Tim Berners-Lee writes in a new article in the Guardian that "Somewhere between my original vision for web 1.0 and the rise of social media as part of web 2.0, we took the wrong path Today, I look at my invention and I am forced to ask: is the web still free today? No, not all of it. We see a handful of large platforms harvesting users' private data to share with commercial brokers or even repressive governments. We see ubiquitous algorithms that are addictive by design and damaging to our teenagers' mental health. Trading personal data for use certainly does not fit with my vision for a free web. On many platforms, we are no longer the customers, but instead have become the product. Our data, even if anonymised, is sold on to actors we never intended it to reach, who can then target us with content and advertising...

We have the technical capability to give that power back to the individual. Solid is an open-source interoperable standard that I and my team developed at MIT more than a decade ago. Apps running on Solid don't implicitly own your data — they have to request it from you and you choose whether to agree, or not. Rather than being in countless separate places on the internet in the hands of whomever it had been resold to, your data is in one place, controlled by you. Sharing your information in a smart way can also liberate it. Why is your smartwatch writing your biological data to one silo in one format? Why is your credit card writing your financial data to a second silo in a different format? Why are your YouTube comments, Reddit posts, Facebook updates and tweets all stored in different places? Why is the default expectation that you aren't supposed to be able to look at any of this stuff? You generate all this data — your actions, your choices, your body, your preferences, your decisions. You should own it. You should be empowered by it...

We're now at a new crossroads, one where we must decide if AI will be used for the betterment or to the detriment of society. How can we learn from the mistakes of the past? First of all, we must ensure policymakers do not end up playing the same decade-long game of catchup they have done over social media. The time to decide the governance model for AI was yesterday, so we must act with urgency. In 2017, I wrote a thought experiment about an AI that works for you. I called it Charlie. Charlie works for you like your doctor or your lawyer, bound by law, regulation and codes of conduct. Why can't the same frameworks be adopted for AI? We have learned from social media that power rests with the monopolies who control and harvest personal data. We can't let the same thing happen with AI.
Berners-Lee also says "we need a Cern-like not-for-profit body driving forward international AI research," arguing that if we muster the political willpower, "we have the chance to restore the web as a tool for collaboration, creativity and compassion across cultural borders.

"We can re-empower individuals, and take the web back. It's not too late."

Berners-Lee has also written a new book titled This is For Everyone.

"Today's AIs are book smart," reports the Wall Street Journal. "Everything they know they learned from available language, images and videos. To evolve further, they have to get street smart."

And that requires "world models," which are "gaining momentum in frontier research and could allow technology to take on new roles in our lives." The key is enabling AI to learn from their environments and faithfully represent an abstract version of them in their "heads," the way humans and animals do. To do it, developers need to train AIs by using simulations of the world. Think of it like learning to drive by playing "Gran Turismo" or learning to fly from "Microsoft Flight Simulator." These world models include all the things required to plan, take actions and make predictions about the future, including physics and time... There's an almost unanimous belief among AI pioneers that world models are crucial to creating next-generation AI. And many say they will be critical to someday creating better-than-human "artificial general intelligence," or AGI. Stanford University professor and AI "godmother" Fei-Fei Li has raised $230 million to launch world-model startup World Labs...

Google DeepMind researchers set out to create a system that could generate real-world simulations with an unprecedented level of fidelity. The result, Genie 3 — which is still in research preview and not publicly available — can generate photo-realistic, open-world virtual landscapes from nothing more than a text prompt. You can think of Genie 3 as a way to quickly generate what's essentially an open-world videogame that can be as faithful to the real world as you like. It's a virtual space in which a baby AI can endlessly play, make mistakes and learn what it needs to do to achieve its goals, just as a baby animal or human does in the real world. That experimentation process is called reinforcement learning. Genie 3 is part of a system that could help train the AI that someday pilots robots, self-driving cars and other "embodied" AIs, says project co-lead Jack Parker-Holder. And the environments could be filled with people and obstacles: An AI could learn how to interact with humans by observing them moving around in that virtual space, he adds.
"It isn't clear whether all these bets will lead to the superintelligence that corporate leaders predict," the article concedes.

"But in the short term, world models could make AIs better at tasks at which they currently falter, especially in spatial reasoning."

YouTube's new "Labs" program plans to "offer a glimpse of the AI features it's developing for YouTube Music," reports Ars Technica.

But Ars Technica adds that this future "starts with AI 'hosts' that will chime in while you're listening to music. Yes, really." (YouTube says the AI aims to "deepen your listening experience"...) The "Beyond the Beat" host will break in every so often with relevant stories, trivia, and commentary about your musical tastes. YouTube says this feature will appear when you are listening to mixes and radio stations. The experimental feature is intended to be a bit like having a radio host drop some playful banter while cueing up the next song. It sounds a bit like Spotify's AI DJ, but the YouTube AI doesn't create playlists like Spotify's robot...

After joining, the YouTube Music app will get a new button on the Now Playing screen with the familiar Gemini sparkle logo. Tapping that will allow you to snooze the commentary for an hour or the remainder of the day. There is no option to completely disable the AI host in the app, so you'll have to opt out of the test if you decide Beyond the Beat is more trouble than it's worth.
YouTube calls it "a way for users to take our cutting edge AI experiments for a test drive," promises that "a limited number of US-based participants can test early prototypes and experiments and influence the future of YouTube. Sign up at YouTube.com/New."

Ars Technica believes "This is still generative AI, which comes with the risk of hallucinations and low-quality slop, neither of which belongs in your music. That said, Google's Audio Overviews are often surprisingly good in small doses."

Doug Bowser, president of Nintendo of America since 2019, will retire at the end of 2025 after overseeing major expansions including theme parks, films, and the launch of the Switch 2. He will be succeeded by Devon Pritchard, while Satoru Shibata will also take on a CEO role at Nintendo of America.

"One of my earliest video game experiences was playing the arcade version of Donkey Kong," Bowser said in a statement. "Since that time, all things Nintendo have continued to be a passion for both me and my family. Leading Nintendo of America has been the honor of a lifetime, and I am proud of what our team has accomplished in both business results and the experiences we've created for consumers." Pritchard said that "Doug has been a fantastic mentor" and that he looks forward to "building on the incredible foundation he has helped establish."

The Supreme Court has temporarily allowed President Trump to fire Rebecca Slaughter, the last Democrat on the FTC. "The court's action is technically temporary, since the justices said they will hear arguments in the case in December, but every indication is that the conservative court majority will use the case to reverse a major Supreme Court precedent that dates back almost a century," reports NPR. From the report: Congress created the FTC and lots of other agencies to be multi-member, bipartisan regulatory agencies. And the Supreme Court in 1935 upheld those statutes ruling ruled against then-President Franklin D. Roosevelt's claim that he could fire FTC commissioners at will. In a unanimous opinion at the time, the court said Congress acted within its powers in declaring that a commissioner could only be fired for misconduct -- not for a policy disagreement. But now, prodded by President Trump, the court's six-member conservative majority seems poised to remake the way independent agencies operate. And if the handwriting on the wall is as clear as it seems to be, the independent agencies won't be independent. Their membership will be subject to the will of the president.

The court's action Monday was hardly subtle. While the lower courts had ruled that the president could not fire Slaughter, under the court's 1935 precedent, the conservative Supreme Court majority allowed the president to fire her. Indeed, her name isn't even on the FTC website anymore. And the court so far has allowed Trump to fire other agency board members. In short, the justices are not playing hide-the-ball. And it's a good bet that the court will reverse the 1935 precedent, which until now had been reaffirmed multiple times. The result will be that whereas in the past, these agencies had to be bipartisan, with a minority of opposition party members, now there will be no such requirement. In short, Trump can name all the agency members. And if his successor is a Democrat, he or she can fire all the Republicans.

Mickey Mouse's first movie Steamboat Willie entered the public domain in 2024.

Now one of America's largest personal injury firms is suing Disney, reports the Associated Press, "in an effort to get a ruling that would allow it to use Steamboat Willie in advertisements..." [The law firm said] it had reached out to Disney to make sure the entertainment company wouldn't sue them if they used images from the animated film for their TV and online ads. Disney's lawyers responded by saying they didn't offer legal advice to third parties, according to the lawsuit. Morgan & Morgan said it was filing the lawsuit to get a decision because it otherwise feared being sued by Disney for trademark infringement if it used Steamboat Willie.
"Without waiver of any of its rights, Disney will not provide such advice in response to your letter," Disney's attorneys wrote in their letter (adding "Very truly yours..."). A local newscast showed a glimpse of the letter, along with a few seconds of the ad (which ends with Minnie Mouse pulling out a cellphone to call for a lawyer...)

Attorney John Morgan tells the newscast that Disney's legal team "is playing cute, and so we're just trying to get a yes or no answer.. They wrote us back a bunch of mumbo-jumbo that made no sense, didn't answer the question. We tried it again, they didn't answer the question..." (The newscast adds that the case isn't expected to go to court for at least a year.)

Key takeaways from a new survey by Pew Research: 1. Americans are much more concerned than excited about the increased use of AI in daily life, with a majority saying they want more control over how AI is used in their lives.
2. Far larger shares say AI will erode than improve people's ability to think creatively and form meaningful relationships.
3. At the same time, a majority is open to letting AI assist them with day-to-day tasks and activities.
4. Most Americans don't support AI playing a role in personal matters such as religion or matchmaking. They're more open to AI for heavy data analysis, such as for weather forecasting and developing new medicines.
5. Americans feel strongly that it's important to be able to tell if pictures, videos or text were made by AI or by humans. Yet many don't trust their own ability to spot AI-generated content.

TIOBE attempts to calculate programming language popularity using the number of skilled engineers, courses, and third-party vendors.

And the eight most popular languages in September's rankings haven't changed since last month:

1. Python
2. C++
3. C
4. Java
5. C#
6. JavaScript
7. Visual Basic
8. Go

But by TIOBE's ranking, Perl is still the #10 most-popular programming in September (dropping from #9 in August). "One year ago Perl was at position 27 and now it suddenly pops up at position 10 again," marvels TIOBE CEO Paul Jansen. The technical reason why Perl is rated this high is because of its huge number of books on Amazon. It has 4 times more books listed than for instance PHP, or 7 times more books than Rust. The underlying "real" reason for Perl's increase of popularity is unknown to me. The only possibility I can think of is that Perl 5 is now gradually considered to become the real Perl... Perl 6/Raku is at position 129 of the TIOBE index, thus playing no role at all in the programming world. Perl 5 on the other hand is releasing more often recently, thus gaining attention.
An article at the i-Programmer blog thinks Perl's resurgence could be from its text processing capabilities: Even in this era of AI, everything is still governed by text formats; text is still the King. XML, JSON calling APIs, YAML, Markdown, Log files..That means that there's still need to process it, transform it, clean it, extract from it. Perl with its first-class-citizen regular expressions, the wealth of text manipulation libraries up on CPAN and its full Unicode support of all the latest standards, was and is still the best. Simply there's no other that can match Perl's text processing capabilities.
They also cite Perl's backing by the open source community, and its "getting a 'proper' OOP model in the last couple of years... People just don't know what Perl is capable of and instead prefer to be victims of FOMO ephemeral trends, chasing behind the new and shiny."

Perl creator Larry Wall answered questions from Slashdot's readers in 2016. So I'd be curious from Slashdot's readers about Perl today. (Share your experiences in the comments if you're still using Perl -- or Raku...)

Perl's drop to #9 means Delphi/Object Pascal rises up one rank, growing from 1.82% in August to 2.26% in September to claim September's #9 spot. "At number 11 and 1.86%, SQL is quite close to entering the top 10 again," notes TechRepublic. (SQL fell to #12 in June, which the site speculated was due to "the increased use of NoSQL databases for AI applications.")

But TechRepublic adds that the #1 most popular programming language (according to TIOBE) is still Python: Perl sits at 2.03% in TIOBE's proprietary ranking system in September, up from 0.64% in January. Last year, Perl held the 27th position... Python's unstoppable rise dipped slightly from 26.14% in August to 25.98% in September. Python is still well ahead of every other language on the index.

Intel's long-time Xeon chief architect Ronak Singhal is leaving the company after nearly 30 years, marking yet another high-profile departure amid Intel's leadership churn and intensifying competition from AMD and Arm-based cloud CPUs. The Register reports: The Carnegie Mellon alum holds degrees in electrical and computer engineering, along with at least 30 patents involving CPUs. Singhal joined Intel in 1997 after spending the previous summer as an intern at Cyrix. After a year in Intel's Rotation Engineers Program, he spent the remainder of his tenure helping to develop some of the chipmaker's most consequential and, at times, controversial processors. Most notably, Singhal oversaw the core development of Intel's 22nm Haswell and 14nm Broadwell processor architectures. His innovations aren't limited to the datacenter either, with his architectural contributions playing a significant role in the success of Intel's Core and Atom processor families as well. [...]

Singhal is only the latest Xeon lead to jump ship since the start of the year. In January, Sailesh Kottapalli, another senior fellow, left for Qualcomm barely a month after former CEO Pat Gelsinger's unceremonious "retirement." Even before Gelsinger's eviction, Intel's datacenter group has been something of a revolving door. Last summer Singhal's long-time colleague Lisa Spelman departed the company, eventually landing a spot as CEO of HPC interconnect vendor Cornelis Networks. Her replacement, Ryan Tabrah, lasted seven months in the role, about half as long as Intel datacenter boss Justin Hotard, who defected for the forests of Finland to lead Nokia as its new President and CEO back in April.

In fact, the churn now extends all the way to the top. On Monday, Intel announced its CEO of Products, Michelle Johnston Holthaus, would be leaving the business. The move is part of a broader executive shakeup that will see former Arm engineer Kevork Kechichian take over as head of Intel's datacenter engineering group. Jim Johnson, meanwhile, will take over as head of the chipmaker's client computing group while Srinivasan (Srini) Iyengar will head up a new central engineering division.

"A raft of articles have been retracted from publications including Business Insider and Wired in recent month," reports the Washington Post, "with links between them suggesting a possible broader scheme to pass off fake stories that these outlets now suspect were written using artificial intelligence." A Washington Post probe into the retractions found a connection between Onyeka Nwelue, the purported author of one of 38 essays removed this week by Business Insider, and someone using the name Margaux Blanchard, two of whose stories were previously removed by the same outlet. In recent months SFGate, Index on Censorship and Wired also retracted articles under the Blanchard byline, after it was identified as bogus by the British publication Press Gazette...

Business Insider Editor in Chief Jamie Heller explained to staff Tuesday in an email, obtained by The Post, that the report of a phony writer spurred a fuller investigation that turned up dozens of suspicious articles under various bylines. "We recently learned that a freelance contributor misrepresented their identity in two first-person essays written for Business Insider. As soon as this came to light, we took down the essays and began an investigation," Heller said. "As part of this process, we've removed additional first-person essays from the site due to concerns about the authors' identity or veracity. No news articles or videos were found to have this issue." On Tuesday Business Insider removed 38 pieces that had been published under bylines other than Blanchard. Business Insider deleted the author pages of 19 individuals, including Blanchard and Nwelue, and replaced their essays with editor's notes.

The website's investigation involved reviewing "tens of thousands of records," Business Insider spokesperson Ari Isaacman D'Angelo said in a statement to The Post. But it hadn't determined whether artificial intelligence was used to produce the yanked essays, she said, noting that AI-detection tools are often unreliable... Essays under [Nate] Giovanni's byline feature contradictory information. One piece, published in December 2024, refers to the author having two teenage daughters and a two-and-a-half-year-old son. Another, published three months later mentions two sons, aged eight and nine. Pieces that ran in May and July — about house-sitting around the world and applying to PhD programs — make no mention of a family at all...

On Aug. 21, Wired wrote a longer mea culpa about the article it published under Blanchard's name, with the headline "How WIRED Got Rolled by an AI Freelancer." "If anyone should be able to catch an AI scammer, it's WIRED," the publication wrote. ["In fact we do, all the time. Our editors receive transparently AI-generated pitches on a regular basis, and we reject them accordingly..."] "Unfortunately, one got through," referring to a story that ran under Blanchard's byline in May about two people who were married in the video game Minecraft.
The site Index on Censorship also published an article under the Blanchard byline about threats to journalists in Guatemala. "In the age of very intelligent AI it's clear we will have to look at things differently," the site's editor told the Washington Post.

The Post's article notes that one sign the pitches were AI-generated "is that while they sounded interesting, they featured details that were erroneous — including fictitious locales." Reached for a comment, one of the authors told the Post "Don't mention my name in your stupid article," claiming their acocunt was recently "compromised" (though their X.com account had also recently tweeted one of their articles.) But another author emailed the Post from their actual academic email address, saying they had no connection to the Gmail account The Post had been corresponding with. And here's how the person at that Gmail account responded to a follow-up query from the Post.

"What is one to do? With a few savvy prompts, AI could probably generate a 'long-lost' novel by Proust."

Paramount and Activision are teaming up to produce a live-action Call of Duty movie, with Paramount promising the same blockbuster treatment it gave Top Gun: Maverick.

David Ellison, Chairman and CEO of Paramount, said in a statement: "As a lifelong fan of Call of Duty this is truly a dream come true. From the first Allied campaigns in the original Call of Duty, through Modern Warfare and Black Ops, I've spent countless hours playing this franchise that I absolutely love. Being entrusted by Activision and players worldwide to bring this extraordinary storytelling universe to the big screen is both an honor and a responsibility that we don't take lightly. We're approaching this film with the same disciplined, uncompromising commitment to excellence that guided our work on Top Gun: Maverick, ensuring it meets the exceptionally high standards this franchise and its fans deserve. I can promise that we are resolute in our mission to deliver a cinematic experience that honors the legacy of this one-in-a-million brand -- thrilling longtime fans of Call of Duty while captivating a whole new generation."

Rob Kostich, President of Activision, also commented: "Throughout its history, Call of Duty has captured our imagination with incredible action and intense stories that have brought millions of people together from around the world, and that focus on making incredible Call of Duty games remains unwavering. With Paramount, we have found a fantastic partner who we will work with to take that visceral, breathtaking action to the big screen in a defining cinematic moment. The film will honor and expand upon what has made this franchise great in the first place, and we cannot wait to get started. Our shared goal is quite simple -- to create an unforgettable blockbuster movie experience that our community loves, and one that also excites and inspires new fans of the franchise."

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: Earlier this month, EA announced that players in its Battlefield 6 open beta on PC would have to enable Secure Boot in their Windows OS and BIOS settings. That decision proved controversial among players who weren't able to get the finicky low-level security setting working on their machines and others who were unwilling to allow EA's anti-cheat tools to once again have kernel-level access to their systems. Now, Battlefield 6 technical director Christian Buhl is defending that requirement as something of a necessary evil to combat cheaters, even as he apologizes to any potential players that it has kept away.

"The fact is I wish we didn't have to do things like Secure Boot," Buhl said in an interview with Eurogamer. "It does prevent some players from playing the game. Some people's PCs can't handle it and they can't play: that really sucks. I wish everyone could play the game with low friction and not have to do these sorts of things." Throughout the interview, Buhl admits that even requiring Secure Boot won't completely eradicate cheating in Battlefield 6 long term. Even so, he offered that the Javelin anti-cheat tools enabled by Secure Boot's low-level system access were "some of the strongest tools in our toolbox to stop cheating. Again, nothing makes cheating impossible, but enabling Secure Boot and having kernel-level access makes it so much harder to cheat and so much easier for us to find and stop cheating." [...]

Despite all these justifications for the Secure Boot requirement on EA's part, it hasn't been hard to find people complaining about what they see as an onerous barrier to playing an online shooter. A quick Reddit search turns up dozens of posts complaining about the difficulty of getting Secure Boot on certain PC configurations or expressing discomfort about installing what they consider a "malware rootkit" on their machine. "I want to play this beta but A) I'm worried about bricking my PC. B) I'm worried about giving EA complete access to my machine," one representative Redditor wrote.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Verge's Victoria Song: The original Pixel Watch was late to the game. For years, there had been rumors of a Google smartwatch that never materialized. Then, when it finally arrived, it was a quintessential first-gen device, with thicc bezels, dismal battery life, and a host of quirks that needed ironing out. My DMs were full of people wondering when the watch would be unceremoniously dumped into Google's infamous product graveyard. A part of me wondered if Google was going to spend the next decade playing catch-up. Fast forward to 2025, and I'm holding the Pixel Watch 4 at Google's office in New York City. On the surface (and my wrist), it doesn't look like much has changed. But after fiddling with a few menus, watching some demos, and talking over the updates, it's evident that Google has a clear vision about where smartwatches are going. [...]

Starting with hardware, the Pixel Watch 4 has a new domed "Actua 360" display -- as in, the display itself, not just the glass, is also domed. What this translates to is about 10 percent more visible screen space, 15 percent thinner bezels, and a 50 percent increase in maximum brightness to 3,000 nits. On a table, there's a lineup of the Pixel Watch 2, 3, and 4 with the flashlight app turned on. Side-by-side, the improvements are striking. Material 3 Expressive in Wear OS 6also helps emphasize the Pixel Watch's roundness. (No squircles here, folks.) The widgets have more rounded edges, and each screen has been redesigned to be more glanceable, fitting more complications. It's not Liquid Glass, but there are subtle animations when flitting through menus that call your attention to the Pixel Watch's rain droplet-inspired design. Altogether, it's a design tweak that makes senseandis aesthetically pleasing. Google also says battery life has improved. The 41mm watch gets an estimated 30 hours on a single charge, while the 45mm gets 40 hours. That can stretch up to two days in battery saver mode for the smaller watch and three days for the larger one. I couldn't test that at a hands-on, but I did get to see the improved fast charging in action.

As with theGalaxy Watch 8, Gemini has a big presence on the Pixel Watch 4. It replaces Google Assistant and is capable of more complex queries -- even if none have been able to blow my mind yet. But, in a bid to make interacting with Gemini as smooth as possible, the speaker and haptic engines have also been updated so you can hear and interact more easily. There's also a new raise-to-talk gesture that lets you speak to Gemini without having to use the wake word. The processor has been upgraded to the Snapdragon W5 Gen 2 to enable more on-device AI features, as well, like smart replies. On the Pixel Watch 4, you'll get more smart reply options to texts that refer to the content of your conversations. They're not confined to the default Messages app, either. But the major AI update this time around is a Gemini-powered health coach that's slated to arrive alongside a revamped Fitbit app in October. ... The gist is the health coach will act more like a personal trainer than a Captain Obvious summary generator. If you sleep poorly, it'll adjust workout suggestions. (This is also why Google is also introducing an improved sleep algorithm.) You can tell it that you've been injured, and that too will be taken into consideration when generating weekly fitness plans. [...]

Another big first is the Satellite SOS mode. If you're without your phone and in a remote area with no signal, you can still call emergency services. (So long as you have the LTE version of the watch.) The big thing here is that there's no extra subscription cost. The watch will also feature more accurate dual-frequency GPS -- a nice update given that I've had issues with the Pixel Watch's GPS maps in the past. The Pixel Watch 4 is priced at $349.99 and is available for pre-order now.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from ZDNet: You can't say Linux creator Linus Torvalds didn't give the kernel developers fair warning. He'd told them: "The upcoming merge window for 6.17 is going to be slightly chaotic for me. I have multiple family events this August (a wedding and a big birthday), and with said family being spread not only across the US, but in Finland too, I'm spending about half the month traveling." Therefore, Torvalds continued, "That does not mean I'll be more lenient to late pull requests (probably quite the reverse, since it's just going to add to the potential chaos)." So, when Meta software engineer Palmer Dabbelt pushed through a set of RISC-V patches and admitted "this is very late," he knew he was playing with fire. He just didn't know how badly he'd be burned.

Torvalds fired back on the Linux Kernel Mailing List (LKML): "This is garbage and it came in too late. I asked for early pull requests because I'm traveling, and if you can't follow that rule, at least make the pull requests good." It went downhill from there. Torvalds continued: "This adds various garbage that isn't RISC-V specific to generic header files. And by 'garbage," I really mean it. This is stuff that nobody should ever send me, never mind late in a merge window." Specifically, Torvalds hated the "crazy and pointless" way in which one of the patch's helper functions combined two unsigned 16-bit integers into a 32-bit integer. How bad was it? "That thing makes the world actively a worse place to live. It's useless garbage that makes any user incomprehensible, and actively *WORSE* than not using that stupid 'helper.'"

In addition to the quality issues, Torvalds was annoyed that the offending code was added to generic header files rather than the RISC-V tree. He emphasized that such generic changes could negatively impact the broader Linux community, writing: "You just made things WORSE, and you added that 'helper' to a generic non-RISC-V file where people are apparently supposed to use it to make other code worse too... So no. Things like this need to get bent. It does not go into generic header files, and it damn well does not happen late in the merge window. You're on notice: no more late pull requests, and no more garbage outside the RISC-V tree." [...] Dabbelt gets it. He replied, "OK, sorry. I've been dropping the ball lately, and it kind of piled up, taking a bunch of stuff late, but that just leads to me making mistakes. So I'll stop being late, and hopefully that helps with the quality issues."

Elon Musk has threatened Apple with legal action over alleged antitrust violations related to rankings of the Grok AI chatbot app, which is owned by his AI startup xAI. From a report: "Apple is behaving in a manner that makes it impossible for any AI company besides OpenAI to reach #1 in the App Store, which is an unequivocal antitrust violation. xAI will take immediate legal action," Musk wrote in a post on his social media platform X. Apple declined to comment on Musk's threat. "Why do you refuse to put either X or Grok in your 'Must Have' section when X is the #1 news app in the world and Grok is #5 among all apps? Are you playing politics?" Musk said in another post.

Grow a Garden, a Roblox game created by a 16-year-old in just a few days, has shattered records for the most concurrent players in gaming history, surpassing Fortnite with over 21.6 million concurrent players at once. The Associated Press reports: Grow a Garden is as simple as its name suggests -- players can fill a plot of land with plants and animals, harvest and sell, trade or steal each others' bounty. The game is low stress, with an aesthetic reminiscent of Minecraft and a soundtrack of soothing classical tunes such as Mozart's Rondo Alla Turca playing in the background. Its popularity has further cemented Roblox' place not just in the gaming world but in popular culture -- for better or for worse, it's where the kids hang out.

Coincidence or not, Grow a Garden soared to popularity around the same time that Take-Two Interactive announced it would delay the launch of its wildly anticipated Grand Theft Auto 6 until next year. In late June, the gardening game logged 21.6 million concurrent players, surpassing Fortnite's previous record of 15.2 million according to Roblox. Analysts who follow Roblox's stock say Grow a Garden is helping boost the company's revenue and will push the company's quarterly earnings numbers above Wall Street's expectations.

While it's not clear if the GTA audience flocked to this simple gardening game to pass the time until then, the timing reignited the age-old debate about who gamers are and what titles are taken seriously by the video game establishment. It happened with Candy Crush, with puzzle games, with Animal Crossing. Are people who play cozy games true gamers? Or is the title reserved for the folks who shoot enemies in Call of Duty or drive around creating mayhem in GTA?

An anonymous reader quotes a report from TechCrunch: Ron Deibert, the director of Citizen Lab, one of the most prominent organizations investigating government spyware abuses, is sounding the alarm to the cybersecurity community and asking them to step up and join the fight against authoritarianism. On Wednesday, Deibert will deliver a keynote at the Black Hat cybersecurity conference in Las Vegas, one of the largest gatherings of information security professionals of the year. Ahead of his talk, Deibert told TechCrunch that he plans to speak about what he describes as a "descent into a kind of fusion of tech and fascism," and the role that the Big Tech platforms are playing, and "propelling forward a really frightening type of collective insecurity that isn't typically addressed by this crowd, this community, as a cybersecurity problem."

Deibert described the recent political events in the United States as a "dramatic descent into authoritarianism," but one that the cybersecurity community can help defend against. "I think alarm bells need to be rung for this community that, at the very least, they should be aware of what's going on and hopefully they can not contribute to it, if not help reverse it," Deibert told TechCrunch. [...] "I think that there comes a point at which you have to recognize that the landscape is changing around you, and the security problems you set out for yourselves are maybe trivial in light of the broader context and the insecurities that are being propelled forward in the absence of proper checks and balances and oversight, which are deteriorating," said Deibert.

Deibert is also concerned that big companies like Meta, Google, and Apple could take a step back in their efforts to fight against government spyware -- sometimes referred to as "commercial" or "mercenary" spyware -- by gutting their threat intelligence teams. [...] Deibert believes there is a "huge market failure when it comes to cybersecurity for global civil society," a part of the population that generally cannot afford to get help from big security companies that typically serve governments and corporate clients. "This market failure is going to get more acute as supporting institutions evaporate and attacks on civil society amplify," he said. "Whatever they can do to contribute to offset this market failure (e.g., pro bono work) will be essential to the future of liberal democracy worldwide," he said. Deibert is concerned that these threat intelligence teams could be cut or at least reduced, given that the same companies have cut their moderation and safety teams. He told TechCrunch that threat intelligence teams, like the ones at Meta, are doing "amazing work," in part by staying siloed and separate from the commercial arms of their wider organizations. "But the question is how long will that last?" said Deibert.

After it began "peering into the distant universe" in 2022, NASA's James Webb Space Telescope "has discovered a rash of 'little red dots'," reports Science magazine. There's "hundreds of them, shining within the first billion years of the 13.8-billion-year-old universe, so small and red that they defied conventional explanation."

"Only in the past few months has a picture begun to emerge. The little red dots, astronomers say, may be an entirely new type of object: a colossal ball of bright, hot gas, larger than the Solar System, powered not by nuclear fusion, but by a black hole..." The objects, which some astronomers are calling "black hole stars," could be a missing link in the evolution of galaxies and help explain the rapid growth of supermassive black holes that lie at their hearts. "The big breakthrough of the past 6 months is actually the realization that we can throw out all these other models we've been playing with before," says astronomer Anna de Graaff of the Max Planck Institute for Astronomy... JWST couldn't resolve the dots into a recognizable shape, which meant they must have been tiny — less than 2% of the diameter of the Milky Way. "It was a mystery ... as to why they were so spatially compact," says Caitlin Casey of the University of Texas at Austin. An impossibly dense packing of stars would be needed to explain their brightness. "I was excited," Casey says...

For Mitch Begelman, a theoretical astrophysicist at the University of Colorado Boulder, the observations are a vindication. Earlier this month, he and a colleague posted a preprint on arXiv reviving a scenario for the formation of hypothetical "quasi-stars" that he and others had proposed 20 years ago. The first generation of stars, they calculated, could have grown to colossal size in the early universe, which was made up almost entirely of hydrogen, the raw material of stars. When a giant star ran out of fuel, they said, its core would have collapsed into a black hole, but the outer envelope of hydrogen was so dense it survived the blast, enclosing the newborn black hole. As the black hole chewed at its shroud of gas, the entire system glowed as a quasi-star larger than the Solar System. "That's what the quasi-star envelope is doing, it's force-feeding the black hole by pushing matter into it," Begelman says.

Given how common little red dots appear to be in the early universe, theorists are beginning to wonder whether this giant-ball-of-gas phase is an essential part of black hole growth and the evolution of galaxies. "We're probably looking at kind of a new phase of black hole growth that we didn't know about before," de Graaff says.
"If the red dots do turn out to be black hole stars, it will be precisely the sort of breakthrough expected from JWST — and the kind of discovery astronomers live for."

Thanks to Slashdot reader sciencehabit for sharing the news.

Chinese AI startup Moonshot AI has released Kimi K2, a trillion-parameter open-source language model that outperforms GPT-4 in key benchmarks with particularly strong performance on coding and autonomous agent tasks. VentureBeat reports: The new model, called Kimi K2, features 1 trillion total parameters with 32 billion activated parameters in a mixture-of-experts architecture. The company is releasing two versions: a foundation model for researchers and developers, and an instruction-tuned variant optimized for chat and autonomous agent applications. "Kimi K2 does not just answer; it acts," the company stated in its announcement blog. "With Kimi K2, advanced agentic intelligence is more open and accessible than ever. We can't wait to see what you build."

The model's standout feature is its optimization for "agentic" capabilities -- the ability to autonomously use tools, write and execute code, and complete complex multi-step tasks without human intervention. In benchmark tests, Kimi K2 achieved 65.8% accuracy on SWE-bench Verified, a challenging software engineering benchmark, outperforming most open-source alternatives and matching some proprietary models. [...] On LiveCodeBench, arguably the most realistic coding benchmark available, Kimi K2 achieved 53.7% accuracy, decisively beating DeepSeek-V3's 46.9% and GPT-4.1's 44.7%. More striking still: it scored 97.4% on MATH-500 compared to GPT-4.1's 92.4%, suggesting Moonshot has cracked something fundamental about mathematical reasoning that has eluded larger, better-funded competitors.

But here's what the benchmarks don't capture: Moonshot is achieving these results with a model that costs a fraction of what incumbents spend on training and inference. While OpenAI burns through hundreds of millions on compute for incremental improvements, Moonshot appears to have found a more efficient path to the same destination. It's a classic innovator's dilemma playing out in real time -- the scrappy outsider isn't just matching the incumbent's performance, they're doing it better, faster, and cheaper.

"A Nintendo Switch 2 user reportedly got his brand-new console banned by Nintendo after buying used Switch 1 games and patching them on his console," reports Tom's Hardware: According to Reddit user dmanthey, they purchased four used titles off the Facebook marketplace, inserted them into the Switch 2, and had them all updated. When they turned on their handhelds the following day, they received a message saying that they were restricted from Nintendo's online services and that they couldn't even download the games they had already bought...

[T]hey were able to prove their innocence by pulling up the Facebook Marketplace listing for their games and sending the photos of their purchased cartridges. According to the Redditor, the process was painless and fast, and it was "so much easier than getting support from Microsoft or Sony...." Other users warned, though, that this isn't always a guaranteed resolution.

Nintendo is known for being protective of its intellectual property and delivers harsh penalties to anyone caught violating it. We've already had several reports of users getting banned for using Mig Flash, even on their own ROMs. And while it's not true that getting banned turns your Switch 2 into a brick, it will still prevent you from accessing the company's online services, which severely restricts its features and usability.
"Nintendo attaches unique codes to its Switch game cartridges to prevent piracy," notes Engadget. "However, bad actors can copy games onto a third-party device, like the MIG Flash, and then resell the physical game card. Once Nintendo detects two instances of its unique code being online at the same time, it will ban any accounts using it..." This anti-piracy policy isn't new — Nintendo has long had a reputation for fiercely combating any type of piracy — but it has become relevant again thanks to the recently released Switch 2, which offers backwards compatibility with original Switch titles. The company even recently amended its user agreement to allow itself the power to brick a Nintendo Switch that's caught running pirated games or mods.