A senior Broadcom executive has defended VMware's controversial licensing changes by arguing that customers complaining about costs simply weren't using the software bundles properly. VMware shifted away from selling perpetual licenses for individual products to subscription bundles after Broadcom's acquisition. Some smaller and mid-sized customers claim their costs increased eight to 15 times under the new pricing structure, prompting migration plans to alternative platforms.

Joe Baguley, Broadcom's chief technology officer for EMEA, countered that 87% of VMware's top 10,000 customers have signed up for VMware Cloud Foundation, and that cost complaints "don't play out" when Broadcom sits down with customers directly.

Apple software chief Craig Federighi has ruled out bringing macOS to the iPad, amusingly using a kitchen utensil analogy to explain the company's design philosophy. "We don't want to create a boat car or, you know, a spork," Federighi said in an interview. "Someone said, 'If a spoon's great, a fork's great, then let's combine them into a single utensil, right?' It turns out it's not a good spoon and it's not a good fork. It's a bad idea. And so we don't want to build sporks."

The new version of iPadOS, which will ship to consumers later this year, features dynamically resizable windows that users can drag by their corners and a menu bar that is accessible through swipe gestures or cursor movement.

Some observers might consider the iPad Pro itself a "convertible" product that blurs the line between tablet and laptop, he said. However, the Mac and iPad serve distinct purposes, he asserted. "The Mac lets the iPad be iPad," he said adding that Apple's objective "has not been to have iPad completely displace those places where the Mac is the right tool for the job." Rather than full convergence, Federighi said the iPad "can be inspired by elements of the Mac" while remaining a separate platform. "I think the Mac can be inspired by elements of iPad, and I think that that's happened a great deal."

An anonymous reader shares a report: [...] the rise in China of open technology, which relies on transparency and decentralisation, is awkward for an authoritarian state. If the party's patience with open-source fades, and it decides to exert control, that could hinder both the course of innovation at home, and developers' ability to export their technology abroad.

China's open-source movement first gained traction in the mid-2010s. Richard Lin, co-founder of Kaiyuanshe, a local open-source advocacy group, recalls that most of the early adopters were developers who simply wanted free software. That changed when they realised that contributing to open-source projects could improve their job prospects. Big firms soon followed, with companies like Huawei backing open-source work to attract talent and cut costs by sharing technology.

Momentum gathered in 2019 when Huawei was, in effect, barred by America from using Android. That gave new urgency to efforts to cut reliance on Western technology. Open-source offered a faster way for Chinese tech firms to take existing code and build their own programs with help from the country's vast community of developers. In 2020 Huawei launched OpenHarmony, a family of open-source operating systems for smartphones and other devices. It also joined others, including Alibaba, Baidu and Tencent, to establish the OpenAtom Foundation, a body dedicated to open-source development. China quickly became not just a big contributor to open-source programs, but also an early adopter of software. JD.com, an e-commerce firm, was among the first to deploy Kubernetes.

AI has lately given China's open-source movement a further boost. Chinese companies, and the government, see open models as the quickest way to narrow the gap with America. DeepSeek's models have generated the most interest, but Qwen, developed by Alibaba, is also highly rated, and Baidu has said it will soon open up the model behind its Ernie chatbot.

Microsoft has disabled Windows Hello's ability to authenticate users in low-light environments through a recent security update that now requires both infrared sensors and color cameras to verify faces. The change forces the system to see a visible face through the webcam before completing authentication with IR sensors.

Windows Hello earlier relied solely on infrared sensors to create 3D facial scans, allowing the feature to work in complete darkness similar to iPhone's Face ID. Microsoft pushed the dual-camera requirement to address a spoofing vulnerability in the biometric system.

Microsoft's latest Windows 11 preview builds contain a bug that replaces the operating system's startup sound with Windows Vista's iconic boot chime from 2006. Microsoft acknowledged the bug in its release notes -- describing it as a "delightful blast from the past" -- and said it was working on a fix.

A chain of stores called Home Bargains installed facial recognition software to spot returning shoplifters. Unfortunately, "Facewatch" made a mistake.

"We acknowledge and understand how distressing this experience must have been," an anonymous Facewatch spokesperson tells the BBC, adding that the store using their technology "has since undertaken additional staff training."

A woman was accused by a store manager of stealing about £10 (about $13) worth of items ("Everyone was looking at me"). And then it happened again at another store when she was shopping with her 81-year-old mother on June 4th: "As soon as I stepped my foot over the threshold of the door, they were radioing each other and they all surrounded me and were like 'you need to leave the store'," she said. "My heart sunk and I was anxious and bothered for my mum as well because she was stressed...."

It was only after repeated emails to both Facewatch and Home Bargains that she eventually found there had been an allegation of theft of about £10 worth of toilet rolls on 8 May. Her picture had somehow been circulated to local stores alerting them that they should not allow her entry. Ms. Horan said she checked her bank account to confirm she had indeed paid for the items before Facewatch eventually responded to say a review of the incident showed she had not stolen anything. "Because I was persistent I finally got somewhere but it wasn't easy, it was really stressful," she said. "My anxiety was really bad — it really played with my mind, questioning what I've done for days. I felt anxious and sick. My stomach was turning for a week."

In one email from Facewatch seen by the BBC, the firm told Ms Horan it "relies on information submitted by stores" and the Home Bargains branches involved had since been "suspended from using the Facewatch system". Madeleine Stone, senior advocacy officer at the civil liberties campaign group Big Brother Watch, said they had been contacted by more than 35 people who have complained of being wrongly placed on facial recognition watchlists.

"They're being wrongly flagged as criminals," Ms Stone said.
"They've given no due process, kicked out of stores," adds the senior advocacy officer. "This is having a really serious impact." The group is now calling for the technology to be banned. "Historically in Britain, we have a history that you are innocent until proven guilty but when an algorithm, a camera and a facial recognition system gets involved, you are guilty. The Department for Science, Innovation and Technology said: "While commercial facial recognition technology is legal in the UK, its use must comply with strict data protection laws. Organisations must process biometric data fairly, lawfully and transparently, ensuring usage is necessary and proportionate.

"No one should find themselves in this situation."
Thanks to alanw (Slashdot reader #1,822) for sharing the article.

"Cooper Taylor is only 17 years old, but he's already trying to revolutionize the drone industry," writes Business Insider: His design makes the drone more efficient, customizable, and less expensive to construct, he says. He's built six prototypes, 3D printing every piece of hardware, programming the software, and even soldering the control circuit board. He says building his drone cost one-fifth of the price of buying a comparable machine, which sells for several thousand dollars. Taylor told Business Insider he hopes that "if you're a first responder or a researcher or an everyday problem solver, you can have access to this type of drone."

His innovation won him an $8,000 scholarship in April at the Junior Science and Humanities Symposium, funded by the Defense Department. Then, on May 16, he received an even bigger scholarship of $15,000 from the US Navy, which he won after presenting his research at the Regeneron International Science and Engineering Fair...

It all started when Taylor's little sister got a drone, and he was disappointed to see that it could fly for only about 30 minutes before running out of power. He did some research and found that a vertical take-off and landing, or VTOL, drone would last longer. This type of drone combines the multi-rotor helicopter style with the fixed wings of an airplane, making it extremely versatile. It lifts off as a helicopter, then transitions into plane mode. That way, it can fly farther than rotors alone could take it, which was the drawback to Taylor's sister's drone. Unlike a plane-style drone, though, it doesn't need a runway, and it can hover with its helicopter rotors.
Taylor designed a motor "that could start out helicopter-style for liftoff, then tilt back to become an airplane-style motor," according to the article.

And now this summer he'll be "working on a different drone project through a program with the Reliable Autonomous Systems Lab at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology."

Thanks to Slashdot reader Agnapot for sharing the news.

America's federal government is building a website and API called ai.gov to "accelerate government innovation with AI", according to an early version spotted by 404 Media that was posted on GitHub by the U.S. government's General Services Administration.

That site "is supposed to launch on July 4," according to 404 Media's report, "and will include an analytics feature that shows how much a specific government team is using AI..." AI.gov appears to be an early step toward pushing AI tools into agencies across the government, code published on Github shows....

The early version of the page suggests that its API will integrate with OpenAI, Google, and Anthropic products. But code for the API shows they are also working on integrating with Amazon Web Services' Bedrock and Meta's LLaMA. The page suggests it will also have an AI-powered chatbot, though it doesn't explain what it will do... Currently, AI.gov redirects to whitehouse.gov. The demo website is linked to from Github (archive here) and is hosted on cloud.gov on what appears to be a staging environment. The text on the page does not show up on other websites, suggesting that it is not generic placeholder text...

In February, 404 Media obtained leaked audio from a meeting in which [the director of the GSA's Technology Transformation Services] told his team they would be creating "AI coding agents" that would write software across the entire government, and said he wanted to use AI to analyze government contracts.

In 1989 a computer scientist argued that more functionality in software actually lowers usability and practicality — leading to the counterintuitive proposition that "worse is better". But is that still true?

Python's original creator Guido van Rossum addressed the question last month in a lightning talk at the annual Python Language Summit 2025. Guido started by recounting earlier periods of Python development from 35 years ago, where he used UNIX "almost exclusively" and thus "Python was greatly influenced by UNIX's 'worse is better' philosophy"... "The fact that [Python] wasn't perfect encouraged many people to start contributing. All of the code was straightforward, there were no thoughts of optimization... These early contributors also now had a stake in the language; [Python] was also their baby"...

Guido contrasted early development to how Python is developed now: "features that take years to produce from teams of software developers paid by big tech companies. The static type system requires an academic-level understanding of esoteric type system features." And this isn't just Python the language, "third-party projects like numpy are maintained by folks who are paid full-time to do so.... Now we have a huge community, but very few people, relatively speaking, are contributing meaningfully."

Guido asked whether the expectation for Python contributors going forward would be that "you had to write a perfect PEP or create a perfect prototype that can be turned into production-ready code?" Guido pined for the "old days" where feature development could skip performance or feature-completion to get something into the hands of the community to "start kicking the tires". "Do we have to abandon 'worse is better' as a philosophy and try to make everything as perfect as possible?" Guido thought doing so "would be a shame", but that he "wasn't sure how to change it", acknowledging that core developers wouldn't want to create features and then break users with future releases.

Guido referenced David Hewitt's PyO3 talk about Rust and Python, and that development "was using worse is better," where there is a core feature set that works, and plenty of work to be done and open questions. "That sounds a lot more fun than working on core CPython", Guido paused, "...not that I'd ever personally learn Rust. Maybe I should give it a try after," which garnered laughter from core developers.

"Maybe we should do more of that: allowing contributors in the community to have a stake and care".

An anonymous reader shared this report from CNET: By using a software emulator to run Atari's 1979 game Video Chess, Citrix engineer Robert Caruso said he was able to set up a match between ChatGPT and the 46-year-old game. The matchup did not go well for ChatGPT. "ChatGPT confused rooks for bishops, missed pawn forks and repeatedly lost track of where pieces were — first blaming the Atari icons as too abstract, then faring no better even after switching to standard chess notations," Caruso wrote in a LinkedIn post.

"It made enough blunders to get laughed out of a 3rd-grade chess club," Caruso said. "ChatGPT got absolutely wrecked at the beginner level."
"Caruso wrote that the 90-minute match continued badly and that the AI chatbot repeatedly requested that the match start over..." CNET reports.

"A representative for OpenAI did not immediately return a request for comment."

An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Register: UK universities and colleges have signed a framework worth up to 9.86 million pounds ($13.33 million) with Oracle to use its controversial Java SE Universal Subscription model, in exchange for a "waiver of historic fees due for any institutions who have used Oracle Java since 2023." Jisc, a membership organization that runs procurement for higher and further education establishments in the UK, said it had signed an agreement to purchase the new subscription licenses after consultation with members. In a procurement notice, it said institutions that use Oracle Java SE are required to purchase subscriptions. "The agreement includes the waiver of historic fees due for any institutions who have used Oracle Java since 2023," the notice said.

The Java SE Universal Subscription was introduced in January 2023 to an outcry from licensing experts and analysts. It moved licensing of Java from a per-user basis to a per-employee basis. At the time, Oracle said it was "a simple, low-cost monthly subscription that includes Java SE Licensing and Support for use on Desktops, Servers or Cloud deployments." However, licensing advisors said early calculations to help some clients showed that the revamp might increase costs by up to ten times. Later, analysis from Gartner found the per-employee subscription model to be two to five times more expensive than the legacy model.

"For large organizations, we expect the increase to be two to five times, depending on the number of employees an organization has," Nitish Tyagi, principal Gartner analyst, said in July 2024. "Please remember, Oracle defines employees as part-time, full-time, temporary, agents, contractors, as in whosoever supports internal business operations has to be licensed as per the new Java Universal SE Subscription model." Since the introduction of the new Oracle Java licensing model, user organizations have been strongly advised to move off Oracle Java and find open source alternatives for their software development and runtime environments. A survey of Oracle users found that only one in ten was likely to continue to stay with Oracle Java, in part as a result of the licensing changes.

An anonymous reader shares a report: In less than three months' time, almost no civil servant, police officer or judge in Schleswig-Holstein will be using any of Microsoft's ubiquitous programs at work. Instead, the northern state will turn to open-source software to "take back control" over data storage and ensure "digital sovereignty," its digitalisation minister, Dirk Schroedter, told AFP. "We're done with Teams!" he said, referring to Microsoft's messaging and collaboration tool and speaking on a video call -- via an open-source German program, of course.

The radical switch-over affects half of Schleswig-Holstein's 60,000 public servants, with 30,000 or so teachers due to follow suit in coming years. The state's shift towards open-source software began last year. The current first phase involves ending the use of Word and Excel software, which are being replaced by LibreOffice, while Open-Xchange is taking the place of Outlook for emails and calendars.

An anonymous reader shares a report: Slack, an instant-messaging service popular with businesses, recently blocked other software firms from searching or storing Slack messages even if their customers permit them to do so, according to a public disclosure from Slack's owner, Salesforce.

The move, which hasn't previously been reported, could hamper fast-growing artificial intelligence startups that have used such access to power their services, such as Glean. Since the Salesforce change, Glean and other applications can no longer index, copy or store the data they access via the Slack application programming interface on a long-term basis, according to the disclosure. Salesforce will continue allowing such firms to temporarily use and store their customers' Slack data, but they must delete the data, the company said.

Shopify is launching stablecoin payments for its merchants later this year, starting with USDC in collaboration with Coinbase and Stripe. Fortune reports: The publicly traded tech company lets merchants -- including vintage clothes sellers, cosmetics businesses, and electronics companies -- set up their own online marketplaces. By late June, Shopify will let a select group of users accept payments in USDC, a stablecoin issued by the crypto company Circle, which recently had one of the year's hottest IPOs. "In our own philosophical framework, we are extremely aligned with everything that crypto stands for," Tobias Lutke, the CEO of Shopify and a Coinbase board member, said onstage at a Coinbase conference on Thursday.

Shopify will then gradually expand access to merchants across its network in the U.S. and Europe before opening up stablecoin payments to every merchant who uses its platform. The e-commerce company worked with Coinbase to develop a payments protocol to handle chargebacks, refunds, and other intricacies of retail payments on Coinbase's blockchain, Base. It also collaborated with fintech giant Stripe, one of Shopify's payments processors, to integrate stablecoins into the e-commerce company's existing software stack. "I think other payment processors will look at what Shopify is building and be like, 'Holy crap,'" Jesse Pollak, a Coinbase executive who oversees the crypto exchange's wallet and blockchain divisions, told Fortune.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from ZDNet: Denmark's Minister of Digitalization, Caroline Stage, has announced that the Danish government will start moving away from Microsoft Office to LibreOffice. Why? It's not because open-source is better, although I would argue that it is, but because Denmark wants to claim "digital sovereignty." In the States, you probably haven't heard that phrase, but in the European Union, digital sovereignty is a big deal and getting bigger.

A combination of security, economic, political, and societal imperatives is driving the EU's digital sovereignty moves. EU leaders are seeking to reduce Europe's dependence on foreign technology providers, primarily those from the United States, and to assert greater control over its digital infrastructure, data, and technological future. Why? Because they're concerned about who controls European data, who sets the rules, and who can potentially cut off access to essential services in times of geopolitical tension. "Money issues have also played a decisive role," writes ZDNet's Steven Vaughan-Nichols. "Copenhagen's Microsoft software bill has soared from 313 million kroner in 2018 to 538 million kroner -- about $53 million in 2023, a 72% increase in just five years.

David Heinemeier Hansson (DHH), a Dane, inventor of Ruby on Rails, and co-owner of the software developer company 37Signals, has said: "Denmark is one of the most highly digitalized countries in the world. It's also one of the most Microsoft-dependent. In fact, Microsoft is by far and away the single biggest dependency, so it makes perfect sense to start the quest for digital sovereignty there."

An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Register: Australian SaaS-y graphic design service Canva now requires candidates for developer jobs to use AI coding assistants during the interview process. [...] Canva's hiring process previously included an interview focused on computer science fundamentals, during which it required candidates to write code using only their actual human brains. The company now expects candidates for frontend, backend, and machine learning engineering roles to demonstrate skill with tools like Copilot, Cursor, and Claude during technical interviews, Canva head of platforms Simon Newton wrote in a Tuesday blog post.

His rationale for the change is that nearly half of Canva's frontend and backend engineers use AI coding assistants daily, that it's now expected behavior, and that the tools are "essential for staying productive and competitive in modern software development." Yet Canva's old interview process "asked candidates to solve coding problems without the very tools they'd use on the job," Newton admitted. "This dismissal of AI tools during the interview process meant we weren't truly evaluating how candidates would perform in their actual role," he added. Candidates were already starting to use AI assistants during interview tasks -- and sometimes used subterfuge to hide it. "Rather than fighting this reality and trying to police AI usage, we made the decision to embrace transparency and work with this new reality," Newton wrote. "This approach gives us a clearer signal about how they'll actually perform when they join our team." The initial reaction among engineers "was worry that we were simply replacing rigorous computer science fundamentals with what one engineer called 'vibe-coding sessions,'" Newton said.

The company addressed these concerns with a recruitment process that sees candidates expected to use their preferred AI tools, to solve what Newton described as "the kind of challenges that require genuine engineering judgment even with AI assistance." Newton added: "These problems can't be solved with a single prompt; they require iterative thinking, requirement clarification, and good decision-making."

Disney and NBCUniversal have filed a copyright infringement lawsuit against AI image generator firm Midjourney in U.S. District Court in Los Angeles, marking the first time major Hollywood studios have taken legal action against a generative AI company.

The entertainment giants accuse Midjourney, founded in 2021, of training its software on "countless" copyrighted works without permission and enabling users to create images that "blatantly incorporate and copy" famous characters including Darth Vader, the Minions, Frozen's Elsa, Shrek, and Homer Simpson.

The companies claim they attempted to resolve the matter privately, but Midjourney "continued to release new versions" with "even higher quality infringing images" according to the complaint. Disney's general counsel used the word "piracy," to describe Midjourney's practice, while NBCUniversal's general counsel characterized it as "blatant infringement."

Apple executives defended the company's AI strategy this week after acknowledging that major Siri features announced at last year's Worldwide Developers Conference remain undelivered and were quietly pulled from development plans. Craig Federighi, Apple's senior vice president of software engineering, told the Wall Street Journal that the company is rebuilding Siri from the ground up, admitting that while Apple had working software for the promised features, "it didn't converge in the way quality-wise that we needed it to."

The missing capabilities included Siri's ability to search through apps and respond to on-screen activities, features that were demonstrated a year ago but never shipped to users. In the upcoming iOS 26, Apple has instead incorporated more OpenAI technology, allowing users to interact with ChatGPT through camera and screenshots and generate images using OpenAI's tools. Federighi defended the strategy by comparing Apple's position to the early internet era, when the company focused on making other services accessible rather than building competing platforms.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from TorrentFreak: Fresh data released by piracy tracking outfit MUSO shows that pirate sites remain popular. In a report released today, MUSO reveals that there were 216 billion pirate site visits globally in 2024, a slight decrease compared to the 229 billion visits recorded a year earlier. TV piracy remains by far the most popular category, representing over 44.6% of all website visits. This is followed by the publishing category with 30.7%, with film, software and music all at a respectable distance. Pirate site visitors originate from all over the world, but one country stands tall above all the rest: America. The United States remains the top driver of pirate site traffic accounting for more than 12% of all traffic globally, good for 26.7 billion visits in 2024. India has been steadily climbing the ranks for years and currently sits in second place with 17.6 billion annual visits, with Russia, Indonesia, and Vietnam completing the top five. As a country with one of the largest populations worldwide, it's not a complete surprise that the U.S. tops the list. If we counted visits per internet user, Canada and Ukraine would top the list.

While pirate site visits dipped by more than 5% in 2024, one category saw substantial growth. Visits to publishing-related pirate sites increased 4.3% from 63.6 to 66.4 billion. The increase is largely driven by the popularity of manga, which accounts for more than 70% of all publishing piracy. Traditional book piracy, meanwhile, is stuck at 5%. The publishing piracy boom is relatively new. Over the past five years, the category grew by more than 100% while the overall number of global pirate site visits remained relatively flat. Looking at the global demand, we see that the U.S. also leads the charge here, followed by Indonesia and Russia. Notably, Japan, the home of manga, ranks fifth in the publishing category. This stands out because Japan is not listed in the global top 15 in terms of total pirate site visits.

In the other content categories, MUSO's data shows a dip in pirate site visits. The changes are relatively modest for TV (-6.8%) and software (-2.1%) but the same isn't true for the music and film categories. In 2024, there were 18% fewer visits for pirated movies compared to a year earlier. MUSO notes that this is due to a "lighter blockbuster calendar" which reduced piracy peaks. "The drop in demand is as much about what wasn't released as it is about access," the report explains. The music category saw a 19% decline in piracy visits year over year, with a more uplifting explanation for rightsholders. According to MUSO, the drop can be partly attributed to "secure app ecosystems" and the "wide adoption of licensed platforms like Spotify and Apple Music."

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Axios: President Trump quietly took a red pen to much of the Biden administration's cyber legacy in a little-noticed move late Friday. Under an executive order signed just before the weekend, Trump is tossing out some of the major touchstones of Biden's cyber policy legacy -- while keeping a few others. The order preserves efforts around post-quantum cryptography, advanced encryption standards, and border gateway protocol security, along with the Cyber Trust Mark program -- an Energy Star-type labeling initiative for consumer smart devices. But hallmark programs tied to software bills of materials, zero-trust implementation, and space contractor cybersecurity requirements have been either rescinded or left in limbo. The new executive order amends both the Biden cyber executive order signed in January and an Obama administration order.

Each of the following Biden-era programs is now out the door or significantly rolled back:
- A broad requirement for federal software vendors to provide a software bill of materials - essentially an ingredient list of code components - is gone.
- Biden-era efforts to encourage federal agencies to accept digital identity documents and help states develop mobile driver's licenses were revoked.
- Several AI cybersecurity research mandates, including those focused on AI-generated code security and AI-driven patch management pilots, have been scrapped or deprioritized.
- The requirement that software contractors formally attest they followed secure development practices - and submit those attestations to a federal repository - has been cut. Instead, the National Institute of Standards and Technology will now coordinate a new industry consortium to review software security guidelines.