so we had to change the look of it by, like, 30 percent. There were a few instances like that, where we couldn't get the exact thing, but we were allowed to get as close as possible.
Deadline's article includes a spoiler about the film, but also this interesting note about two of its young actors, Julian Dennison and Jaeden Martell: [A]lthough Dennison and Martell were both born after 2000, they enjoyed slipping into the "lack of convenience and the lack of technology" that came with the era.

"I wish I got to experience that. I wish I didn't live in the age of everything being so accessible," said Martell.
And apparently the movie also includes a quick shout-out to Myspace co-founder Tom Anderson.

CNN reports that investigators "are trying to crack the mystery of how two undersea internet cables in the Baltic Sea were cut within hours of each other." But there's now two competing viewpoints, "with European officials saying they believe the disruption was an act of sabotage and U.S. officials suggesting it was likely an accident." The foreign ministers of Finland and Germany said in a joint statement that they were "deeply concerned" about the incident and raised the possibility that it was part of a "hybrid warfare," specifically mentioning Russia in their statement. Their assessment was not plucked out of thin air. Russia has been accused of waging a hybrid war against Europe after a string of suspicious incidents, arson attacks, explosions and other acts of sabotage across multiple European countries were traced back to Moscow. And the disruption to the cables came just weeks after the US warned that Moscow was likely to target critical undersea infrastructure. This followed months of suspicious movements of Russian vessels in European waters and the significant beefing up of a dedicated Russian secretive marine unit tasked with surveying the seabed...

But two US officials familiar with the initial assessment of the incident told CNN on Tuesday the damage was not believed to be deliberate activity by Russia or any other nation. Instead, the two officials told CNN they believed it likely caused by an anchor drag from a passing vessel. Such accidents have happened in the past, although not in a quick succession like the two on Sunday and Monday.
Cloudflare's blog also reminds readers that the two cable cuts resulted in little-to-no observable impact
Cloudflare attributes this largely to "the significant redundancy and resilience of Internet infrastructure in Europe." (Their Cloudflare Radar graphs show that after the Sweden-Lithuania cable cut "there was no apparent impact to traffic volumes in either country at the time that the cables were damaged.") Telegeography's submarinecablemap.com illustrates, at least in part, the resilience in connectivity enjoyed by these two countries. In addition to the damaged cable, it shows that Lithuania is connected to neighboring Latvia as well as to the Swedish mainland. Over 20 submarine cables land in Sweden, connecting it to multiple countries across Europe. In addition to the submarine resilience, network providers in both countries can take advantage of terrestrial fiber connections to neighboring countries, such as those illustrated in a European network map from Arelion (formerly Telia), which is only one of the large European backbone providers.

Less than a day later, the C-Lion1 submarine cable, which connects Helsinki, Finland and Rostock Germany was reportedly damaged during the early morning hours of Monday, November 18... In this situation as well, as the Cloudflare Radar graphs below show, there was no apparent impact to traffic volumes in either country at the time that the cables were damaged...

Telegeography's submarinecablemap.com shows that both Finland and Germany also have significant redundancy and resilience from a submarine cable perspective, with over 10 cables landing in Finland, and nearly 10 landing in Germany, including Atlantic Crossing-1 (AC-1), which connects to the United States over two distinct paths. Terrestrial fiber maps from Arelion and eunetworks (as just two examples) show multiple redundant fiber routes within both countries, as well as cross-border routes to other neighboring countries, enabling more resilient Internet connectivity.
See also Does the Internet Route Around Damage?

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Fortune: Google CEO Sundar Pichai has weighed in on the debate over the relative values of political expression and workplace coexistence by ordering employees to leave their political opinions at home. A day after firing 28 workers for participating in a sit-in protest of the tech giant's cloud contract with Israel, Pichai warned staff that the office is not a place "to fight over disruptive issues or debate politics" in a company blog post.

Although Pichai didn't specifically mention the protests or the Israel-Hamas war, he concluded that the $1.92 trillion company "is a business, and not a place to act in a way that disrupts coworkers or makes them feel unsafe, to attempt to use the company as a personal platform." "We have a duty to be an objective and trusted provider of information that serves all of our users globally," Pichai continued. "When we come to work, our goal is to organize the world's information and make it universally accessible and useful. That supersedes everything else and I expect us to act with a focus that reflects that." The sit-in protest was staged against Google's involvement in Project Nimbus, a $1.2 billion cloud contract with the Israeli government. During the nearly 10-hour protest, employees wore "Googler against genocide" T-shirts and occupied the office of Google Cloud CEO Thomas Kurian.

The report notes how tech companies, "previously famed for their progressive culture where nap pods and abortion benefits were welcome," are increasingly restricting political discussions to avoid internal conflict. Pichai notes in his memo that Google has previously enjoyed "a culture of vibrant, open discussion that enables us to create amazing products and turn great ideas into action."

AMD is launching a new chip to rival Nvidia's upcoming Blackwell chips, which Nvidia called the "world's most powerful chip" for AI when unveiled earlier this year. CNBC reports: The Instinct MI325X, as the chip is called, will start production before the end of 2024, AMD said Thursday during an event announcing the new product. If AMD's AI chips are seen by developers and cloud giants as a close substitute for Nvidia's products, it could put pricing pressure on Nvidia, which has enjoyed roughly 75% gross margins while its GPUs have been in high demand over the past year. In the past few years, Nvidia has dominated the majority of the data center GPU market, but AMD is historically in second place. Now, AMD is aiming to take share from its Silicon Valley rival or at least to capture a big chunk of the market, which it says will be worth $500 billion by 2028.

AMD didn't reveal new major cloud or internet customers for its Instinct GPUs at the event, but the company has previously disclosed that both Meta and Microsoft buy its AI GPUs and that OpenAI uses them for some applications. The company also did not disclose pricing for the Instinct MI325X, which is typically sold as part of a complete server. With the launch of the MI325X, AMD is accelerating its product schedule to release new chips on an annual schedule to better compete with Nvidia and take advantage of the boom in AI chips. The new AI chip is the successor to the MI300X, which started shipping late last year. AMD's 2025 chip will be called MI350, and its 2026 chip will be called MI400, the company said.

During a 2023 deployment, senior enlisted leaders aboard the Navy ship USS Manchester secretly installed a Starlink Wi-Fi network, allowing them exclusive internet access in violation of Navy regulations. "Unauthorized Wi-Fi systems like the one [then-Command Senior Chief Grisel Marrero] set up are a massive no-no for a deployed Navy ship, and Marrero's crime occurred as the ship was deploying to the West Pacific, where such security concerns become even more paramount among heightened tensions with the Chinese," reports Navy Times. From the report: As the ship prepared for a West Pacific deployment in April 2023, the enlisted leader onboard conspired with the ship's chiefs to install the secret, unauthorized network aboard the ship, for use exclusively by them. So while rank-and-file sailors lived without the level of internet connectivity they enjoyed ashore, the chiefs installed a Starlink satellite internet dish on the top of the ship and used a Wi-Fi network they dubbed "STINKY" to check sports scores, text home and stream movies. The enjoyment of those wireless creature comforts by enlisted leaders aboard the ship carried serious repercussions for the security of the ship and its crew. "The danger such systems pose to the crew, the ship and the Navy cannot be understated," the investigation notes.

Led by the senior enlisted leader of the ship's gold crew, then-Command Senior Chief Grisel Marrero, the effort roped in the entire chiefs mess by the time it was uncovered a few months later. Marrero was relieved in late 2023 after repeatedly misleading and lying to her ship's command about the Wi-Fi network, and she was convicted at court-martial this spring in connection to the scheme. She was sentenced to a reduction in rank to E-7 after the trial and did not respond to requests for comment for this report. The Navy has yet to release the entirety of the Manchester investigation file to Navy Times, including supplemental enclosures. Such records generally include statements or interview transcripts with the accused.

But records released so far show the probe, which wrapped in November, found that the entire chiefs mess knew about the secret system, and those who didn't buy into it were nonetheless culpable for not reporting the misconduct. Those chiefs and senior chiefs who used, paid for, helped hide or knew about the system were given administrative nonjudicial punishment at commodore's mast, according to the investigation. All told, more than 15 Manchester chiefs were in cahoots with Marrero to purchase, install and use the Starlink system aboard the ship. "This agreement was a criminal conspiracy, supported by the overt act of bringing the purchased Starlink onboard USS MANCHESTER," the investigation said. "Any new member of the CPO Mess which then paid into the services joined that conspiracy following the system's operational status."

Records obtained by Navy Times via a Freedom of Information Act request reveal a months-long effort by Marrero to obtain, install and then conceal the chiefs Wi-Fi network from superiors, including the covert installation of a Starlink satellite dish on the outside of the Manchester. When superiors became suspicious about the existence of the network and confronted her about it, Marrero failed to come clean on multiple occasions and provided falsified documents to further mislead Manchester's commanding officer, the investigation states. "The installation and usage of Starlink, without the approval of higher headquarters, poses a serious risk to mission, operational security, and information security," the investigation states.