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Submission + - Publishers are losing Google traffic as AI answers replace links (axios.com)

Submitted by alternative_right
alternative_right writes: Google has basically stopped sending people to websites (including our site) for answers and information. Instead, it's using AI to answer them on its platform, in its words.

Chartbeat data shared with Axios shows Google Search traffic to publishers fell 34% over the past year.

That pain is regressive. Over the past two years, small publishers lost 60% of referrals from search overall, medium publishers 47%, large publishers 22%.

Submission + - FBI gets voter's IP address in new fraud probe tactic (axios.com)

Submitted by alternative_right
alternative_right writes: The Trump administration has a new tactic for trying to isolate cases of alleged voter fraud â" digging into the IP addresses of those who went online to register to vote.

The FBI recently obtained the IP address of someone who registered online in South Carolina, according to documents first shared with Axios.

Submission + - FCC Officials Took Pricey Gifts From Paramount as the Company Needed Approval fo (propublica.org)

Submitted by joshuark
joshuark writes: ProPublica reports that disclosures show FCC Chair Brendan Carr and Federal Communications Commissioner Olivia Trusty are among seven FCC commissioners who have accepted Kennedy gala tickets from CBS or its parent company over the last decade. Ethics experts told ProPublica this poses a blatant conflict of interest since the commission regulates the network. Carr’s previous financial statements show he has accepted tickets at least seven times since his 2017 appointment, totaling over $63,000 in gifts. It’s unclear if Paramount gifted Carr the premium seats because the FCC has yet to make public his financial disclosure for last year.

Federal ethics rules ban employees from taking gifts from any entity that does business with, is regulated by or seeks official action from their agency.

Four ethics experts told ProPublica that by accepting the premium tickets Trusty and Carr compromised the FCC’s impartiality and should not take part in any upcoming decision on the merger.

“There’s no way that any top federal regulator should ever, ever accept a gift from a regulated company with interests their work will foreseeably affect,” said Walter Shaub, who led the federal Office of Government Ethics from 2013 to 2017. “The appearance of taking gifts like that is terrible. What’s at stake is nothing less than the public’s trust in government.”

The FCC’s review of the merger is one of the final hurdles facing a historic $110 billion consolidation of two of the five largest film studios in Hollywood. The deal would unite Paramount Skydance with Warner Bros., bringing under the control of one company Paramount+ and HBO Max streaming services; CBS and CNN; and scores of other major broadcast channels, cable networks, and digital platforms.

American and international regulators are evaluating the deal for its potential national security implications and impacts to consumers worldwide. Last week, the British government signaled it planned to investigate whether the new entertainment titan that would emerge from the union would unfairly stifle competition. The FCC’s ongoing review includes examining the Middle Eastern sovereign wealth funds backing the deal, including from Saudi Arabia, Qatar and Abu Dhabi.

The FCC usually has five commissioners — all appointed by the president and confirmed by the Senate to serve five-year terms — but the agency currently has only three. Any vote by the full commission would likely be decided by Republicans Carr and Trusty over Democrat Anna Gomez.

The experts warned the commissioners’ gifts might become central in legal challenges and said the Justice Department should investigate potential violations of federal rules or laws.

Neither Carr nor Trusty responded to ProPublica’s requests for comment. Gomez said in a statement that she followed agency advice when she attended the event in 2023 and 2024. Her statement did not elaborate or otherwise address why taking gifts from Paramount did not pose a conflict of interest.

An FCC spokesperson said agency ethics officers have for years cleared commissioner appearances, finding it consistent with ethics law.

“FCC Chairs and officials have attended the same event, in the same ways, consistently from the Trump Administration to the Biden Administration to the Obama Administration,” the FCC said in a statement. “There has been no change in recent years.”

Shaub called the justification outrageous.

“It’s no excuse to say that you took the gift because everyone else was doing it or that your agency has had a bad habit of indulging in gift taking for a long time,” Shaub said. “That kind of explanation doesn’t work for school children, and it sure as hell doesn’t work for government officials who are supposed to have better judgment than a fifth grader.”

Richard Painter, a former White House ethics attorney in the administration of George W. Bush, said while courts often defer to the government’s judgment, they also can become skeptical if a regulatory agency is shown to have violated ethics rules.

“A judge may very well say that the merger decision of the FCC isn’t worth jack because the process was corrupted,” he said.

Submission + - Dutch government blocks US company from acquisition: "risk to public interest" (politico.eu)

Submitted by rastakid
rastakid writes: Following months of public debate and protests against the acquisition of Solvinity, a Dutch cloud provider that hosts the Netherlands’ online identity platform, by American IT giant Kyndryl, the Dutch government has decided to block the acquisition. The deal triggered fears that it would mean that "DigiD" data would fall under foreign control, and could be demanded by U.S. authorities.

Submission + - Visual Studio Code update added Copilot as co-author by default to Git commits (ycombinator.com)

Submitted by UnknowingFool
UnknowingFool writes: On April 15, 2026, a Microsoft employee made a change to Visual Studio Code and pushed it within 8 hours without review, notification, or documentation. The change would add "Co-authored-by: Copilot " by default to the end of commit messages in Git if Copilot was used in creating the code. However, the implementation was bugged, and the message was added to every commit regardless if Copilot was used or disabled. Since this message was automatically added to the end of commit messages, users were not aware of it as the UI does not show this addition when making commits. The change as been reverted as of May 3, but not before 1.4 million commits were made. Unfortunately those messages cannot be cleansed and are permanent.

Submission + - 'Missing-Scientist' Story Is Unbelievably Dumb (theatlantic.com)

Submitted by mmarlett
mmarlett writes: The Atlantic has a long article on the story of missing scientists recently featured here on Slashdot. In short, it is an incoherent conspiracy theory that spreads wide and far, not paying any attention to boundaries of time, space or area of expertise. “Which is all to say that another piece of flagrant nonsense has ascended to the highest levels of U.S. politics and media. To call it a conspiracy theory would be far too kind, because no comprehensive theory has been floated to explain the pattern of events. But then, even the phrase pattern of events is imprecise, because there is no pattern here at all. Given all the people who could have been roped into this narrative but weren’t, any hope of finding meaning falls away. Barring any dramatic new disclosures, the mystery of the missing scientists has the dubious honor of being a sham in every way at once.”

Submission + - Palantir posts Bond villain manifesto on X

Submitted by DeanonymizedCoward
DeanonymizedCoward writes: Engadget reports that Palantir has posted to X a summary of CEO Alex Karp and Nicholas W. Zamiska's 2025 book, The Technological Republic, which reads like a utopian idealist doodled on a Bond villain's whiteboard. While the post makes some decent points, it also highlights the Big-AI attitude that the AI surveillance state is in fact a good thing, and strongly implies that the Good Guys need to do war crimes before the Bad Guys get around to it.

Submission + - Government Workers Say They're Getting Inundated With Religion (wired.com)

Submitted by joshuark
joshuark writes: Federal workers across multiple U.S. agencies are complaining that Christianity is flooding into their workplaces in ways they've never seen before—and they feel powerless to speak up.

It started after President Trump returned to office and signed an executive order in February 2025 creating a White House Faith Office and similar offices inside federal agencies. Since then, religion has crept into everyday government life in a big way...Secretary Brooke Rollins sent an agency-wide Easter email titled "He has risen!" with explicitly Christian messaging. One employee called it "grotesque" and suspected AI wrote it. A formal complaint was filed with the Office of Special Counsel.

Department of Labor hosts monthly worship services with pastors and political figures. One speaker, Alveda King, said she was "more concerned about" nonreligious employees—a comment that rattled staffers who felt it implied atheists were going to hell.

Health and Human Services, under vaccine denier RFK Jr., expanded funding for faith-based addiction treatment and gave workers the afternoon off for Good Friday.

Department of Defense has seen the most dramatic shift, with Secretary Pete Hegseth hosting monthly prayer services featuring high-profile Christian nationalist figures like Doug Wilson, who has advocated for a theocracy and argued women shouldn't vote. Hegseth himself has called the U.S. war with Iran a "holy war."
Employees are afraid to push back—only 22.5% of federal workers in 2025 say they could report wrongdoing without retaliation, down from nearly 72% in 2024.

The government's position: these events are voluntary and legally permitted. A public policy professor quoted in the piece put it plainly: "The Trump administration has opened a new chapter in the integration of Christianity into the daily work of government."

Submission + - Brazil Builds Free Payment System; US Wonders If That's Allowed (yahoo.com) 1

Submitted by Suripat
Suripat writes: Brazil’s instant payment system, Pix, has quickly changed how people handle money, making transfers free and nearly immediate. It’s become so widely used that cash and even card payments are losing ground. That success is now getting attention abroad, especially in the United States, where officials are looking into whether a government-backed system like Pix gives it an unfair edge over private payment companies. Supporters see it as efficient and accessible, while critics raise questions about competition. As Pix keeps growing, it’s starting to look less like a local innovation and more like something that could challenge established payment systems worldwide.

Submission + - Co-founder of Supermicro allegedly smuggled $2.5B worth of GPUs to China (cnn.com)

Submitted by AmiMoJo
AmiMoJo writes: The co-founder of Super Micro Computer and two others were charged with diverting $2.5 billion worth of servers with Nvidia’s artificial intelligence chips to China, in violation of US laws barring exports to that country without a license.

Yih-Shyan Liaw, known as Wally; Ruei-Tsang Chang, known as Steven; and Ting-Wei Sun, known as Willy, were charged with conspiring to violate export control laws, smuggling goods from the US and conspiring to defraud the US.

Liaw, who co-founded Super Micro Computer and served on its board of directors, was arrested Thursday in California and released on bail. Sun, a contractor, is held awaiting a detention hearing. Chang, who worked in the Taiwan office of Super Micro, remains at large.

Submission + - OpenAI to merge Atlas browser, ChatGPT, Codex into a single desktop super app (neowin.net)

Submitted by joshuark
joshuark writes: OpenAI is planning to combine its Atlas web browser, ChatGPT app, and Codex coding app into a singular desktop super app. CEO of Applications, Fidji Simo, said the company was doubling down on its successful products.

By taking this move, the AI company aims to streamline the user experience and reduce fragmentation. With that said, each of the apps currently do quite different things so it will be interesting to see how they put this all together. Simo said in an internal memo: “We realized we were spreading our efforts across too many apps and stacks, and that we need to simplify our efforts. That fragmentation has been slowing us down and making it harder to hit the quality bar we want.”

OpenAI is in a fierce battle with companies like Anthropic and Google to produce the best models and products. By unifying and speeding up the development of their desktop offering, it gives OpenAI a leg up in the race.

Atlas is probably the least known among the three products. It lets users browse the web with ChatGPT packed in. This browser is only available on macOS, so fewer people have had a chance to use it.

Submission + - r/linux poster unearths Meta's lobbying net behind OS Age Verfication blitz (archive.org)

Submitted by He Who Has No Name
He Who Has No Name writes: In an incredibly in-depth researched post that was removed by Reddit mods almost as soon as it went up but is preserved at Archive.org, Reddit user Ok_Lingonberry3296 has dug deep into lobbying activity and records across multiple states and at the federal level to unearth what — or who — is behind the nationwide state-level and federal legislation blitz of nearly identical age verification laws targeting operating systems instead of companies — with no carveout for open source, no awareness of how these centralized control models break when applied to a FOSS operating system like Linux, and no apparent regard for the avalanche of second order effects the legislation could cause in contexts like embedded devices, VMs, and data centers.

The culprit that emerges isn't a huge surprise: a recently created lobbying org called the Digital Childhood Alliance, which appears to be functionally a front group for the lobbying efforts of... (drumroll) ...Mark Zuckerberg's Meta, formerly Facebook.

Ok_Lingonberry3296 writes: "...Rep. Kim Carver (R-Bossier City), the sponsor of Louisiana's HB-570, publicly confirmed that a Meta lobbyist brought the legislative language directly to her. The bill as drafted required only app stores (Apple, Google) to verify user ages. It did not require social media platforms to do anything.

...Senator Jay Morris, who expanded the bill to include app developers alongside app stores after Google's senior director of government affairs publicly questioned why "Mark Zuckerberg is so keen on passing these bills." When Morris introduced his amendment, Meta went silent. The conference committee compromise maintained dual responsibility but kept the primary burden on app stores, which is what Meta wanted from the start.

At that same Senate hearing, Morris directly questioned DCA Executive Director Casey Stefanski about who funds her organization. She reportedly deflected, said she "wasn't comfortable answering," then under continued pressure admitted tech companies provide funding but refused to name them."

The research gets into funding, connected groups (on both sides of the political aisle) involved with lobbying, messaging, funding, and other parts of the legislative push, and most of all, tracks the money.

For those that want to dig into the research itself, OK_Lingonberry3296 posted their entire folder of research and sources on github, here: github.com/upper-up/meta-lobbying-and-other-findings

A quick synopsis of where the US laws currently stand:

CA | AB-1043 | Enacted, effective Jan 1, 2027
CO | SB26-051 | Passed Senate, in House committee
LA | HB-570 | Enacted, effective July 1, 2026
UT | SB-142 | Enacted, first in nation
TX | SB-2420 | Enjoined by federal judge
NY | S8102A | Pending
IL | HB-3304, HB-4140, SB-2037 | Pending
Federal | KOSA, ASAA | Pending

Submission + - Tech Giant CEOs No-Shows at Rev. Jesse Jackson's Memorial Service

Submitted by theodp
theodp writes: Before this week, the last time the three living former U.S. Presidents got together was at the Trump Inauguration in 2025 in Washington, DC. Joining them were current and former CEOs of Google, Meta, Amazon, and Apple (Microsoft's CEO didn't attend, but the company sent a $1 million check).

So, on Friday, when former Presidents Bush, Obama, and Biden reconvened in Chicago at the memorial service for civil rights leader Rev. Jesse Jackson, Sr., one might have expected to see the tech giant CEOs join them again. After all, their companies pledged to work with Jackson to do better on their hiring efforts, as Jackson first pressured Google and then the others into finally publishing their woeful EEO-1 diversity numbers that they formerly kept under wraps under the guise of 'trade secrets'. "We’ve always been reluctant to publish numbers about the diversity of our workforce at Google," confessed Google HR Chief Laszlo Bock in a 2014 mea culpa blog post. "We now realize we were wrong, and that it’s time to be candid about the issues. Put simply, Google is not where we want to be when it comes to diversity, and it’s hard to address these kinds of challenges if you’re not prepared to discuss them openly." The tech giants redoubled their racial equity pledges in 2020.

So, why wouldn't the tech CEOs come together at Jackson's memorial service and celebrate Jackson's life and accomplishments? Even Trump publicly praised Jackson (albeit with some unnecessary swipes at others). Well, one possible explanation might be that the workforce transparency the tech giants promised Jackson to determine how successful their efforts were going never fully materialized. The tech giants largely chose to spin their own cherrypicked metrics of workforce diversity success instead of publishing meaningful raw data for others to objectively analyze. Worse than that, a Wired report in November 2025 revealed that as Jackson's health took a turn for the worse, some tech giants — including Google, Microsoft, and Meta — stopped their decade-long practice of publishing statistics about the gender and racial makeup of their workforce altogether. "The broad loss in transparency," Wired reported, "could obscure the impact of President Donald Trump’s anti-DEI policies on the tech workforce." Yusef Jackson [Jesse Jackson's son], who now leads the Rainbow PUSH Coalition, said the group would fight the nondisclosure of diversity data.

All of which would certainly not make for the greatest of press, especially if it came out in the same week that Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg closed on a new record breaking $170 million mansion on Miami's exclusive 'Billionaire Bunker' island that Amazon founder Jeff Bezos also calls home (and a billion-dollar tax shelter). By the way, Meta's last-published EEO-1 report shows that the number of reported Black employees was 43.6% lower at the end of 2023 than at the end of 2022, compared to an overall workforce reduction of 21.8% (Zuckerberg dubbed 2023 Meta's "Year of Efficiency").

Writing in Fortune, Brennan Nevada Johnson has a message for tech CEOs: "Reverend Jackson did not protest technology, but rather insisted on participating in shaping it. He forced an industry that prides itself on innovation to innovate socially. Today, despite much pushback due to the current administration, diversity reports, inclusive recruiting pipelines, and equity initiatives do exist across major tech firms. It’s so important that we honor Reverend Jackson’s legacy of continuing accountability. The future is still being built, and as Reverend Jesse Jackson reminded Silicon Valley [and even children], it must be built by all, for all."

Submission + - Oil surges 35% this week for biggest gain in futures trading history (cnbc.com)

Submitted by fjo3
fjo3 writes: President Donald Trump on Friday demanded unconditional surrender from Iran, raising fears of a prolonged war that could wreak havoc on the global oil and gas market. The war has already brought traffic in the Strait of Hormuz, a critical shipping route for energy supplies, to a near standstill.

Qatar’s energy minister, Saad al-Kaabi, told The Financial Times on Friday that crude prices could reach $150 per barrel in the coming weeks if oil tankers were unable to pass through the Strait.

This could “bring down the economies of the world,” Kaabi said.

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