Long-time Slashdot reader MojoKid writes: AMD took the wraps of its next gen RDNA 4 consumer graphics architecture Friday, which was designed to enhance efficiency over the previous generation, while also optimizing performance for today's more taxing ray-traced gaming and AI workloads. RDNA 4 features next generation Ray Tracing engines, dedicated hardware for AI and ML workloads, better bandwidth utilization, and multimedia improvements for both gaming and content creation. AMD's 3rd generation Ray Accelerators in RDNA offer 2x the peak throughput of RDNA 3 and add support for a new feature called Oriented Bounding Boxes, that results in more efficient GPU utilization. 3rd Generation Matrix Accelerators are also present, which offer improved performance, along with support for 8-bit float data types, with structured sparsity.

The first cards featuring RDNA 4, the Radeon RX 9070 and 9070 XT go on sale next week, with very competitive MSRPs below $600, and are expected to do battle with NVIDIA's GeForce RTX 5070-class GPUs
The article calls it "a significant step forward" for AMD, adding that next week is "going to be very busy around here. NVIDIA is launching the final, previously announced member of the RTX 50 series and AMD will unleash the 9070 and 9070 XT."

President Trump has directly criticized the UK government's approach to encryption, comparing recent actions to those of China. Speaking to The Spectator, Trump said he confronted UK Prime Minister Keir Starmer about the Home Office's request for "backdoor access" to encrypted iCloud data, which led Apple to remove its Advanced Data Protection feature from British services entirely.

"We told them you can't do this... That's incredible. That's something, you know, that you hear about with China," Trump said after his meeting with Starmer. The remarks come as the Trump administration has directed Treasury and Commerce officials to examine UK tech regulations, including the Online Safety Act, for potential free speech violations and discrimination against US companies.

Apple announced a new feature allowing parents to share a child's age with app developers without exposing sensitive information, as lawmakers debate age-verification laws for social media and apps. Reuters reports: States, such as Utah and South Carolina, are currently debating laws that would require app store operators such as Apple and Alphabet's Google to check the ages of users. That has set up a conflict in the tech industry over which party should be responsible for checking ages for users under 18 -- app stores, or each individual app. Meta, for instance, has long argued in favor of legislation requiring app stores to check ages when a child downloads an app.

Apple on Thursday said it does not want to be responsible for collecting sensitive data for those age verifications. "While only a fraction of apps on the App Store may require age verification, all users would have to hand over their sensitive personally identifying information to us -- regardless of whether they actually want to use one of these limited set of apps," Apple wrote in a whitepaper on its website.

Microsoft has released a native Copilot app for macOS, offering AI-powered text and image generation, dark mode, and a Command + Space shortcut. The Verge reports: Microsoft is launching this new Copilot Mac app in the US, UK, and Canada today, and the iPad version is also being updated with a split screen mode. You'll also now be able to log into Copilot on an iPhone or iPad with an Apple ID, and upload text or PDF files to ask questions about the documents or generate a summary about them. This document summarization feature is also coming to the macOS app soon. You can download the app here.

When developers boast "I could write that in a weekend," they're missing the painful reality that haunts software maintainers for years. In a candid blog post, Construct developer Ashley explains why maintaining large software projects is a burden most programmers fail to appreciate. "Writing the initial code for a feature is only a fraction of the work," Ashley explains, estimating it represents just "25% of the total work" in Construct's 750,000-line codebase. The rest? A grinding cycle of "testing, diagnosing and fixing bugs, optimizing performance, upgrading it to work with other changes, refactoring, customer support, writing documentation and similarly revising the documentation over time."

Ashley describes how accepting code contributions feels like someone offering to build you a free extension -- initially attractive until the roof starts leaking years later and the original builder is nowhere to be found. Meanwhile, your tenants (users) are furious, and you're stuck with "no good options." The post recounts Construct's own bruises: a community-contributed storage plugin still causing compatibility headaches a decade later, and third-party libraries that became maintenance nightmares after their creators vanished.

These experiences explain why seasoned maintainers eye large code contributions with deep suspicion rather than gratitude. "If you suggest some software project uses some code -- even a small amount -- will you be there in literally 10 year's time sorting out all the issues that arise from it?" Ashley asks. "Usually the answer is no."

Google has received FDA clearance for the Pixel Watch 3's Loss of Pulse Detection feature, which will start rolling out to U.S. devices around the end of March. The Verge reports: The Loss of Pulse Detection feature is exactly what it sounds like: if the Pixel Watch 3 senses that you've lost your pulse through an event like a heart attack or an overdose, it'll send you a prompt. If you don't respond, it'll automatically call emergency services on your behalf. Back in August, Sandeep Waraich, Google's senior director of product manager for Pixel wearables, told The Verge that the Pixel Watch 3 is capable of differentiating between a genuine loss-of-pulse event and a person simply taking the watch off.

ZDNet's Steven Vaughan-Nichols shares some of the latest improvements to ExpressVPN following its codebase transition from C to Rust. An anonymous reader quotes an excerpt from the report: ExpressVPN is one of ZDNET's favorite Virtual Private Networks (VPNs). The popular VPN's transformation of its Lightway codebase from C to Rust promises to make the service faster and more secure. For now, the updated Lightway 2.0 is only available via ExpressVPN's Aircove router with the February 4 AircoveOS v5 update. The Aircove, which we rate as the best VPN router, costs $189. With this device, you can protect your tech from unwanted snoopers without installing a VPN on each gadget. So, how much faster is the updated ExpressVPN? In my tests, I connected to the internet via my updated router over my 2 Gigabit per second (Gbps) AT&T Internet using a 2.5 Gbps Ethernet-connected Linux Mint desktop with a Wi-Fi 6 connection over my Samsung Galaxy 25 Plus smartphone.

Without the VPN engaged, I saw 1.6 Gbps speeds, which is about par. With the VPN switched on and using Lightway 2.0, I saw speeds in the 290 to 330 Megabit per second (Mbps) range to Toronto and London, England. Farther afield, I saw speeds around 250 to 280Mbps to Hong Kong and Seoul. That's about 20% faster than I had seen with earlier Lightway versions. I was impressed. This version of the VPN should also be more secure. As Pete Membrey, ExpressVPN's chief research officer, said in a statement: "At ExpressVPN, we innovate to solve the challenges of tomorrow. Upgrading Lightway from its previous C code to Rust was a strategic and straightforward decision to enhance performance and security while ensuring longevity."

The updated Lightway VPN protocol also uses ML-KEM, the newly finalized NIST standard for post-quantum encryption. This feature, wrote Membray in a blog post, "ensures your connection is secured by encryption designed not just for today's threats but for the quantum-powered challenges of the future." To ensure the integrity of the recoded Lightway protocol, ExpressVPN commissioned two independent security audits from cybersecurity firms Cure53 and Praetorian. Both audits yielded positive results, with only minor vulnerabilities identified and promptly addressed by ExpressVPN. In short, ExpressVPN is technically about as safe a VPN as they come.

U.S. Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard has condemned a British order requiring Apple to break its encrypted storage worldwide as an "egregious" violation of American rights that could breach the CLOUD Act facilitating cross-border investigations. In a letter [PDF] to Senator Ron Wyden and Representative Andy Biggs, Gabbard revealed she has directed a legal review of the secret order, which she learned about through media reports.

"This would be a clear and egregious violation of Americans' privacy and civil liberties, and open up a serious vulnerability for cyber exploitation by adversarial actors," Gabbard wrote. The UK Home Office, under the Investigatory Powers Act, prohibited Apple from disclosing the order to Congress or U.S. regulators. The directive would have forced Apple to compromise its Advanced Data Protection encryption, enabling officials to access individual data. Apple refused compliance, instead withdrawing the secure storage option from UK customers while maintaining it elsewhere globally. Despite Apple's pullback, the UK demand for backdoor creation remains. Gabbard pledged to ensure UK actions protect American privacy rights "consistent with the CLOUD Act and other applicable laws."

British iPhone users have shown minimal reaction to Apple's decision to disable end-to-end encryption for UK iCloud customers, challenging the company's assumption about privacy priorities, a Bloomberg columnist notes. Rather than create a government-accessible backdoor demanded under Britain's Investigatory Powers Act, Apple chose to eliminate its Advanced Data Protection feature entirely for UK customers, effectively giving both authorities and potential hackers easier access to stored emails, photos and documents.

The near absence of public outcry from British consumers points to what researchers call the "privacy paradox," where stated concerns about data security rarely translate to action. According to cited research, while 92% of American consumers believe they should control their online information, only 16% have stopped using services over data misuse. The quiet reception suggests Apple's principled stand against backdoors may have limited impact if customers don't understand or value encrypted protection, potentially undermining privacy's effectiveness as a marketing differentiator for the tech giant.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Wired: Anthropic, an artificial intelligence company founded by exiles from OpenAI, has introduced the first AI model that can produce either conventional output or a controllable amount of "reasoning" needed to solve more grueling problems. Anthropic says the new hybrid model, called Claude 3.7, will make it easier for users and developers to tackle problems that require a mix of instinctive output and step-by-step cogitation. "The [user] has a lot of control over the behavior -- how long it thinks, and can trade reasoning and intelligence with time and budget," says Michael Gerstenhaber, product lead, AI platform at Anthropic.

Claude 3.7 also features a new "scratchpad" that reveals the model's reasoning process. A similar feature proved popular with theChinese AI model DeepSeek. It can help a user understand how a model is working over a problem in order to modify or refine prompts. Dianne Penn, product lead of research at Anthropic, says the scratchpad is even more helpful when combined with the ability to ratchet a model's "reasoning" up and down. If, for example, the model struggles to break down a problem correctly, a user can ask it to spend more time working on it. [...]

Penn says that Claude's reasoning mode received additional data on business applications including writing and fixing code, using computers, and answering complex legal questions. "The things that we made improvements on are ... technical subjects or subjects which require long reasoning," Penn says. "What we have from our customers is a lot of interest in deploying our models into their actual workloads." Anthropic says that Claude 3.7 is especially good at solving coding problems that require step-by-step reasoning, outscoring OpenAI's o1 on some benchmarks like SWE-bench. The company is today releasing a new tool, called Claude Code, specifically designed for this kind of AI-assisted coding. "The model is already good at coding," Penn says. But "additional thinking would be good for cases that might require very complex planning -- say you're looking at an extremely large code base for a company."

The Los Angeles Times publishes a weekly "Boiling Point" newsletter about climate change and energy issues. And this week they examined whether the scientific fact of a change climate is reflected in the mass media: For the second year running, nonprofit consulting firm Good Energy applied its Climate Reality Check to the actual Oscar-nominated films [which] tests whether a movie and its characters acknowledge global warming... Of last year's 13 Oscar-nominated films that met Good Energy's criteria (feature-length movies set in present-day or near-future Earth) three passed the test. This year, there were 10 eligible films. Only "The Wild Robot" passed...

Maybe a few years from now, studios will release a torrent of movies and shows reflecting the realities of a scary-but-still-salvageable world, helmed by producers and writers jolted into renewed awareness by the infernos. But for now, the picture is bleak. A peer-reviewed study slated for publication this month, led by Rice University English and environmental studies professor Matthew Schneider-Mayerson, analyzes climate change mentions in 250 of the most popular movies of the last decade. The authors found that just 12.8% of the films allude to global warming. Just 3.6% depict or mention the climate crisis in two or more scenes. "A lot of times, it's really being mentioned in passing," Schneider-Mayerson said...

[Good Energy Chief Executive Anna Jane Joyner] pointed to another analysis led by Schneider-Mayerson, which found that movies passing the Climate Reality Check and released in theaters earned 10% more at the box office, on average, than films failing the test. Netflix, meanwhile, says on its website that 80% of its customers "choose to watch at least one story on Netflix that helps them better understand climate issues or highlight hopeful solutions around sustainability...." [Netflix's "Sustainability Stories" collection includes Dr. Seuss' The Lorax, Chicken Run: Dawn of the Nugget, and Waterworld]

Sponsors are interested in selling audiences on climate-friendly products, too. I was sitting in a movie theater last weekend enjoying "Captain America: Brave New World" — the latest entry in Disney's Marvel Cinematic Universe — when, to my surprise, Sam Wilson (Anthony Mackie) got out of his SUV and pulled his iconic red-white-and-blue shield out of the front trunk. Yes, a front trunk, where an internal combustion engine would normally be. That meant Captain America was driving an electric vehicle, right? Indeed, he was. I did some research after I got home and learned that Wilson was driving a GMC Hummer EV, the result of a paid partnership between Marvel Studios and GMC parent company General Motors.
Ironically, the movie does not at any point acknowledge global warming, the article points out (adding "Also, SUVs kill more pedestrians and cyclists than smaller cars.")

"But the more movies and TV shows spotlight climate solutions — electric vehicles, solar panels, induction stoves — the more likely people are to support those solutions. For Hollywood, that's a step in the right direction."

"Amazon has long allowed you to download its ebooks to your computer," notes PCMag.com, "where they can serve as a backup or be transferred to other devices.

"However, that feature will end on February 26, 2025, along with the ability to transfer books from your computer to your Kindle via USB." If you attempt to download your ebooks right now, a message says: "Starting February 26, 2025, the 'Download & Transfer via USB' option will no longer be available. You can still send Kindle books to your Wi-Fi-enabled devices by selecting the 'Deliver or Remove from Device' option." After February 26, you will still be able to download Kindle books [onto your Kindle] from the Kindle Store via Wi-Fi, and you can also use the Send to Kindle page on Amazon to send a variety of files to your Kindle.

Should you want to transfer your titles from your Kindle to your computer while you still can, go to Amazon.com, sign in, and click Accounts & Lists > Content Library > Books. Navigate to the book you want to download and click More actions > Download & transfer via USB.
Tom's Guide shares their reaction: Most people probably won't notice this latest example of an Amazon service getting worse, but the feature has existed for over a decade and is useful for backing up your purchases or converting them to formats compatible with other non-Kindle e-Readers or devices. It's also useful for those times when you don't have access to Wi-Fi, and of course, there's peace of mind knowing you have copies of your books... All in all it is a reminder that you don't actually own many or most of your digital purchases, as what you are typically actually "buying" are licenses to use content that can be revoked at any time.

If you find this decision annoying and want to find alternatives, here are a few. To start, might we recommend the Libby app which lets you borrow ebooks from your local library. You can also borrow audiobooks... You can also try purchasing books from places like Google Books and Apple Books, both of which offer a number of ebooks. eBooks.com offers DRM free books and EPUB formats. For those looking for free ebooks there is always Project Gutenberg which has over 75,000 free books largely those in the public domain though there are some more recent titles as well.

Apple is removing its most advanced, end-to-end encrypted security feature for cloud data in the United Kingdom [alternative source], in a stunning development after the government ordered the company to build a backdoor for accessing user data. From a report: The company said Friday that Advanced Data Protection, an optional feature that adds end-to-end encryption to a wide assortment of user data is no longer available in the UK for new users.

This layer of security covers iCloud data storage, device backups, web bookmarks, voice memos, notes, photos, reminders and text message backups. "We are gravely disappointed that the protections provided by ADP will not be available to our customers in the UK given the continuing rise of data breaches and other threats to customer privacy," the company said in a statement. "ADP protects iCloud data with end-to-end encryption, which means the data can only be decrypted by the user who owns it, and only on their trusted devices."

Apple's Google Lens-like took called Visual Intelligence is coming to the iPhone 15 Pro, according to John Gruber of Daring Fireball. It's unclear which update will offer the feature but Gruber speculates it could arrive with iOS 18.4 in April. From a report: Visual Intelligence was originally introduced with the initial iPhone 16 lineup in September, and Apple showed it off as a feature that you launched from the Camera Control button. But yesterday, Apple announced that Visual Intelligence would be available on the iPhone 16E, which does not have the Camera Control button, through its Action Button.

That suggested that the feature could technically work with the iPhone 15 Pro, which also has an Action Button, and now Apple is confirming that Visual Intelligence will indeed come to that phone and be available via the Action Button. You'll also be able to launch Visual Intelligence from the Control Center on the iPhone 15 Pro, Apple told Gruber.

Amazon will discontinue its workplace communications platform Chime in February 2026 and has stopped accepting new customers, the company's cloud division AWS said in a blog post. The service, which Amazon employees widely used for video calls, messaging and business communications, is among several products being phased out. The company also recently shuttered Inspire, its TikTok-style video feed feature in its mobile app, and announced plans to shut down its Android app store earlier today.

Microsoft has placed its new AI-powered text rewrite feature in Notepad behind a subscription paywall, requiring users to have a Microsoft 365 Personal or Family plan to access the functionality. While the core text editor remains free and accessible without a Microsoft account, the AI feature requires users to sign in and have sufficient "AI credits" included in their subscription.Users can disable the feature and hide its icon if they choose not to subscribe.

Leading AI models can fix broken code, but they're nowhere near ready to replace human software engineers, according to extensive testing [PDF] by OpenAI researchers. The company's latest study put AI models and systems through their paces on real-world programming tasks, with even the most advanced models solving only a quarter of typical engineering challenges.

The research team created a test called SWE-Lancer, drawing from 1,488 actual software fixes made to Expensify's codebase, representing $1 million worth of freelance engineering work. When faced with these everyday programming tasks, the best AI model â" Claude 3.5 Sonnet -- managed to complete just 26.2% of hands-on coding tasks and 44.9% of technical management decisions.

Though the AI systems proved adept at quickly finding relevant code sections, they stumbled when it came to understanding how different parts of software interact. The models often suggested surface-level fixes without grasping the deeper implications of their changes.

The research, to be sure, used a set of complex methodologies to test the AI coding abilities. Instead of relying on simplified programming puzzles, OpenAI's benchmark uses complete software engineering tasks that range from quick $50 bug fixes to complex $32,000 feature implementations. Each solution was verified through rigorous end-to-end testing that simulated real user interactions, the researchers said.

Microsoft is reminding IT administrators that WSUS driver synchronization will be deprecated on April 18, 2025, urging them to transition to cloud-based update solutions like Windows Autopatch, Azure Update Manager, and Microsoft Intune. "For on-premises contexts, drivers will be available on the Microsoft Update catalog, but you won't be able to import them into WSUS," the company said in a Windows message center update on Tuesday. "You'll need to use any of the available alternative solutions, such as Device Driver Packages, or transition to cloud-based driver services for your organization, such as Microsoft Intune and Windows Autopatch." BleepingComputer reports: This reminder follows two other warnings issued since June 2024, announcing the deprecation of WSUS driver synchronization and encouraging customers to adopt Redmond's newer cloud-based driver services. The company also revealed in September 2024 that WSUS had been deprecated, but Microsoft added that it plans to keep publishing updates through the channel and maintain all existing capabilities. This announcement came after WSUS was listed on August 13 as one of the "features removed or no longer developed starting with Windows Server 2025."

"Specifically, this means that we are no longer investing in new capabilities, nor are we accepting new feature requests for WSUS," Microsoft's Nir Froimovici said at the time. "However, we are preserving current functionality and will continue to publish updates through the WSUS channel. We will also support any content already published through the WSUS channel."

Valve removed the game PirateFi from Steam after discovering it was laced with the Vidar infostealer malware, designed to steal sensitive user data such as passwords, cookies, cryptocurrency wallets, and more. TechCrunch reports: Marius Genheimer, a researcher who analyzed the malware and works at SECUINFRA Falcon Team, told TechCrunch that judging by the command and control servers associated with the malware and its configuration, "we suspect that PirateFi was just one of multiple tactics used to distribute Vidar payloads en masse." "It is highly likely that it never was a legitimate, running game that was altered after first publication," said Genheimer. In other words, PirateFi was designed to spread malware.

Genheimer and colleagues also found that PirateFi was built by modifying an existing game template called Easy Survival RPG, which bills itself as a game-making app that "gives you everything you need to develop your own singleplayer or multiplayer" game. The game maker costs between $399 and $1,099 to license. This explains how the hackers were able to ship a functioning video game with their malware with little effort.

According to Genheimer, the Vidar infostealing malware is capable of stealing and exfiltrating several types of data from the computers it infects, including: passwords from the web browser autofill feature, session cookies that can be used to log in as someone without needing their password, web browser history, cryptocurrency wallet details, screenshots, and two-factor codes from certain token generators, as well as other files on the person's computer.

Meta's WhatsApp messaging service has surpassed 45 million users, earning the designation of a "Very Large Online Platform" under the EU's Digital Services Act. Bloomberg reports: WhatsApp's open channels, which are feeds affiliated with news outlets or public figures that under the DSA are comparable to a social network, averaged about 46.8 million monthly average users in the second half of 2024, Meta said in a filing on Feb. 14 that hasn't previously been reported. [...] The DSA content moderation rulebook imposes stricter requirements on very large online platforms, defined as those whose EU-based monthly active users exceed 45 million. Users of WhatsApp's core messaging feature do not count toward the designation under the DSA.

The commission would still need to rule that WhatsApp should be included in the more regulated tier. Under the DSA, very large online platforms must carry out risk assessments on the spread of illegal or harmful content, and put in place a mitigation strategy. Fines under the DSA can reach as much as 6% of a company's annual global sales. The DSA requires platforms to disclose user numbers every six months. Messaging service Telegram also published an update this week, saying that monthly EU users of its public channels are "significantly fewer than 45 million."