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Submission + - Alarm Bells Sound, Will Bitcoin Prices Plunge? (tradingkey.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: Google's comments elevate the quantum computing threat to encryption from a long-term risk to an immediate market pricing consideration for Bitcoin. The focus on digital signatures, Bitcoin's core security, suggests a potential systemic risk to ownership verification. While not an immediate collapse, this erodes Bitcoin's "absolute security" narrative, shifting focus to the feasibility and timing of Post-Quantum Cryptography upgrades. This transforms a technical issue into a governance challenge for a decentralized system, prompting investors to re-evaluate asset risk structures to include long-term technical migration concerns. The market will increasingly assess Bitcoin's ability to upgrade before quantum threats materialize.

Submission + - Reducing Europe's Nuclear Energy Sector Was 'Strategic Mistake', EU Chief Says (reuters.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: Reducing Europe's nuclear energy sector was a "strategic mistake," European Commission chief Ursula von der Leyen said on Tuesday, as governments grapple with an energy crunch from the Iran war. Europe produced around a third of electricity from nuclear power in 1990 but that has fallen to 15%, she told an event in Paris, leaving it reliant on oil and gas imports whose prices have surged in recent days. Being "completely dependent on expensive and volatile imports" of fossil fuels puts Europe at a disadvantage to other regions, von der Leyen said in a speech. "This reduction in the share of nuclear was a choice. I believe that it was a strategic mistake for Europe to turn its back on a reliable, affordable source of low-emissions power."

[...] The EU budget does not directly fund nuclear energy projects because they are not unanimously supported by its 27 member governments. In a sign of the EU's increasing acceptance of the technology, von der Leyen said the executive Commission would offer a 200-million-euro guarantee for private investments in innovative nuclear technologies. She said the money would come from the EU's carbon market. Some EU countries which previously opposed nuclear, such as Denmark and the Netherlands, have recently softened their stance, as they hunt for ways to secure large amounts of stable, low-carbon electricity for heavy industry. Others, including Austria and Luxembourg, remain opposed.

Submission + - Does Apple's M5 Max Really "Destroy" a 96-Core Threadripper? (tomshardware.com)

Submitted by Ecuador
Ecuador writes: Tom's Hardware currently has a front-page article making some wild claims about the 18-core Apple M5 Max versus a 96-core Ryzen Threadripper.

Reading the article, the comparison is based largely on Geekbench 6 multi-core scores. The author briefly mentions that Geekbench doesn't scale well, but doesn't really make clear just how bad the scaling actually is.

From my own experience doing cloud benchmarking for work, unlike previous versions, Geekbench 6 multi-core is essentially useless for large CPUs. Some of the suite's tests (including workloads that are normally very parallelizable) stop scaling beyond 4-8 cores, and the overall score can actually start dropping as you add more and more cores.

I wrote a more detailed breakdown of the issue last year.

Is this a new low for a major tech site, running sensational headlines based on such inappropriate benchmarking, or is this just the new normal?

Comment Re:As long as I can keep using the old look (Score 1) 99

by Asteconn (#66027296) Attached to: Mozilla Is Working On a Big Firefox Redesign

I had earlier today been thinking about how much unneeded whitespace there is in FF's address and tabs bars today; this link not only tightens everything up well enough that I can actually see the URL of a site when the window is 60rem wide (half a 1080p monitor width), but I can also enjoy the nostalgia of the UI when the Internet itself was just... better

Submission + - Did Ring's Super Bowl commercial destroy its brand? (nj.com) 1

Submitted by schwit1
schwit1 writes: Super Bowl commercials often spark conversation, but one 2026 ad in particular has caused quite a stir.

The home security company Ring aired a Super Bowl advertisement highlighting the AI-powered Search Party feature. When a pet owner reports their pet missing in the Ring app, Search Party kicks in on participating outdoor Ring cameras, scanning the area for the missing pet.

The commercial presented the feature as a wholesome way to reunite pets with their beloved owners, but many viewers took issue with the implications of Search Party.

“Do you see what I did there? I disguised mass human surveliance [sic] as a puppy search party,” one X user wrote.

Other social media posts slammed the commercial as “creepy as can be,” “concerning” and “invasive.”

“Marketing team at Ring Camera HQ seriously sat around and was like, ‘How do we sell unconstitutional surveillance of our citizens during the Super Bowl?’ And one guy was like “DOGS!’” one person quipped.

Submission + - Old galaxies in a young universe? (phys.org)

Submitted by alternative_right
alternative_right writes: The fact that some of these galaxies might be older than the universe within some significant confidence level is even more challenging.

The most extreme case is for the galaxy JADES-1050323 with redshift 6.9, which has, according to my calculation, an age incompatible to be younger than the age of the universe (800 Myr) within 4.7-sigma (that is, a probability that this happens by chance as statistical fluctuation of one in one million).

If this result is confirmed, it would invalidate the standard Lambda-CDM cosmological model. Certainly, such an extraordinary change of paradigm would require further corroboration and other stronger evidence.

Submission + - James Webb Space Telescope confirms 1st 'runaway' supermassive black hole (space.com) 1

Submitted by schwit1
schwit1 writes: Astronomers have made a truly mind-boggling discovery using the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST): a runaway black hole 10 million times larger than the sun, rocketing through space at a staggering 2.2 million miles per hour (1,000 kilometers per second).

That not only makes this the first confirmed runaway supermassive black hole, but this object is also one of the fastest-moving bodies ever detected, rocketing through its home, a pair of galaxies named the "Cosmic Owl," at 3,000 times the speed of sound at sea level here on Earth. If that isn't astounding enough, the black hole is pushing forward a literal galaxy-sized "bow-shock" of matter in front of it, while simultaneously dragging a 200,000 light-year-long tail behind it, within which gas is accumulating and triggering star formation.

Submission + - Firefox Will Ship with an "AI Kill Switch" to Completely Disable all AI Features (9to5linux.com) 2

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: From a report on 9to5Linux.com:

"On Tuesday, Anthony Enzor-DeMeo was named the new CEO of Mozilla Corporation, the company behind the beloved Firefox web browser used by almost all GNU/Linux distributions as the default browser."

"In his message as new CEO, Anthony Enzor-DeMeo stated that Firefox will grow from a browser into a broader ecosystem of trusted software while remaining the company’s anchor, and that Firefox will evolve into a modern AI browser and support a portfolio of new and trusted software additions."

"What was not made clear is that Firefox will also ship with an AI kill switch that will let users completely disable all the AI features that are included in Firefox. Mozilla shared this important update earlier today to make it clear to everyone that Firefox will still be a trusted web browser."

Comment Re: Making a note... (Score 1) 94

One can somewhat mitigate this with Japanese specifically, as it uses only ~2000 or so Kanji if I remember correctly; and by and large even those are composed of regular radicals; plus hirigana, katakana, and furigana.

Not to discount how challenging it would still be though - it still remains a large number of characters that need individual testing once all of those components have been put together.

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