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Submission + - Apple tries selling $150+ socks (apple.com)

Submitted by dskoll
dskoll writes: Apple introduces the iPhone Pocket: a beautiful way to wear and carry iPhone

ISSEY MIYAKE and Apple today unveiled iPhone Pocket. Inspired by the concept of “a piece of cloth,” its singular 3D-knitted construction is designed to fit any iPhone as well as all pocketable items.

When stretched, the open textile subtly reveals its contents and allows users to peek at their iPhone display. iPhone Pocket can be worn in a variety of ways — handheld, tied onto bags, or worn directly on the body. Featuring a playful colour palette, the short strap design is available in eight colours, and the long strap design in three colours.

Submission + - A potential quantum leap (harvard.edu)

Submitted by schwit1
schwit1 writes: Harvard physicists unveil system to solve long-standing barrier to new generation of supercomputers

The dream of creating game-changing quantum computers — supermachines that encode information in single atoms rather than conventional bits — has been hampered by the formidable challenge known as quantum error correction.

In a paper published Monday in Nature, Harvard researchers demonstrated a new system capable of detecting and removing errors below a key performance threshold, potentially providing a workable solution to the problem.

"For the first time, we combined all essential elements for a scalable, error-corrected quantum computation in an integrated architecture," said Mikhail Lukin, co-director of the Quantum Science and Engineering Initiative, Joshua and Beth Friedman University Professor, and senior author of the new paper. "These experiments — by several measures the most advanced that have been done on any quantum platform to date — create the scientific foundation for practical large-scale quantum computation."

In the new paper, the team demonstrated a "fault tolerant" system using 448 atomic quantum bits manipulated with an intricate sequence of techniques to detect and correct errors.

The key mechanisms include physical entanglement, logical entanglement, logical magic, and entropy removal. For example, the system employs the trick of "quantum teleportation" — transferring the quantum state of one particle to another elsewhere without physical contact.

"There are still a lot of technical challenges remaining to get to very large-scale computer with millions of qubits, but this is the first time we have an architecture that is conceptually scalable," said lead author Dolev Bluvstein, Ph.D. '25, who did the research during his graduate studies at Harvard and is now an assistant professor at Caltech. "It's going to take a lot of effort and technical development, but it's becoming clear that we can build fault-tolerant quantum computers."

Submission + - Proton might recycle abandoned email addresses and the privacy risks are terrify (nerds.xyz)

Submitted by BrianFagioli
BrianFagioli writes: Proton is floating a plan on Reddit that should unsettle anyone who values privacy. The company is considering recycling abandoned email addresses that were originally created by bots a decade ago. These addresses were never used, yet many of them are extremely common names that have silently collected misdirected emails, password reset attempts, and even entries in breach datasets. Handing those addresses to new owners today would mean that sensitive messages intended for completely different people could start landing in a strangerâ(TM)s inbox overnight.

Proton says itâ(TM)s just gathering feedback, but the fact that this made it far enough to ask the community is troubling. Releasing these long-abandoned addresses would create confusion, risk exposure of personal data, and undermine the trust users place in a privacy focused provider. Itâ(TM)s hard to see how Proton could justify taking a gamble with other peopleâ(TM)s digital identities like this.

Submission + - Google will leave open the option to sideload apps on Android (googleblog.com)

Submitted by Artem S. Tashkinov
Artem S. Tashkinov writes: A few months ago, Google proposed that every Android developer, including those distributing apps outside the Google Play Store, such as popular third-party stores like F-Droid, must verify their identity to have their apps installable on "certified Android devices," starting circa 2026 in countries such as Brazil, Indonesia, Singapore, and Thailand. This triggered strong push-back from indie developers and open-source advocates, who saw it as a shift toward a more closed ecosystem, raising fears that sideloading would be free in name only and making Android essentially an iOS clone.

In response, Google clarified in its November 2025 blog post that while verification is moving forward, there will be lighter-weight paths for students and hobbyists, and an "advanced flow" for power users to install unverified apps with full warning of the risks, essentially backtracking on its initial proposal.

Submission + - AI-generated song tops country music chart (go.com)

Submitted by Tablizer
Tablizer writes: A song created through artificial intelligence has made history topping a Billboard country music chart, but it has also sent shockwaves through the music industry, with artists getting vocal about the AI-generated hit.

The new country tune, "Walk my Walk" by Breaking Rust, recently hit No. 1 on Billboard's Country Digital Song Sales chart, reaching over 3 million streams on Spotify in less than a month. That success has garnered mixed reactions from music fans and artists alike, particularly on TikTok, where hundreds of users have posted videos addressing the tune and others discussing the music in the comments.

Billboard has acknowledged Breaking Rust is an AI act and said it is one of at least six to chart in the past few months alone. "Ultimately, this feels like an experiment to see just how far something like this can go and what happens in the future and in other disciplines of art as well," senior entertainment reporter Kelley L. Carter told ABC News.

"AI artists won't require things that a real human artist will require, and once companies start considering it and looking at bottom lines, I think that's when artists should rightly be concerned about it," she added. ABC News attempted to reach out to Breaking Rust's creator for comment but did not receive a response.

Submission + - IEA Drops Peak Oil Predictions (oilprice.com)

Submitted by magzteel
magzteel writes: The International Energy Agency has dropped its predictions that oil demand growth will peak in a matter of a few years. In the latest edition of its World Energy Outlook, the IEA said oil and gas demand could continue growing until 2050.

The IEA said that the coming years and decades will see a consistent increase in demand for energy across industry, households and, notably, information technology. Investments in data centers this year could reach $580 billion this year, the IEA’s secretary-general said, which exceeds the expected $540 billion in oil and gas industry investment.

As demand for energy grows, so will demand for the traditional sources of that energy. In a departure from its predictions of peak oil demand and peak natural gas demand before 2030, the IEA now expects oil demand to reach 113 million barrels by 2050, under the stated policies scenario that the outlet reintroduced this year after dropping it for five years to focus on aspirational scenarios focused on net zero.

Submission + - OpenAI Fights Order To Turn Over Millions of ChatGPT Conversations (reuters.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: OpenAI asked a federal judge in New York on Wednesday to reverse an order that required it to turn over 20 million anonymized ChatGPT chat logs amid a copyright infringement lawsuit by the New York Times and other news outlets, saying it would expose users' private conversations. The artificial intelligence company argued that turning over the logs would disclose confidential user information and that "99.99%" of the transcripts have nothing to do with the copyright infringement allegations in the case.

"To be clear: anyone in the world who has used ChatGPT in the past three years must now face the possibility that their personal conversations will be handed over to The Times to sift through at will in a speculative fishing expedition," the company said in a court filing (PDF). The news outlets argued that the logs were necessary to determine whether ChatGPT reproduced their copyrighted content and to rebut OpenAI's assertion that they "hacked" the chatbot's responses to manufacture evidence. The lawsuit claims OpenAI misused their articles to train ChatGPT to respond to user prompts.

Magistrate Judge Ona Wang said in her order to produce the chats that users' privacy would be protected by the company's "exhaustive de-identification" and other safeguards. OpenAI has a Friday deadline to produce the transcripts.

Submission + - Nearly half of top 1,000 websites have no password length requirements (scworld.com)

Submitted by spatwei
spatwei writes: At least 42% of the top 1,000 most-visited websites have weak password requirements, according to research published by NordPass on Wednesday.

NordPass’ research looked at sites from Ahrefs’ list of the top 1,000 most visited websites based on monthly visits from organic search between Feb. 26 and March 6, 2025. Nearly two-third of these sites (61%) allow users to log in with a password.

The study found that only five websites out of the top 1,000 enforced minimum password length, special characters and case sensitivity requirements together, while 58% did not require special characters and 42% did not have minimum password length requirements.

“The internet teaches us how to log in and for decades it’s been teaching us the wrong lessons. If a site accepts ‘password123,’ users learn that’s enough and it’s not. People normalized minimal effort for maximum risk,” NordPass Head of Product Karolis Arbaciauskas said in a statement provided to SC Media.

The research further found that 11% of websites have no requirements at all for password creation, and just 2% support passkeys as a more secure alternative to passwords. A little more than a third (39%) offered a single sign-on (SSO) option, mostly through Google.

Comment The issue is Section 230 (Score 1) 208

by pcause (#61827895) Attached to: 'Facebook Is What's Wrong With America'

We don't and shouldn't have government telling us what we are allowed to say and read. And things folks thought were true often turn out later to be false, especially when it is about politicians/said by politicians (Clinton on Lewinsky, Flowers, etc).

Section 230 is the issue as it is too broad. It was written at a time when the issues was transmitting email from basically one person to another and it was *JUST* transmission to specific addressees. But things like Facebook and twitter are broadcast media and also are applying algorithms to decide what you see and hence are really publishers.

We need to classify these folks are publishers and hold them to the same standards as radio, TV stations, newspapers and the like. Or make them stop filtering/promoting and manipulating the content and hold the person disseminating content liable for what they say.

The problem is NO ONE is accountable.

Comment The Valley companies avoid this... (Score 1) 62

The folks like Google Facebook and Twitter and most of the Valley avoid this by just not hiring older programmers. EQUALLY illegal. The EEOC should broaden their efforts to the tech industry and its obsession and youth and inexperience ( people they can manipulate and exploit) versus age and experience (people who now recognize the manipulation and are harder to exploit).

Comment Will they never learn` (Score 1) 40

Really? Didn't they try this with WinRT and Win10S. The key value of Windows is the app base and even with the UWP apps which have been around for years, most of the useful app base has never moved off Win32.

On ChromeOS, I can at least access the Android app base. With this change to Win10X my choice will have to be to use WSL2, with the GUI support they are adding and run Linux desktop apps or a Win10 VM. And if I do either of those, why do I need Win10X at all?

Comment Sounds like a big number, but... (Score 1) 129

by pcause (#57460756) Attached to: Waymo's Driverless Cars Have Logged 10 Million Miles On Public Roads

I think I read somewhere that the number of miles driven in one single morning commute is something like 130 million miles. So, while 10 million miles is certainly impressive we aren't yet equivalent to 0.4% of a year's commuter driving (2 commutes per day, 5 days a week, 52 weeks per year). And, as previously pointed out, the Waymo miles are not driven in every set of road conditions in the US and are very controlled.

The real question we and they need to discuss is what is the amount of testing and user what conditions so that we as consumers can believe that this technology is well tested? Rain, snow, highways with bridges that ice before the roads do, heavy winds, dense fog, all need to be in the test conditions. Then add cities like NYC, where pedestrians don't yield the right of way and the many other edge conditions, like aggressive drivers doing stupid things.

We have a LONG way to go.

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