Pure Tech

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Alamo Drafthouse will not implement Meta's new Movie Mate technology during the April 30 nationwide rerelease of Blumhouse's "M3GAN," Variety reports. The specialty theater chain confirmed it will maintain its strict no-phones policy...

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China's outing of alleged US National Security Agency hackers marks a major escalation in the ongoing tit-for-tat between Chinese and American intelligence agencies, according to analysts. From a report: Chinese authorities Tuesday said...

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A Canadian math prodigy is accused of stealing over $65 million through complex exploits on decentralized finance platforms and is currently a fugitive from U.S. authorities. Despite facing criminal charges for fraud and money laundering,...

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Apple has officially designated all Intel-based Mac minis as "vintage" or "obsolete," marking the end of an era. This means Apple no longer guarantees parts or service for these devices, as they've surpassed the 5- to 7-year support...

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An anonymous reader quotes a report from TechCrunch: Figma has sent a cease-and-desist letter to popular no-code AI startup Lovable, Figma confirmed to TechCrunch. The letter tells Lovable to stop using the term "Dev Mode" for a new...

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Uber cofounder Travis Kalanick thinks AI is about to shake up consulting -- and for "traditional" professionals, not in a good way. From a report: The former Uber CEO said consultants who mostly follow instructions or do repetitive tasks...

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You should still learn to code, says GitHub's CEO. And you should start as soon as possible. From a report: "I strongly believe that every kid, every child, should learn coding," Thomas Dohmke said in a recent podcast interview with EO....

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An anonymous reader shares a report: None of the frontier AI research labs have presented any evidence that they are on the brink of achieving artificial general intelligence, no matter how they define that goal, but Google is already...

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An anonymous reader shares a report: OpenAI is working on its own X-like social network, according to multiple sources familiar with the matter. While the project is still in early stages, we're told there's an internal prototype focused...

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An anonymous reader shares a report: A silent update rolling out to virtually all Android devices will make your phone more secure, and all you have to do is not touch it for a few days. The new feature implements auto-restart of a locked...

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Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg considered resetting all Facebook users' friend connections to boost the platform's declining relevance, according to internal emails revealed Monday in a landmark FTC antitrust trial. In a 2022 message to...

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FCC Chairman Brendan Carr has issued a stark ultimatum to European allies, telling them to choose between US and Chinese communications technology. In an interview with Financial Times, Carr urged "allied western democracies" to "focus on...

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Publishers and law professors have filed amicus briefs supporting authors who sued Meta over its AI training practices, arguing that the company's use of "thousands of pirated books" fails to qualify as fair use under copyright law. The...

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An anonymous reader quotes a report from TechCrunch: Car rental giant Hertz has begun notifying its customers of a data breach that included their personal information and driver's licenses. The rental company, which also owns the Dollar...

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Longtime Slashdot reader AmiMoJo shares the news that China has halted all rare earth exports globally -- including to the U.S., Japan, and Germany. Fortune reports: After Trump unveiled his "Liberation Day" tariffs on April 2, China...

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A new study projects that CT scans conducted in 2023 may result in around 103,000 future cancer cases in the U.S. due to low-dose ionizing radiation. "[I]t would put CT scans on par with other significant risk factors for cancer, like...

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An anonymous reader shares a report: Generative AI offers remarkable efficiency gains while presenting a profound challenge for the global IT services industry -- a sector concentrated in India and central to its export economy. For...

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An anonymous reader quotes a report from Forbes: Robotaxi development is speeding at a fast pace in China, but we don't hear much about it in the USA, where the news focuses mostly on Waymo, with a bit about Zoox, Motional, May, trucking...

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The climate crisis has tripled the length of ocean heatwaves, a study has found, supercharging deadly storms and destroying critical ecosystems such as kelp forests and coral reefs. From a report: Half of the marine heatwaves since 2000...

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Apple will begin analyzing data on customers' devices in a bid to improve its AI platform, a move designed to safeguard user information while still helping it catch up with AI rivals. From a report: Today, Apple typically trains AI models...

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Samsung has paused the global rollout of its One UI 7 update after a serious bug was reported that prevented some Galaxy S24 owners from unlocking their phones. The Verge reports: While the complaints seem to have specifically come from...

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A new investigation reveals that children as young as five can easily access inappropriate content and interact unsupervised with adults on Roblox, despite the platform's child-friendly image and recent safety updates. The Guardian...

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An anonymous reader quotes a report from the New York Times: British laws restricting what the police can say about criminal cases are "not fit for the social media age (source paywalled; alternative source)," a government committee said...

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Several crosswalk buttons in Palo Alto and nearby cities were hacked over the weekend to play deepfake-style satirical audio clips mimicking Elon Musk and Mark Zuckerberg. Authorities have disabled the altered systems, but the identity of...

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Meta said the company plans to start using data collected from its users in the European Union to train its AI systems. Engadget reports: Starting this week, the tech giant will begin notifying Europeans through email and its family of...

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An anonymous reader quotes a report from DefenseScoop: NATO announced Monday that it has awarded a contract to Palantir to adopt its Maven Smart System for artificial intelligence-enabled battlefield operations. Through the contract, which...

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VMware has resumed offering a free hypervisor. News of the offering emerged in a throwaway line in the Release Notes for version 8.0 Update 3e of the Broadcom business unit's ESXi hypervisor. From a report: Just below the "What's New"...

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The European Commission is issuing burner phones and basic laptops to some US-bound staff to avoid the risk of espionage [non-paywalled source], a measure traditionally reserved for trips to China. Financial Times: Commissioners and senior...

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OpenAI unveiled its GPT-4.1 model family on Monday, prioritizing coding capabilities and instruction following while expanding context windows to 1 million tokens -- approximately 750,000 words. The lineup includes standard GPT-4.1,...

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Apple is readying a substantial overhaul for iPadOS 19 that will transform the tablet experience to function more like macOS, according to Bloomberg. The update will focus on productivity features, multitasking capabilities, and app window...

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An anonymous reader shares a report: Requests to remove books from library shelves are on the rise in the UK, as the influence of pressure groups behind book bans in the US crosses the Atlantic, according to those working in the sector....

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Blue Origin's New Shepard completed its 31st mission Monday morning, carrying the first all-female crew to space since Soviet cosmonaut Valentina Tereshkova's 1963 solo flight. The NS-31 mission lifted off from West Texas at 9:30 a.m. EDT,...

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An anonymous reader shares a report: An attorney for the Federal Trade Commission told a judge that Facebook, fearing the competitive threat of Instagram posted to their social media network, acquired both as a way to "neutralize" the...

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Nvidia has announced plans to manufacture AI supercomputers entirely within the United States, commissioning over 1 million square feet of manufacturing space across Arizona and Texas. Production of Blackwell chips has begun at TSMC's...

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America's Department of Energy launched a federally funded R&D center in 1946 called the Argonne National Laboratory, and its research became the basis for all of the world's commercial nuclear reactors. But it's now developed an...

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Formula One cars, the world's fastest racecars, need to grip the track for speed and safety on the curves — leading engineers to design cars that create downforce. And racing fans are even told that "a Formula 1 racecar generates enough...

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10 years ago "certificate authorities normally issued certificate lifetimes lasting a year or more," remembers a new blog post Thursday by the EFF's engineering director. So in 2015 when the free cert authority Let's Encrypt first started...

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Late Friday news broke that U.S. President Trump's new tariffs included exemptions for smartphones, computer monitors, semiconductors, and other electronics. But Sunday morning America's commerce secretary insisted "a special-focus type of...

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Stanford law school graduate Peter Thiel later co-founded Facebook, PayPal, and Palantir. But in 2010 Thiel also created the Thiel Fellowship, which annually gives 20 to 30 people under the age of 23 $100,000 "to encourage students to not...

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Remember how last weekend Meta claimed its "Maverick" AI model (in the newly-released Llama-4 series) beat GPT-4o and Gemini Flash 2 "on all benchmarks... This thing is a beast." And then how within a day several AI researchers pointed out...

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"More than three million children around the world are thought to have died in 2022 as a result of infections that are resistant to antibiotics," reports the BBC, citing a study by two leading experts in child health that used data from...

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"It is somewhat remarkable that work on AmigaOS 3.X continues in 2025," notes Tom's Hardware, "given that Commodore International released AmigaOS 3.0 in 1992..." AmigaOS 3.1 came in 1993. And now... Work continues on AmigaOS 3.2 with the...

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"Can you help me take down the Texas lottery?" That's what a London banker-turned-bookmaker asked "acquaintances" in 2023, reports the Wall Street Journal. The plan was to buy "nearly every possible number in a coming drawing" — purchasing...

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Somewhere in Montana sits the only coal-fired power plant in America that hasn't installed modern pollution controls to limit particulate matter, according to the Environmental Protecction Agency. Mining.com notes that it has the highest...

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Linux Mint Debian Edition 7 "will come with full support for OEM installations," according to their monthly newsletter, so Linux Mint "can be pre-installed on computers which are sold throughout the World. It's a very important feature and...

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When Microsoft announced it would stop developing MS-DOS after 1995, college student Jim Hall "packaged my own extended DOS utilities, as did others," according to the web site for the resulting "FreeDOS" project. Jim Hall is also Slashdot...

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"AMD processors were instrumental in achieving a new world record," reports Tom's Hardware, "during a recent Ansys Fluent computational fluid dynamics simulation run on the Frontier supercomputer at the Oak Ridge National Laboratory." The...

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"Researchers say that a person's intelligence plays a bigger role in their computer proficiency than previously believed," writes SciTechDaily, "so much so that practice alone may not be enough to ensure ease of use." A new study has found...

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Celebrating Git's 20th anniversary, GitHub hosted a Q&A with Linus Torvalds, writes Its FOSS News. Among the other revelations: He says his college-age daughter sent a texting saying he's better known at her CS lab for Git than for...

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Here's an update from the Wall Street Journal about a "widespread series of alarming cyberattacks on U.S. infrastructure." China was behind it, "Chinese officials acknowledged in a secret December meeting... according to people familiar...