Amazon finds itself caught between two competing impulses as AI shopping agents from OpenAI, Google, Perplexity and Microsoft mushroom across the e-commerce space -- block them to protect its dominant position, or partner with them to avoid being left behind. The company has largely played defense so far. Amazon recently updated its website code to block external AI agents from crawling it, and as of this week had blocked 47... Read more ›
46
An anonymous reader quotes a report from the Wall Street Journal: Concerned that artificial intelligence could threaten Communist Party rule, Beijing is taking extraordinary steps to keep it under control. Although China's government sees AI as crucial to the country's economic and military future, regulations and recent purges of online content show it also fears AI could destabilize society. Chatbots pose a particular problem: Their ability to think for themselves... Read more ›
9
Los Angeles Times (non-paywalled source): When police questioned Marvin Margolis following the murder of Elizabeth Short -- who became known as the Black Dahlia -- he lied about how well he had known her. The 22-year-old Short had been found mutilated in a weedy lot in South Los Angeles, severed neatly in half with what detectives thought was surgical skill. Margolis was on the list of suspects. He was a... Read more ›
54
European leaders including Emmanuel Macron have accused Washington of "coercion and intimidation," after the US imposed a visa ban on five prominent European figures who have been at heart of the campaign to introduce laws regulating American tech companies. From a report: The visa bans were imposed on Tuesday on Thierry Breton, the former EU commissioner and one of the architects of the bloc's Digital Services Act (DSA), and four... Read more ›
0
Russia plans to put a nuclear power plant on the moon in the next decade to supply its lunar space programme and a joint Russian-Chinese research station, as major powers rush to explore the earth's only natural satellite. Reuters: Ever since Soviet cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin became the first human to go into space in 1961, Russia has prided itself as a leading power in space exploration, but in recent decades... Read more ›
0
The Justice Department justified its delayed release of sensitive files by citing the need to carefully redact information that could identify victims, but at least some of those redactions have proven to be technically ineffective and can be bypassed by simply copying and pasting the blacked-out text into a new document. A 2022 complaint filed by the US Virgin Islands seeking damages from Jeffrey Epstein's estate appeared on the DOJ's... Read more ›
64
Hallmark has released more than 300 Christmas-themed TV movies since 2000, and a detailed internal rulebook obtained by film data analyst Stephen Follows explains how the company manages to produce nearly one new holiday film per week during the final quarter of each year without the whole operation collapsing into creative chaos. The document, referred to as Hallmark's "bible" by writers and producers who have worked on these films, specifies... Read more ›
4
An anonymous reader shares a report: In 2024, 25.2% of gross final energy consumption in the EU came from renewable sources, up by 0.7 percentage points compared with 2023. This share is 17.3 pp short of meeting the 2030 target (42.5%), which would require an annual average increase of 2.9 pp from 2025 to 2030. Among the EU countries, Sweden recorded the highest share of its gross final energy consumption... Read more ›
33
YouTube has been winning the streaming wars for years, but its real competitive advantage comes not from prime-time viewing but from its stranglehold on daytime hours when Americans are meditating, exercising, cooking, or simply looking for background noise. At 11 a.m. in October, YouTube commanded an average audience of 6.3 million viewers compared to Netflix's 2.8 million, according to Nielsen data. Amazon drew about a million viewers at that hour,... Read more ›
5
Goldman Sachs, in a note this week, via India Dispatch: There are various reasons that explains this: (i) A large part of the global education spend goes towards formal education (schools, colleges and universities), which are typically either run by governments or are not-for-profit institutions; (ii) It is difficult to replicate education quality at scale in our view, since most teachers would have a different pedagogy, and thus standardization is... Read more ›
32
An anonymous reader quotes a report from the Associated Press: The State Department announced Tuesday it was barring five Europeans it accused of leading efforts to pressure U.S. tech firms to censor or suppress American viewpoints. The Europeans, characterized by Secretary of State Marco Rubio as "radical" activists and "weaponized" nongovernmental organizations, fell afoul of a new visa policy announced in May to restrict the entry of foreigners deemed responsible... Read more ›
34
Longtime Slashdot reader MrFreak shares a public radio interview from 2015 discussing artificial intelligence as inference over abstract inputs, along with scaling limits, automation, and governance models, where for-profit engines are constrained by nonprofit oversight: Recorded months before OpenAI was founded, the conversation treats intelligence as math plus incentives rather than something mystical, touching on architectural bottlenecks, why "reasoning" may not simply emerge from brute force, labor dis Read more ›
0
theodp writes: We all mix pictures, emojis, and text freely in our communications. So why not in our code? That's the premise of "Fun With Python and Emoji: What Might Adding Pictures to Text Programming Languages Look Like?" (two-image Bluesky explainer; full slides), which takes a look at what mixing emoji with Python and SQL might look like. A GitHub repo includes a Google Colab-ready Python notebook proof of concept... Read more ›
57
An anonymous reader quotes a report from TechCrunch: Across Uzbekistan, a network of about a hundred banks of high-resolution roadside cameras continuously scan vehicles' license plates and their occupants, sometimes thousands a day, looking for potential traffic violations. Cars running red lights, drivers not wearing their seatbelts, and unlicensed vehicles driving at night, to name a few. The driver of one of the most surveilled vehicles in the system was... Read more ›
18
Under pressure from the Digital Markets Act, Apple's iOS 26.3 adds AirPods-style proximity pairing and notification support for third-party accessories in the EU. The changes will roll out to European users in 2026. MacRumors reports: The Digital Markets Act requires Apple to provide third-party accessories with the same capabilities and access to device features that Apple's own products get. In iOS 26.3, EU wearable device makers can now test proximity... Read more ›
3
A group of authors led by John Carreyrou has filed a new lawsuit against Anthropic, Google, OpenAI, Meta, xAI, and Perplexity, accusing the AI firms of training models on pirated copies of their books. TechCrunch reports: If this sounds familiar, it's because another set of authors already filed a class action suit against Anthropic for these same acts of copyright infringement. In that case, the judge ruled that it was... Read more ›
45
Phoronix's Michael Larabel writes: An interesting anecdote from this month's Linux Plumbers Conference in Tokyo is that Meta (Facebook) is using the Linux scheduler originally designed for the needs of Valve's Steam Deck... On Meta Servers. Meta has found that the scheduler can actually adapt and work very well on the hyperscaler's large servers. [...] The presentation at LPC 2025 by Meta engineers was in fact titled "How do we... Read more ›
95
An anonymous reader quotes a report from MarketWatch: ServiceNow announced a deal to acquire cybersecurity company Armis on Tuesday, marking a new milestone in the software giant's artificial-intelligence business strategy. The $7.75 billion all-cash transaction is part of ServiceNow's goal of advancing governance and trust in autonomous AI agents, and the company's largest transaction to date. "The acquisition of Armis will extend and enhance ServiceNow's Security, Risk, and [Operational Technology]... Read more ›
0
Irish competitor Diarmuid Early, dubbed the "Lebron James of Excel spreadsheets," has won the 2025 Microsoft Excel World Championship in Las Vegas, dethroning three-time champion Andrew Ngai. The BBC reports: The esport showpiece in December attracted competitors worldwide as 256 spreadsheet heads battled it out across knockout rounds to join the final 24 in Vegas. [...] A three-time champion in the financial Excel tournaments, this win was Diarmuid's first in... Read more ›
0
A federal judge blocked Texas' app store age-verification law, ruling it likely violates the First Amendment by forcing platforms to gate speech and collect data in an overly broad way. The law was set to go into effect on January 1, 2026. The Verge reports: In an order granting a preliminary injunction on the Texas App Store Accountability Act (SB 2420), Judge Robert Pitman wrote that the statute "is akin... Read more ›
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17.05.2026 00:10
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