An anonymous reader shares a report: HMD Global, the company best known for licensing the Nokia brand for new phones and tablets over the last decade, has announced that it will "scale back" its US operations, and appears to have stopped selling both HMD and Nokia devices entirely.

[...] Based in Finland, HMD was formed in 2016 in order to purchase the Nokia feature phone business from Microsoft, which had in turn bought the ailing brand in 2014. It also secured a license to use the Nokia name on smartphones and tablets, with a focus on affordable and midrange hardware.

Google is rolling out photo-to-video generation in its Gemini app today, allowing paid subscribers to upload images and transform them into short AI videos using the company's Veo 3 model. The feature requires a subscription to Google's AI Pro plan at $20 per month for three daily video generations, or the $250 AI Ultra plan for five daily videos.

Videos are limited to 720p resolution and eight seconds in length, taking several minutes to generate due to computational requirements.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from TechCrunch: On Sunday, Block CEO and Twitter co-founder Jack Dorsey launched an open source chat app called Bitchat, promising to deliver "secure" and "private" messaging without a centralized infrastructure. The app relies on Bluetooth and end-to-end encryption, unlike traditional messaging apps that rely on the internet. By being decentralized, Bitchat has potential for being a secure app in high-risk environments where the internet is monitored or inaccessible. According to Dorsey's white paper detailing the app's protocols and privacy mechanisms, Bitchat's system design "prioritizes" security.

But the claims that the app is secure, however, are already facing scrutiny by security researchers, given that the app and its code have not been reviewed or tested for security issues at all -- by Dorsey's own admission. Since launching, Dorsey has added a warning to Bitchat's GitHub page: "This software has not received external security review and may contain vulnerabilities and does not necessarily meet its stated security goals. Do not use it for production use, and do not rely on its security whatsoever until it has been reviewed." This warning now also appears on Bitchat's main GitHub project page but was not there at the time the app debuted.

As of Wednesday, Dorsey added: "Work in progress," next to the warning on GitHub. This latest disclaimer came after security researcher Alex Radocea found that it's possible to impersonate someone else and trick a person's contacts into thinking they are talking to the legitimate contact, as the researcher explained in a blog post. Radocea wrote that Bitchat has a "broken identity authentication/verification" system that allows an attacker to intercept someone's "identity key" and "peer id pair" -- essentially a digital handshake that is supposed to establish a trusted connection between two people using the app. Bitchat calls these "Favorite" contacts and marks them with a star icon. The goal of this feature is to allow two Bitchat users to interact, knowing that they are talking to the same person they talked to before.

After discovering that ChatGPT was falsely telling users that Soundslice could convert ASCII tablature into playable music, founder Adrian Holovaty decided to actually build the feature -- even though the app was never designed to support that format. TechCrunch reports: Soundslice is an app for teaching music, used by students and teachers. It's known for its video player synchronized to the music notations that guide users on how the notes should be played. It also offers a feature called "sheet music scanner" that allows users to upload an image of paper sheet music and, using AI, will automatically turn that into an interactive sheet, complete with notations. [Adrian Holovaty, founder of music-teaching platform Soundslice] carefully watches this feature's error logs to see what problems occur, where to add improvements, he said. That's where he started seeing the uploaded ChatGPT sessions.

They were creating a bunch of error logs. Instead of images of sheet music, these were images of words and a box of symbols known as ASCII tablature. That's a basic text-based system used for guitar notations that uses a regular keyboard. (There's no treble key, for instance, on your standard QWERTY keyboard.) The volume of these ChatGPT session images was not so onerous that it was costing his company money to store them and crushing his app's bandwidth, Holovaty said. He was baffled, he wrote in a blog post about the situation.

"Our scanning system wasn't intended to support this style of notation. Why, then, were we being bombarded with so many ASCII tab ChatGPT screenshots? I was mystified for weeks -- until I messed around with ChatGPT myself." That's how he saw ChatGPT telling people they could hear this music by opening a Soundslice account and uploading the image of the chat session. Only, they couldn't. Uploading those images wouldn't translate the ASCII tab into audio notes. He was struck with a new problem. "The main cost was reputational: New Soundslice users were going in with a false expectation. They'd been confidently told we would do something that we don't actually do," he described to TechCrunch.

He and his team discussed their options: Slap disclaimers all over the site about it -- "No, we can't turn a ChatGPT session into hearable music" -- or build that feature into the scanner, even though he had never before considered supporting that offbeat musical notation system. He opted to build the feature. "My feelings on this are conflicted. I'm happy to add a tool that helps people. But I feel like our hand was forced in a weird way. Should we really be developing features in response to misinformation?" he wrote.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from VentureBeat: Hugging Face, the $4.5 billion artificial intelligence platform that has become the GitHub of machine learning, announced Tuesday the launch of Reachy Mini, a $299 desktop robot designed to bring AI-powered robotics to millions of developers worldwide. The 11-inch humanoid companion represents the company's boldest move yet to democratize robotics development and challenge the industry's traditional closed-source, high-cost model.

The announcement comes as Hugging Face crosses a significant milestone of 10 million AI builders using its platform, with CEO Clement Delangue revealing in an exclusive interview that "more and more of them are building in relation to robotics." The compact robot, which can sit on any desk next to a laptop, addresses what Delangue calls a fundamental barrier in robotics development: accessibility. "One of the challenges with robotics is that you know you can't just build on your laptop. You need to have some sort of robotics partner to help in your building, and most people won't be able to buy $70,000 robots," Delangue explained, referring to traditional industrial robotics systems and even newer humanoid robots like Tesla's Optimus, which is expected to cost $20,000-$30,000.

Reachy Mini emerges from Hugging Face's April acquisition of French robotics startup Pollen Robotics, marking the company's most significant hardware expansion since its founding. The robot represents the first consumer product to integrate natively with the Hugging Face Hub, allowing developers to access thousands of pre-built AI models and share robotics applications through the platform's "Spaces" feature. [...] Reachy Mini packs sophisticated capabilities into its compact form factor. The robot features six degrees of freedom in its moving head, full body rotation, animated antennas, a wide-angle camera, multiple microphones, and a 5-watt speaker. The wireless version includes a Raspberry Pi 5 computer and battery, making it fully autonomous. The robot ships as a DIY kit and can be programmed in Python, with JavaScript and Scratch support planned. Pre-installed demonstration applications include face and hand tracking, smart companion features, and dancing moves. Developers can create and share new applications through Hugging Face's Spaces platform, potentially creating what Delangue envisions as "thousands, tens of thousands, millions of apps." Reachy Mini's $299 price point could significantly transform robotics education and research. "Universities, coding bootcamps, and individual learners could use the platform to explore robotics concepts without requiring expensive laboratory equipment," reports VentureBeat. "The open-source nature enables educational institutions to modify hardware and software to suit specific curricula. Students could progress from basic programming exercises to sophisticated AI applications using the same platform, potentially accelerating robotics education and workforce development."

"... For the first time, a major AI platform is betting that the future of robotics belongs not in corporate research labs, but in the hands of millions of individual developers armed with affordable, open-source tools."

Apple plans to release its first Vision Pro upgrade as early as this year, according to Bloomberg. The updated $3,499 headset will feature an M4 processor, replacing the current M2 chip, and components designed to better handle AI tasks.

The company is also developing new straps to reduce neck strain and head pain from the 1.4-pound device. The Vision Pro launched in February 2024 but has sold only hundreds of thousands of units. Apple is working on a significantly lighter redesigned model for 2027, the report added.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from TechCrunch: Google announced on Tuesday that it's launching a new Gmail feature that is designed to help users easily manage their subscriptions and declutter their inboxes. The new "Manage subscriptions" tool is rolling out on the web, Android, and iOS in select countries. With the new feature, users can view and manage their subscription emails in one place and quickly unsubscribe from the ones they no longer want to receive.

Users can view their active subscriptions, organized by the most frequent senders, alongside the number of emails they've sent in the past few weeks. Clicking on a sender provides a direct view of all emails from them. If a user decides to unsubscribe, Gmail will send an unsubscribe request to the sender on their behalf. "It can be easy to feel overwhelmed by the sheer volume of subscription emails clogging your inbox: Daily deal alerts that are basically spam, weekly newsletters from blogs you no longer read, promotional emails from retailers you haven't shopped in years can quickly pile up," Chris Doan, Gmail's Director of Product, wrote in a blog post.

Users can access the new feature by clicking the navigation bar in the top-left corner of their Gmail inbox and then selecting "Manage subscriptions." [...] Google says the new feature will begin rolling out on the web starting Tuesday, with Android and iOS users starting to receive it on July 14 and July 21, respectively. It may take up to 15 days from the start of the rollout for the feature to reach every user, the company says. The Manage subscriptions feature is available to all Google Workspace customers, Workspace Individual Subscribers, and users with personal Google accounts.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: Epic Games, buoyed by the massive success of Fortnite, has spent the last few years throwing elbows in the mobile industry to get its app store on more phones. It scored an antitrust win against Google in late 2023, and the following year it went after Samsung for deploying "Auto Blocker" on its Android phones, which would make it harder for users to install the Epic Games Store. Now, the parties have settled the case just days before Samsung will unveil its latest phones.

The Epic Store drama began several years ago when the company defied Google and Apple rules about accepting outside payments in the mega-popular Fortnite. Both stores pulled the app, and Epic sued. Apple emerged victorious, with Fortnite only returning to the iPhone recently. Google, however, lost the case after Epic showed it worked behind the scenes to stymie the development of app stores like Epic's. Google is still working to avoid penalties in that long-running case, but Epic thought it smelled a conspiracy last year. It filed a similar lawsuit against Samsung, accusing it of implementing a feature to block third-party app stores. The issue comes down to the addition of a feature to Samsung phones called Auto Blocker, which is similar to Google's new Advanced Protection in Android 16. It protects against attacks over USB, disables link previews, and scans apps more often for malicious activity. Most importantly, it blocks app sideloading. Without sideloading, there's no way to install the Epic Games Store or any of the content inside it.

Auto Blocker is enabled by default on Samsung phones, but users can opt out during setup. Epic claimed in its suit that the sudden inclusion of this feature was a sign that Google was working with Samsung to stand in the way of alternative app stores again. Epic has apparently gotten what it wanted from Samsung -- CEO Tim Sweeney has announced that Epic is dropping the case in light of a new settlement. Sweeney said Samsung "will address Epic's concerns," without elaborating on the details. Samsung may stop making Auto Blocker the default or create a whitelist of apps, like the Epic Games Store, that can bypass Auto Blocker. Another possibility is that Epic and select third-party stores are granted special access while Auto Blocker remains on for others, balancing security and openness.

A "more interesting outcome," according to Ars, would be for Samsung to pre-install the Epic Games Store on its new phones.

Long-time Slashdot reader AmiMoJo shared this report from the Apple news blog 9to5Mac: iOS 26 is a packed update for iPhone users thanks to the new Liquid Glass design and major updates for Messages, Wallet, CarPlay, and more. But another new feature was just discovered in the iOS 26 beta: FaceTime will now freeze your call's video and audio if someone starts undressing.

When Apple unveiled iOS 26 last month, it mentioned a variety of new family tools... "Communication Safety expands to intervene when nudity is detected in FaceTime video calls, and to blur out nudity in Shared Albums in Photos." However, at least in the iOS 26 beta, it seems that a similar feature may be in place for all users — adults included.
That's the claim of an X.com user named iDeviceHelp, who says FaceTime in iOS 26 swaps in a warning message that says "Audio and video are paused because you may be showing something sensitive," giving users a choice of ending the call or resuming it.

9to5Mac says "It's unclear whether this is an intended behavior, or just a bug in the beta that's applying the feature to adults... [E]verything happens on-device so Apple has no idea about the contents of your call."

In April researchers responsibly disclosed two security flaws found in Sudo "that could enable local attackers to escalate their privileges to root on susceptible machines," reports The Hacker News. "The vulnerabilities have been addressed in Sudo version 1.9.17p1 released late last month." Stratascale researcher Rich Mirch, who is credited with discovering and reporting the flaws, said CVE-2025-32462 has managed to slip through the cracks for over 12 years. It is rooted in the Sudo's "-h" (host) option that makes it possible to list a user's sudo privileges for a different host. The feature was enabled in September 2013. However, the identified bug made it possible to execute any command allowed by the remote host to be run on the local machine as well when running the Sudo command with the host option referencing an unrelated remote host. "This primarily affects sites that use a common sudoers file that is distributed to multiple machines," Sudo project maintainer Todd C. Miller said in an advisory. "Sites that use LDAP-based sudoers (including SSSD) are similarly impacted."

CVE-2025-32463, on the other hand, leverages Sudo's "-R" (chroot) option to run arbitrary commands as root, even if they are not listed in the sudoers file. It's also a critical-severity flaw. "The default Sudo configuration is vulnerable," Mirch said. "Although the vulnerability involves the Sudo chroot feature, it does not require any Sudo rules to be defined for the user. As a result, any local unprivileged user could potentially escalate privileges to root if a vulnerable version is installed...."

Miller said the chroot option will be removed completely from a future release of Sudo and that supporting a user-specified root directory is "error-prone."

An anonymous reader shares a report: Google has ended tests of a feature that would have let users open a snapshot of cooking-recipe content directly in web search results -- a welcome development for creators and food bloggers who were concerned about eroding traffic to their sites.

In recent months, Alphabet-owned Google has tested Recipe Quick View, which showed some food bloggers' content in search. The company framed the feature as an attempt to help users determine whether they are interested in a recipe before visiting a website. But some bloggers said they feared that the product would keep users from clicking through to their sites, depriving them of traffic and ad revenue.

Google on Tuesday confirmed it ended the trial.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Axios: Tinder is mandating new users in California verify their profiles using facial recognition technology starting Monday, executives exclusively tell Axios. The move aims to reduce impersonation and is part of Tinder parent Match Group's broader effort to improve trust and safety amid ongoing user frustration. The Face Check feature prompts users to take a short video selfie during onboarding. The biometric face scan, powered by FaceTec, then confirms the person is real and present and whether their face matches their profile photos. It also checks if the face is used across multiple accounts. If the criteria are met, the user receives a photo verified badge on their profile. The selfie video is then deleted. Tinder stores a non-reversible, encrypted face map to detect duplicate profiles in the future.

Face Check is separate from Tinder's ID Check, which uses a government-issued ID to verify age and identity. "We see this as one part of a set of identity assurance options that are available to users," Match Group's head of trust and safety Yoel Roth says. "Face Check ... is really meant to be about confirming that this person is a real, live person and not a bot or a spoofed account." "Even if in the short term, it has the effect of potentially reducing some top-line user metrics, we think it's the right thing to do for the business," Rascoff said.

AT&T has launched a new Account Lock feature designed to protect customers from SIM swapping attacks. The security tool, available through the myAT&T app, prevents unauthorized changes to customer accounts including phone number transfers, SIM card changes, billing information updates, device upgrades, and modifications to authorized users.

SIM swapping attacks occur when criminals obtain a victim's phone number through social engineering techniques, then intercept messages and calls to access two-factor authentication codes for sensitive accounts. The attacks have become increasingly common in recent years. AT&T began gradually rolling out Account Lock earlier this year, joining T-Mobile, Verizon, and Google Fi, which already offer similar fraud prevention features.

Apple plans to release a cheaper MacBook powered by the A18 Pro chip used in the iPhone 16 Pro line, according to analyst Ming-Chi Kuo. The laptop will be priced below $999 -- first time for a MacBook Air -- and go into production in late 2025 or early 2026 on the new laptop, the analyst noted.

The device will feature the same 13-inch screen as the current MacBook Air, with the chip representing the primary difference between models. The A18 Pro chip delivers single-core performance around 3,500 on Geekbench, trailing the M4 chip only slightly, though multicore performance lags significantly at approximately 8,780 versus 15,000 for the M4. The A18's multicore performance matches the original 2020 M1 chip.

The problem? "Companies want their products and brands to appear in chatbot results," reports 9to5Mac. And "Since Reddit forms a key part of the training material for Google's AI, then one effective way to make that happen is to spam Reddit." Huffman has confirmed to the Financial Times that this is happening, with companies using AI bots to create fake posts in the hope that the content will be regurgitated by chatbots:

"For 20 years, we've been fighting people who have wanted to be popular on Reddit," Huffman said... "If you want to show up in the search engines, you try to do well on Reddit, and now the LLMs, it's the same thing. If you want to be in the LLMs, you can do it through Reddit."

Multiple ad agency execs confirmed to the FT that they are indeed "posting content on Reddit to boost the likelihood of their ads appearing in the responses of generative AI chatbots." Huffman says that AI bots are increasingly being used to make spam posts, and Reddit is trying to block them: For Huffman, success comes down to making sure that posts are "written by humans and voted on by humans [...] It's an arms race, it's a never ending battle." The company is exploring a number of new ways to do this, including the World ID eyeball-scanning device being touted by OpenAI's Sam Altman.
It's Reddit's 20th anniversary, notes CNBC. And while "MySpace, Digg and Flickr have faded into oblivion," Reddit "has refused to die, chugging along and gaining an audience of over 108 million daily users..."

But now Reddit "faces a gargantuan challenge gaining new users, particularly if Google's search floodgates dry up." [I]n the age of AI, many users simply "go the easiest possible way," said Ann Smarty, a marketing and reputation management consultant who helps brands monitor consumer perception on Reddit. And there may be no simpler way of finding answers on the internet than simply asking ChatGPT a question, Smarty said. "People do not want to click," she said. "They just want those quick answers."
But in response, CNBC's headline argues that Reddit "is fighting AI with AI." It launched its own Reddit Answers AI service in December, using technology from OpenAI and Google. Unlike general-purpose chatbots that summarize others' web pages, the Reddit Answers chatbot generates responses based purely on the social media service, and it redirects people to the source conversations so they can see the specific user comments. A Reddit spokesperson said that over 1 million people are using Reddit Answers each week.

Bcachefs "pitches itself as a filesystem that 'doesn't eat your data'," writes the open source/Linux blog It's FOSS. Although it was last October that Bcachefs developer Kent Overstreet was restricted from participating in the Linux 6.13 kernel development cycle (after ending a mailing list post with "Get your head examined. And get the fuck out of here with this shit.")

And now with the upcoming Linux kernel 6.17 release, Linus Torvalds has decided to drop Bcachefs support, they report, "owing to growing tensions" with Overstreet: The decision follows a series of disagreements over how fixes and changes for it were submitted during the 6.16 release cycle... Kent filed a pull request to add a new feature called "journal-rewind". It was meant to improve bcachefs repair functionality, but it landed during the release candidate (RC) phase, a time usually reserved for bug fixes, not new features, as Linus pointed out. [Adding "I remain steadfastly convinced that anybody who uses bcachefs is expecting it to be experimental. They had better."]

Theodore Ts'o, a long-time kernel developer and maintainer of ext4, also chimed in, saying that Kent's approach risks introducing regressions, especially when changes affect sensitive parts of a filesystem like journaling. He reminded Kent that the rules around the merge window have been a long-standing consensus in the kernel community, and it's Linus's job to enforce them. After some more back and forth, Kent pushed back, arguing that the rules around the merge window aren't absolute and should allow for flexibility, even more so when user data is at stake. He then went ahead and resubmitted the patch, citing instances from XFS and Btrfs where similar fixes made it into the kernel during RCs. Linus merged it into his tree, but ultimately decided to drop Bcachefs entirely in the 6.17 merge window.

To which Kent responded by clarifying that he wasn't trying to shut Linus out of Bcachefs' decisions, stressing that he values Linus's input...
This of course follows the great Torvalds-Overstreet "filesystem people never learn" throwdown back in April.

Facebook is prompting users to opt into a feature that uploads photos from their camera roll -- even those not shared on the platform -- to Meta's servers for AI-driven suggestions like collages and stylized edits. While Meta claims the content is private and not used for ads, opting in allows the company to analyze facial features and retain personal data under its broad AI terms, raising privacy concerns. TechCrunch reports: The feature is being suggested to Facebook users when they're creating a new Story on the social networking app. Here, a screen pops up and asks if the user will opt into "cloud processing" to allow creative suggestions. As the pop-up message explains, by clicking "Allow," you'll let Facebook generate new ideas from your camera roll, like collages, recaps, AI restylings, or photo themes. To work, Facebook says it will upload media from your camera roll to its cloud (meaning its servers) on an "ongoing basis," based on information like time, location, or themes.

The message also notes that only you can see the suggestions, and the media isn't used for ad targeting. However, by tapping "Allow," you are agreeing to Meta's AI Terms. This allows your media and facial features to be analyzed by AI, it says. The company will additionally use the date and presence of people or objects in your photos to craft its creative ideas. [...] According to Meta's AI Terms around image processing, "once shared, you agree that Meta will analyze those images, including facial features, using AI. This processing allows us to offer innovative new features, including the ability to summarize image contents, modify images, and generate new content based on the image," the text states.

The same AI terms also give Meta's AIs the right to "retain and use" any personal information you've shared in order to personalize its AI outputs. The company notes that it can review your interactions with its AIs, including conversations, and those reviews may be conducted by humans. The terms don't define what Meta considers personal information, beyond saying it includes "information you submit as Prompts, Feedback, or other Content." We have to wonder whether the photos you've shared for "cloud processing" also count here.

Android 16 will include a new security feature that warns users when their phones connect to fake cell towers designed for surveillance. The "network notification" setting alerts users when devices connect to unencrypted networks or when networks request phone identifiers, helping protect against "stingray" devices that mimic legitimate cell towers to collect data and force phones onto insecure communication protocols.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from TechCrunch: Google's AI search features are killing traffic to publishers, so now the company is proposing a possible solution. On Thursday, the tech giant officially launched Offerwall, a new tool that allows publishers to generate revenue beyond the more traffic-dependent options, like ads.

Offerwall lets publishers give their sites' readers a variety of ways to access their content, including through options like micropayments, taking surveys, watching ads, and more. In addition, Google says that publishers can add their own options to the Offerwall, like signing up for newsletters. The new feature is available for free in Google Ad Manager after earlier tests with 1,000 publishers that spanned over a year. While no broad case studies were shared, India's Sakal Media Group implemented Google Ad Manager's Offerwall feature and saw a 20% revenue boost and up to 2 million more impressions in three months. Overall, publishers testing Offerwall experienced an average 9% revenue lift, with some seeing between 5% and 15%.

Michael Larabel writes via Phoronix: The upcoming Blender 5.0 3D modeling software application is introducing High Dynamic Range (HDR) display support on Linux when making use of Wayland -- no X11 support for HDR -- and Vulkan graphics accelerator. HDR support for Blender 5.0 on Linux is currently considered experimental. Enabling the HDR support on Linux for the Blender creator software requires having a High Dynamic Range display (of course) and be running on a Wayland desktop, enabling Vulkan API acceleration rather than OpenGL, and enabling the feature currently deemed experimental. Additional details can be found via this Blender DevTalk thread.