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AOL's Owner Bending Spoons Hits Wall Street with $1.7 billion IPO (apnews.com)

Posted by EditorDavid from the you've-got-IPO dept.
"The owner of AOL and other tech businesses hit Wall Street with a $1.7 billion initial public offering Wednesday," reports the Associated Press: The company is getting $1 billion in proceeds, while the rest is going to shareholders. The stock surged 39.7% in its first day of trading under the symbol "BSP" on the Nasdaq, giving it a market value of $25.2 billion.

Among the company's well-known holdings are the event creation and ticketing company Eventbrite, and the video hosting service Vimeo... AOL itself went public in 1992 and was a vanguard of technology and communication. It reached a market value of $164 billion in 2000 shortly before merging with Time Warner. It then crashed along with the rest of the industry following the bursting of the dot-com bubble. It has been bought and sold several times over the last two decades...

[Italy-based Bending Spoons] was founded by three friends in 2013 following the failure of their first attempt at building a technology startup. It has since grown by buying more than 50 companies. The acquired companies are reorganized, and AI technology is often a key tool in the redesign. The focus remains on subscription-based revenue from the portfolio of businesses. The company said it had net income of $27.5 million on revenue of $601 million during the first three months of 2026. It had more than 500 million monthly active users and 9 million monthly paying customers as of March. The company has debt of just under $4.4 billion. It plans to use proceeds from the offering to invest in new acquisitions.
The article notes that in the company's prospectus, it says they chose the name Bending Spoons because "We were about to attempt to create a world-class company with $40,000, a team of five, and a track record that read 0 for 1. A touch of irony seemed appropriate."
Television

EchoStar's US Satellite Pay-TV Provider Dish DBS Files for Bankruptcy (deadline.com) 3

Posted by EditorDavid from the breaking-a-Dish dept.
EchoStar's satellite pay-TV unit Dish DBS has filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection, reports Reuters. The move also applies to its wireless subsidiaries, according to the article, and "facilitates the wind-down of Dish Wireless's 5G network operations following an unexpected delay in a spectrum license sale to AT&T... under which EchoStar agreed to sell about 50 megahertz of its nationwide spectrum for $23 billion."

Some context from Deadline.com: Charlie Ergen, who co-founded EchoStar and Dish, recently returned as chairman and CEO to steer the company through its recent challenges... Even prior to the merger, Ergen had been working to pivot from the pay-TV business, where Dish now has just 5 million subscribers and streaming sibling Sling TV has another 2 million, toward wireless telecom. With wireless spectrum hitting the market due to the Sprint-T-Mobile merger and then Elon Musk's Starlink looking to ramp up in the sector, it seemed more attractive than the cord-cutting-ravaged pay-TV business. But it is still entails plenty of risk, especially given how tightly regulated the spectrum is due to security concerns.
Thanks to long-time Slashdot reader schwit1 for sharing the news.

Comment Re:2028 is probably too early but not by that much (Score 1) 24

by Tablizer (#66222244) Attached to: What Is a Quantum Computer Good For? Absolutely Nothing - Yet

People often overestimate short-term tech improvement and underestimate medium to long-term improvement.

Most investors don't want a long-term payoff, they have other options that are more likely to pay off in the shorter term. I doubt most quantum investors would accept a 40-year return if they knew that was the future.
AI

Decades-Old Bash Tricks Expose AI Coding Agents To Supply Chain Attacks (securityweek.com) 9

Posted by EditorDavid from the big-Bash-theory dept.
Slashdot reader wiredmikey writes: AI security researchers have uncovered a structural security flaw dubbed GuardFall that allows decades-old Bash shell tricks to bypass safeguards in most open source AI coding agents. By exploiting shell behaviors such as quote removal and variable expansion, attackers can hide malicious commands in repositories, README files, Makefiles, or other content consumed by AI agents. If executed — particularly in auto-approve or CI environments—the commands can steal credentials, compromise developer systems, or enable software supply chain attacks. According to researchers at Adversa AI, the 11 popular open source AI coding agents tested, only one successfully blocked all of the Bash trick techniques.
Science

What Is a Quantum Computer Good For? Absolutely Nothing - Yet (theverge.com) 24

Posted by EditorDavid from the quantum-leaps dept.
The Verge argues that researchers "have made genuine progress in quantum computing — it's just been largely incremental and too esoteric to immediately capture the public's imagination."

And there are predictions that quantum computers will finally do something useful as soon as 2028: The drama can overshadow the real progress in quantum computing... Researchers have improved the qubits themselves, so they hold onto information longer. When they hold onto information longer, you can fit in more operations and do more complicated algorithms. Last November, Andrew Houck of Princeton University and his colleagues reported that they'd made a superconducting qubit that can hold onto information three times longer than the previous record holder... And in the last two years, researchers have made substantial strides in what's known as quantum error correction... In addition, researchers have developed algorithms to correct errors while the quantum computer operates... Microsoft claimed, which experts dispute, that it made an object made of electrons known as a Majorana particle [which should make fewer errors and be easier to scale up]...

"We 100 percent stand behind our results. We stand by our roadmap," Microsoft's quantum lead, Chetan Nayak, responded in an interview with The Verge. In an email statement, he added that Microsoft's "papers do show that we are creating and controlling Majorana [particles]... Microsoft's supporting evidence is unconvincing [according to [Henry Legg, a physicist from the University of St. Andrews and a longtime Microsoft critic]Rnqyq. What it claimed as evidence of a Majorana particle, he says, could actually be due to quantum dots forming in its device. Quantum dots are electron-containing objects that are not useful for Microsoft's quantum computer. It also bases its claim on data from a single device, says Legg. He wants to see Microsoft replicate the results in multiple chips. "If you repeatedly try and find Jesus in your toast, eventually you'll find Jesus in your toast," he says. "But that one piece of toast doesn't mean you had some kind of epiphany."

"While we appreciate the religious fervor, our data maintains the strength and consistency of our roadmap, as we have for the past several years across previous milestones. We look forward to delivering the world's first quantum machine and sharing the energy of our achievements with the world," wrote Nayak in response.

Past spurious work from Microsoft-affiliated researchers adds to the doubt. In 2021, the journal Nature retracted an article from Microsoft-affiliated researchers in which they'd claimed strong experimental evidence that they'd created a Majorana particle.
"Even hopeful experts have varying opinions about when a quantum computer will demonstrate something useful," the article acknowledges.

But quantum computing lecturer Eleanor Crane of King's College London predicts researchers will have demonstrated a useful scientific simulation on a quantum computer by 2028.

Thanks to Slashdot reader joshuark for sharing the article.

Comment Re:How close (Score 1) 121

by gweihir (#66221948) Attached to: US Life Expectancy On Track To Reach Record High

Exactly. I think the death rate metric is being used to give the appearance of the US not being as bad as it is. There is no other reason I see why an indirect (and incomplete) metric like the death rate would be used, when quite direct and clear life expectancy numbers are easily available.

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