Mark Zuckerberg opened an unlicensed school named after the family's pet chicken -- and it was the final straw for his neighbors, writes Slashdot reader joshuark, citing a report from Wired. The magazine obtained 1,665 pages of documents about the neighborhood dispute -- "including 311 records, legal filings, construction plans, and emails." Here are excerpts from the report: The documents reveal that the school may have been operating as early as 2021 without a permit to operate in the city of Palo Alto. As many as 30 students might have enrolled, according to observations from neighbors. [...] Over time, neighbors became fed up with what they argued was the city's lack of action, particularly with respect to the school. Some believed that the delay was because of preferential treatment to the Zuckerbergs. "We find it quite remarkable that you are working so hard to meet the needs of a single billionaire family while keeping the rest of the neighborhood in the dark," reads one email sent to the city's Planning and Development Services Department in February. "Just as you have not earned our trust, this property owner has broken many promises over the years, and any solution which depends on good faith behavioral changes from them is a failure from the beginning." [...]

In order for the Zuckerbergs to run a private school on their land, which is in a residential zone, they need a "conditional use" permit from the city. However, based on the documents WIRED obtained, and Palo Alto's public database of planning applications, the Zuckerbergs do not appear to have ever applied for or received this permit. Per emails obtained by WIRED, Palo Alto authorities told a lawyer working with the Zuckerbergs in March 2025 that the family had to shut down the school on its compound by June 30. [...] However, Zuckerberg family spokesperson Brian Baker tells WIRED that the school didn't close, per se. It simply moved. It's not clear where it is now located, or whether the school is operating under a different name. [...] Most of the Zuckerbergs' neighbors did not respond to WIRED's request for comment. However, the ones that did clearly indicated that they would not be forgetting the Bicken Ben saga, or the past decade of disruption, anytime soon.

alternative_right shares a report from The Conversation: Countries around the world have been discussing the need to rein in climate change for three decades, yet global greenhouse gas emissions -- and global temperatures with them -- keep rising. When it seems like we're getting nowhere, it's useful to step back and examine the progress that has been made. Let's take a look at the United States, historically the world's largest greenhouse gas emitter. Over those three decades, the U.S. population soared by 28% and the economy, as measured by gross domestic product adjusted for inflation, more than doubled. Yet U.S. emissions from many of the activities that produce greenhouse gases -- transportation, industry, agriculture, heating and cooling of buildings -- have remained about the same over the past 30 years.

Transportation is a bit up; industry a bit down. And electricity, once the nation's largest source of greenhouse gas emissions, has seen its emissions drop significantly. Overall, the U.S. is still among the countries with the highest per capita emissions, so there's room for improvement, and its emissions (PDF) haven't fallen enough to put the country on track to meet its pledges under the 10-year-old Paris climate agreement. But U.S. emissions are down about 15% over the past 10 years. The report mentions how the U.S. managed to replace coal with cheaper, more efficient natural-gas plants while rapidly scaling wind, solar, and battery storage as their costs fell. At the same time, major gains in appliance, lighting, and building efficiency flattened per-capita power use. This also coincided with improved vehicle fuel economy that helped keep transportation emissions in check.

An anonymous reader shares a report: Amazon just introduced an AI tool that will automatically translate books into other languages. The appropriately-named Kindle Translate is being advertised as a resource for authors that self publish on the platform.

The company says the tool can translate entire books between English and Spanish and German to English. Amazon promises that more languages are coming down the pike. It's available right now in a beta form to select authors enrolled in the Kindle Direct Publishing platform. There's a broader rollout planned for a later date.

Venture capitalist David Sacks, who is serving as President Donald Trump's AI and crypto czar, said Thursday that there will be "no federal bailout for AI." From a report: "The U.S. has at least 5 major frontier model companies. If one fails, others will take its place," Sacks wrote in a post on X. Sacks' comments came after OpenAI CFO Sarah Friar said Wednesday that the startup wants to establish an ecosystem of private equity, banks and a federal "backstop" or "guarantee" that could help the company finance its infrastructure investments.

She softened her stance later in a LinkedIn post and said OpenAI is not seeking a government backstop for its infrastructure commitments. She said her use of the word "backstop" clouded her point. [...] Sacks said the Trump administration does want to make permitting and power generation easier, and that the goal is to facilitate rapid infrastructure buildouts without raising residential electricity rates. "To give benefit of the doubt, I don't think anyone was actually asking for a bailout. (That would be ridiculous.)," he wrote.

American manufacturing's postwar boom from the 1940s through the 1970s resulted from conditions that cannot be recreated, a story on WSJ argues. Global competitors had been destroyed by war. Energy was cheap. Unions could demand concessions without fearing job losses to foreign rivals.

Strikes were frequent in steel, auto, trucking, rubber and coal mining. That relentless pressure from an organized working class raised real wages and created fringe benefits including health insurance and retirement pay. Government support for unions kept executive salaries at just a few times median income. Stock buybacks were illegal or frowned upon. President Eisenhower declared at the 1956 dedication of the AFL-CIO national headquarters that "Labor is the United States."

The system began unraveling by the mid-1960s. The Vietnam War drained federal coffers. Inflation accelerated as government deficits exploded. Nixon abandoned the gold standard in 1971, unleashing currency volatility. The 1973 OPEC oil embargo quadrupled energy prices. Foreign competition returned from Japan, Korea and West Germany. American companies carried mounting legacy costs like pensions that discouraged investment in upgrades and research.

Milton Friedman declared in a 1970 New York Times essay that the social responsibility of business is to increase its profits. Clinton signed NAFTA in 1993 and championed the World Trade Organization in 1995. Bethlehem Steel employed around 150,000 people in the mid-1950s. The company filed for bankruptcy in 2001. Its former hometown plant in Bethlehem, Pa., is now a casino.

An anonymous reader shares a report: US software company SAS Institute has withdrawn from mainland China and dismissed its local staff, according to a Beijing-based employee affected by the move, as the analytics specialist ended more than two decades of operations amid intense domestic competition and geopolitical tensions. The company on Thursday announced the lay-offs via an email and hosted a short video call, in which executives thanked local employees for their contribution and cited "organisational optimisation" for the exit, according to the employee.

"SAS is ceasing direct business operations in China," an SAS spokeswoman said on Friday in response to the Post's inquiry. "This decision reflects a broader shift in how we operate globally, optimising our footprint and ensuring long-term sustainability." The company would continue having a presence on the mainland via third-party partners, according to the spokeswoman.

The government shutdown-spurred airport chaos is about to get a whole lot worse. From a report: The Federal Aviation Administration said Wednesday it will reduce flight volumes by 10 percent across 40 major airports in response, a move that could threaten 3,000 to 4,500 flights daily. The cuts will affect "high volume" markets, including in Atlanta, Dallas, New York City and Los Angeles, according to CBS. The FAA has not formally announced which airports will have their capacity cut.

"I'm not aware in my 35-year history in the aviation market where we've had a situation where we're taking these kinds of measures," FAA Administrator Bryan Bedford said at a news conference, according to the AP. The government shutdown, which is now the longest in US history, has already been causing thousands of delays each day, as well as long waits at airport security. Some major airports have even been forced to operate without air traffic control for hours at a time.

A new Activate Consulting report reveals that 43% of Gen Z now prefer YouTube and TikTok over traditional TV or paid streaming. With global media revenues surging and traditional TV viewership collapsing, the average person now spends over 13 hours a day consuming content across platforms, effectively living a "32-hour day" through multitasking. Variety reports: Per the same survey, the popularity of "microdramas" -- one of the latest trends on those platforms, consisting of 1-2 minute scripted episodes of an ongoing storyline -- has been increasing at a fast rate with 28 million U.S. adults (52% aged 18-34) reportedly watching that new form of content.

Additional findings include projections for global internet and media revenue to increase by $388 billion by 2029, while average daily time spent streaming video will climb to 4 hours and 8 minutes as time spent watching traditional TV is set to collapse to just 1 hour and 17 minutes. Activate estimates that, as a result, streaming revenues (from ads and subscriptions) will grow 18-19% annually while traditional TV revenues will fall 4-6% year to year.

Solar geoengineering could increase the ferocity of North Atlantic hurricanes, cause the Amazon rainforest to die back and cause drought in parts of Africa if deployed above only some parts of the planet by rogue actors, a report has warned. The Guardian: However, if technology to block the sun was used globally and in a coordinated way for a long period -- decades or even centuries -- there is strong evidence that it would lower the global temperature, the review from the UK's Royal Society concluded.

The world is failing to halt the climate crisis and the researchers said that in future, a judgment might need to be made between the risks of geoengineering and the those of continued global heating, which is already costing lives and livelihoods. The logistics of a large-scale geoengineering effort would be daunting, the experts said, but the cost would be small relative to climate action -- billions of dollars a year against trillions.

The researchers emphasised that geoengineering only masked the symptoms of the climate crisis, and did not tackle the root cause -- the burning of fossil fuels. Geoengineering could only complement the cutting of emissions, not replace it, they said. If geoengineering was halted abruptly but emissions had not been reduced, there would be a termination shock of rapidly rising temperatures -- 1-2C within a couple of decades -- that would have severe effects on people and ecosystems unable to rapidly adapt.

Brazil is set to announce Thursday the establishment of a multibillion-dollar fund designed to pay countries to keep their tropical forests standing. The Tropical Forest Forever Facility would deliver $4 billion per year to as many as 74 countries that maintain their forest cover. The fund requires $25 billion from governments and philanthropies to begin operations.

Private investors would contribute the remaining $100 billion. Brazil has committed $1 billion. Countries would receive around $4 per hectare of standing forest after using satellite imagery to verify forests remain in place. Nations with annual deforestation rates above 0.5% are ineligible for payouts. Indonesia, which has rapidly lost forests to palm-oil cultivation and mining, cannot participate. One-fifth of the payments are designated for forest communities. The World Bank is managing the fund.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: Today, Samsung provided details about the next version of the HDR10 format, which introduces six new features. Among HDR10+ Advanced's most interesting features is HDR10+ Intelligent FRC (frame rate conversion), which is supposed to improve motion smoothing.

A TV using motion smoothing analyzes each video frame and tries to determine what additional frames would look like if the video were playing at a frame rate that matched the TV's refresh rate. The TV then inserts those frames into the video. A 60Hz TV with motion smoothing on, for example, would attempt to remove judder from a 24p film by inserting frames so that the video plays as if it were shot at 60p. For some, this appears normal and can make motion, especially camera panning or zooming, look smoother. However, others will report movies and shows that look more like soap operas, or as if they were shot on higher-speed video cameras instead of film cameras. Critics, including some big names in Hollywood, argue that motion smoothing looks unnatural and deviates from the creator's intended vision.

Intelligent FRC takes a more nuanced approach to motion smoothing by letting content creators dictate the level of motion smoothing used in each scene, Forbes reported. The feature is also designed to adjust the strength of motion interpolation based on ambient lighting.

Dick Cheney, who served four Republican presidents and became one of the most powerful and controversial vice presidents in American history as an architect of the post-9/11 war on terror, died at 84. His family said he died from complications of pneumonia and cardiac and vascular disease.

Cheney served as vice president under George W. Bush for two terms beginning in 2001 and relentlessly advocated for the 2003 invasion of Iraq. Many Americans came to view the war as a strategic and humanitarian disaster. The conflict had far-reaching policy and political consequences that helped turn the public against intervention and upheaved Republican politics. Cheney continued to defend the invasion long after leaving office in 2009.

He had heart disease for most of his life and underwent a transplant in 2012. That allowed him to live to see his daughter Liz Cheney follow in his political footsteps to become a House GOP leader. Before serving as vice president, Cheney was defense secretary under George H.W. Bush and chief of staff to Gerald Ford at age 34.

Amazon's data-center expansion turned Umatilla, Oregon into an unlikely nerve center for American infrastructure investment. The community of roughly 8,000 residents has seen home prices double and local government budgets surge from $7 million in 2011 to a hundred and $44 million in the past fiscal year. Yesenia Leon-Tejeda, a Realtor and daughter of Mexican-born farmhands who once worked 12-hour shifts at a distribution center, is now on pace to close 35 deals this year.

Federal data shows investment in software and information-processing equipment drove most of America's GDP growth in the first half of 2025. Goldman Sachs estimated that roughly 72% of all server-farm capacity sat in just 1% of counties as of July. The region's hydroelectric dams and cheap power attracted Amazon Web Services more than a decade ago. Growth has brought rising costs for housing and child care. Political tensions over spending erupted this year when Mayor Caden Sipe sued the city manager and council members.

Longtime Slashdot reader sinij shares a report from Car and Driver: Sales of electric vehicles surged in September as shoppers rushed to take advantage of the $7500 federal EV tax credit before it disappeared at the end of the month. With the government subsidies now gone, EV sales were expected to take a hit in October. While only a few automakers still report sales on a monthly basis, the results we do have do not paint a rosy picture for EVs in a post-tax credit world.

The Korean automakers were hit particularly hard by the loss of the tax credit. The Hyundai Ioniq 5, which was the fifth-best-selling EV through the third quarter of this year, experienced a 63 percent drop, moving 1642 units in October 2025, down from 4498 in 2024. Its platform-mates saw similar declines. The Kia EV6 moved just 508 units, down 71 percent versus the same month the year before, while the luxurious Genesis GV60 only found 93 buyers, a 54 percent slide year over year. Things were even worse at Honda. While the Acura ZDX was recently discontinued after just a single model year, the related Honda Prologue remains on sale but registered just 806 units, down 81 percent from 4130 sales in October 2024. [...]

Obviously, this isn't the full picture, as several major players -- including General Motors, Toyota, Nissan, and Volkswagen -- only release sales reports on a quarterly basis, and others, such as Tesla and Rivian, don't break out individual sales at all. But with four of the top 10 bestselling EVs through Q3 all showing noteworthy declines in October, it spells trouble for the EV market at large. The end-of-year sales figures will provide a much clearer picture of whether October was just a blip or the start of a much more widespread problem for EV sales.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from CNN: An Antarctic glacier shrunk by nearly 50% in just two months, the fastest retreat recorded in modern history, according to a new study -- and the way it retreated could have big implications for global sea level rise. The Hektoria Glacier, roughly the size of Philadelphia, is on the Antarctic Peninsula, a spindly chain of mountains sticking off the continent like a thumb pointing toward South America. It is one of the fastest warming regions on Earth.

Grounded glaciers like Hektoria, which rest on the seabed and don't float, generally retreat no more than a few hundred meters a year. But between November and December 2022, Hektoria retreated by 5 miles, according to the study published Monday in the journal Nature Geoscience. [...] Understanding more about why this happened is vital; if larger glaciers retreat at similar rates, it could have "catastrophic implications for sea level rise," the authors wrote in a statement accompanying the report. Antarctica holds enough ice to raise global sea level by around 190 feet. Models show that the latest time this kind of ice plain melting occurred was between about 15,000 and 19,000 years ago, "during a period of warming that ended the last Ice Age," notes the report.

"[W]e hadn't seen it play out live before, certainly not at this rate," said Naomi Ochwat, a study co-author and postdoctoral associate at the University of Colorado Boulder.

concertina226 shares a report from The Register: [A massive power outage in April left tens of millions across Spain, Portugal, and parts of France without electricity for hours due to cascading grid failures, exposing how fragile and interconnected Europe's energy infrastructure is. The incident, though not a cyberattack, reignited concerns about the vulnerability of aging, fragmented, and insecure operational technology systems that could be easily exploited in future cyber or ransomware attacks.] This headache is one the European Commission is focused on. It is funding several projects looking at making electric grids more resilient, such as the eFort framework being developed by cybersecurity researchers at the independent non-profit Netherlands Organisation for Applied Scientific Research (TNO) and the Delft University of Technology (TU Delft).

TNO's SOARCA tool is the first ever open source security orchestration, automation and response (SOAR) platform designed to protect power plants by automating the orchestration of the response to physical attacks, as well as cyberattacks, on substations and the network, and the first country to demo it will be the Ukraine this year. At the moment, SOAR systems only exist for dedicated IT environments. The researchers' design includes a SOAR system in each layer of the power station: the substation, the control room, the enterprise layer, the cloud, or the security operations centre (SOC), so that the SOC and the control room work together to detect anomalies in the network, whether it's an attacker exploiting a vulnerability, a malicious device being plugged into a substation, or a physical attack like a missile hitting a substation. The idea is to be able to isolate potential problems and prevent lateral movement from one device to another or privilege escalation, so an attacker cannot go through the network to the central IT management system of the electricity grid. [...]

The SOARCA tool is underpinned by CACAO Playbooks, an open source specification developed by the OASIS Open standards body and its members (which include lots of tech giants and US government agencies) to create standardized predefined, automated workflows that can detect intrusions and changes made by malicious actors, and then carry out a series of steps to protect the network and mitigate the attack. Experts largely agree the problem facing critical infrastructure is only worsening as years pass, and the more random Windows implementations that are added into the network, the wider the attack surface is. [...] TNO's Wolthuis said the energy industry is likely to be pushed soon to take action by regulators, particularly once the Network Code on Cybersecurity (NCCS), which lays out rules requiring cybersecurity risk assessments in the electricity sector, is formalized.

A long-simmering battle over who controls credit scoring in America has erupted into open warfare. Fair Isaac, whose FICO score is used in about 90% of consumer-lending decisions in the U.S., announced it will double the price of its mortgage credit score to $10 next year. The company also said it will bypass the three credit-reporting firms that have supplied the data feeding into its algorithm for decades.

Equifax, Experian and TransUnion created VantageScore in 2006 as an alternative to FICO and collectively own the scoring system. The move came months after Bill Pulte, head of the Federal Housing Finance Agency, announced that Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac would allow lenders to use VantageScore for mortgage approvals. The three credit-reporting firms responded by offering VantageScore free for many loans. Fair Isaac had charged a few cents per score for decades before chief executive Will Lansing began raising prices several years ago. Revenue from selling credit scores reached $920 million in fiscal 2024, nearly five times what it was a decade earlier.

Palantir launched a fellowship that recruited high school graduates directly into full-time work, bypassing college entirely. The company received more than 500 applications and selected 22 for the inaugural class. The four-month program began with seminars on Western civilization, U.S. history, and leaders including Abraham Lincoln and Winston Churchill. Fellows then embedded in client teams working on live projects for hospitals, insurance companies, defense contractors, and government agencies.

CEO Alex Karp, who studied at Haverford and Stanford, said in August that hiring university students now means hiring people engaged in "platitudes." The program wraps up in November. Palantir executives said they had a clear sense by the third or fourth week of which fellows were succeeding in the company environment. Fellows who perform well will receive offers for permanent positions without college degrees.

"Ubuntu's decision to switch to Rust-based coreutils in 25.10 hasn't been the smoothest ride," writes the blog OMG Ubuntu, "as the latest — albeit now resolved — bug underscores." [Coreutils] are used by a number of processes, apps and scripts, including Ubuntu's own unattended-upgrades process, which automatically checks for new software updates. Alas, the Rust-based version of date had a bug which meant Ubuntu 25.10 desktops, servers, cloud and container images were not able to automatically check for updates when configured. Unattended-upgrades hooks into the date utility to check the timestamp of a reference file of when an update check was last run and, past a certain date, checks again. But date was incorrectly showing the current date, always.

A fix has been issued so only Ubuntu 25.10 installs withrust-coreutils 0.2.2-0ubuntu2 (or earlier) are affected.

Slashdot reader BrianFagioli summarizes some news from Nerds.xyz: Creative Technology has launched Sound Blaster Re:Imagine, a modular, Linux-powered audio hub that reimagines the classic PC sound card for the modern age. The device acts as both a high-end digital-to-analog converter (DAC) and a customizable control deck that connects PCs, consoles, phones, and tablets in one setup.

Users can instantly switch inputs and outputs, while developers get full hardware access through an SDK for creating their own apps. It even supports AI-driven features like an on-device DJ, a revived "Dr. Sbaitso" speech synthesizer, and a built-in DOS emulator for retro gaming.

The Kickstarter campaign has already raised more than $150,000, far surpassing its initial goal of $15,000 with over 50 days remaining. Each unit ships with a modular "Horizon" base and swappable knobs, sliders, and buttons, while a larger "Vertex" version will unlock at a higher funding milestone.

Running an unspecified Linux build, Re:Imagine positions itself as both a nostalgic nod to Sound Blaster's roots and a new open platform for creators, gamers, and tinkerers.

"Amazon has deployed Rivian's electric delivery vans in Canada for the first time," reports CleanTechnica, with 50 now deployed in the Vancouver area.

Amazon's director of Global Fleet and Products says there's now over 35,000 electric vans deployed globally — and that they've delivered more than 1.5 billion packages.

More from the blog Teslarati: In December 2024, the companies announced they had successfully deployed 20,000 EDVs across the U.S. In the first half of this year, 10,000 additional vans were delivered, and Amazon's fleet had grown to 30,000 EDVs by mid-2025. Amazon's fleet of EDVs continues to grow rapidly and has expanded to over 100 cities in the United States... The EDV is a model that is exclusive to Amazon, but Rivian sells the RCV, or Rivian Commercial Van, openly. It detailed some of the pricing and trim options back in January when it confirmed it had secured orders from various companies, including AT&T.

Ubuntu "is adopting the memory-safe Rust language," reports ZDNet, citing remarks at this year's Ubuntu Summit from Jon Seager, Canonical's VP of engineering for Ubuntu: . Seager said the engineering team is focused on replacing key system components with Rust-based alternatives to enhance safety and resilience, starting with Ubuntu 25.10. He stressed that resilience and memory safety, not just performance, are the principal drivers: "It's the enhanced resilience and safety that is more easily achieved with Rust ports that are most attractive to me". This move is echoed in Ubuntu's adoption of sudo-rs, the Rust implementation of sudo, with fallback and opt-out mechanisms for users who want to use the old-school sudo command.

In addition to sudo-rs, Ubuntu 26.04 will use the Rust-based uutils/coreutils for Linux's default core utilities. This setup includes ls, cp, mv, and dozens of other basic Unix command-line tools. This Rust reimplementation aims for functional parity with GNU coreutils, with improved safety and maintainability.

On the desktop front, Ubuntu 26.04 will also bring seamless TPM-backed full disk encryption. If this approach reminds you of Windows BitLocker or MacOS FileVault, it should. That's the idea.
In other news, Canonical CEO Mark Shuttleworth said "I'm a believer in the potential of Linux to deliver a desktop that could have wider and universal appeal." (Although he also thinks "the open-source community needs to understand that building desktops for people who aren't engineers is different. We need to understand that the 'simple and just works' is also really important.")

Shuttleworth answered questions from Slashdot's readers in 2005 and 2012.

Longtime Slashdot reader AmiMoJo shares a report from the Financial Times: Solar power developers want to cover an area larger than Washington, DC, with silicon panels and batteries, converting sunlight into electricity that will power air conditioners in sweltering Las Vegas along with millions of other homes and businesses. But earlier this month, bureaucrats in charge of federal lands scrapped collective approval for the Esmeralda 7 projects, in what campaigners fear is part of an attack on renewable energy under President Donald Trump. "We will not approve wind or farmer destroying [sic] Solar," he posted on his Truth Social platform in August. Developers will need to reapply individually, slowing progress.

Thousands of miles away on the other side of the Pacific Ocean, it is a different story. China has laid solar panels across an area the size of Chicago high up on the Tibetan Plateau, where the thin air helps more sunlight get through. The Talatan Solar Park is part of China's push to double its solar and wind generation capacity over the coming decade. "Green and low-carbon transition is the trend of our time," President Xi Jinping told delegates at a UN summit in New York last month. China's vast production of solar panels and batteries has also pushed down the prices of renewables hardware for everyone else, meaning it has "become very difficult to make any other choice in some places," according to Heymi Bahar, senior analyst at the International Energy Agency. [...]

More broadly, the US's focus on fossil fuels and pullback of support for clean energy further cedes influence over the future global energy system to China. The US is trying to tie its trading partners into fossil fuels, pressing the EU to buy $750 billion of American oil, natural gas, and nuclear technologies during his presidency as part of a trade deal, scuppering an initiative to begin decarbonizing world shipping and pressuring others to reduce their reliance on Chinese technology. But the collapsing cost of solar panels in particular has spoken for itself in many parts of the world. Experts caution that the US's attacks on renewables could cause lasting damage to its competitiveness against China, even if an administration more favorable to renewables were to follow Trump's.

Disney's channels, including ESPN, ABC, FX, and NatGeo, have gone dark on YouTube TV after Google and Disney failed to renew their carriage agreement before the October 30 deadline, with each side blaming the other for using unfair negotiating tactics and price hikes. YouTube TV says it will issue a $20 credit to subscribers if the blackout continues while negotiations proceed. Engadget reports: "Last week Disney used the threat of a blackout on YouTube TV as a negotiating tactic to force deal terms that would raise prices on our customers," YouTube said in an announcement on its blog. "They're now following through on that threat, suspending their content on YouTube TV." YouTube added that Disney's decision harms its subscribers while benefiting its own live TV products, such as Hulu+Live TV and Fubo.

In a statement sent to the Los Angeles Times, however, Disney accused Google's YouTube TV of choosing to deny "subscribers the content they value most by refusing to pay fair rates for [its] channels, including ESPN and ABC." Disney also accused Google of using its market dominance to "eliminate competition and undercut the industry-standard terms" that other pay-TV distributors have agreed to pay for its content.

An anonymous reader shares a report: Is installing Windows 11 with a local account or on unsupported hardware harmful or dangerous? YouTube's AI moderation system seems to think so, as it has started pulling videos that show users how to sidestep Microsoft's setup restrictions.

Tech YouTuber Rich White, aka CyberCPU Tech, was the first to go public about the issue on October 26, when he posted a video reporting the removal of a how-to he published on installing Windows 11 25H2 with a local account instead of a Microsoft account. In the video, White expressed concern that YouTube's automated flagging process may be the root of the problem, as he found it hard to believe that "creating a local account in Windows 11 could lead to serious harm or even death," as YouTube reportedly alleged when it removed the video.

When he appealed, White said that YouTube denied the request within 10 to 20 minutes, early on a Sunday morning, which led him to speculate that there wasn't a human in the loop when the request was shut down. That wasn't his only video removed, either. The next day, White uploaded his video for this week on installing Windows 11 25H2 on unsupported hardware, which was removed hours after being posted. YouTube justified the removal on similar grounds. [...] At least two other YouTubers - Britec09 and Hrutkay Mods - have released videos alleging much of the same.

Trevor McNally posts videos of himself opening locks. The former Marine has 7 million followers and nearly 10 million people watched him open a Proven Industries trailer hitch lock in April using a shim cut from an aluminum can. The Florida company responded by filing a federal lawsuit in May charging McNally with eight offenses. Judge Mary Scriven denied the preliminary injunction request in June and found the video was fair use.

McNally's followers then flooded the company with harassment. Proven dismissed the case in July and asked the court to seal the records. The company had initiated litigation over a video that all parties acknowledged was accurate. ArsTechnica adds: Judging from the number of times the lawsuit talks about 1) ridicule and 2) harassment, it seems like the case quickly became a personal one for Proven's owner and employees, who felt either mocked or threatened. That's understandable, but being mocked is not illegal and should never have led to a lawsuit or a copyright claim. As for online harassment, it remains a serious and unresolved issue, but launching a personal vendetta -- and on pretty flimsy legal grounds -- against McNally himself was patently unwise. (Doubly so given that McNally had a huge following and had already responded to DMCA takedowns by creating further videos on the subject; this wasn't someone who would simply be intimidated by a lawsuit.)

In the end, Proven's lawsuit likely cost the company serious time and cash -- and generated little but bad publicity.

A top United States regulator plans to unveil a faster approach to approving custom gene-editing treatments, a move designed to unleash a wave of industry investment that will yield cures for patients with rare diseases. From a report: Vinay Prasad, who oversees gene therapies at the Food and Drug Administration, said scientific advances, like Crispr, have forced the agency to relax some of its strict rules. As an example, he cited the case of 10-month-old KJ Muldoon, who this year became the first person in history to have his genes custom edited to cure an inherited disease.

"Regulation has to evolve as fast as science evolves," Prasad said in an interview with Bloomberg News. The agency is "going to be extremely flexible and work very fast with the scientists who want to bring these therapies to kids who need it." Prasad plans to publish a paper in early November outlining the FDA's new approach. He predicted it will spark interest in developing treatments for conditions that may affect only a handful of people.

An anonymous reader shares a report: Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) does not let people decline to be scanned by its new facial recognition app, which the agency uses to verify a person's identity and their immigration status, according to an internal Department of Homeland Security (DHS) document obtained by 404 Media. The document also says any face photos taken by the app, called Mobile Fortify, will be stored for 15 years, including those of U.S. citizens.

The document provides new details about the technology behind Mobile Fortify, how the data it collects is processed and stored, and DHS's rationale for using it. On Wednesday 404 Media reported that both ICE and Customs and Border Protection (CBP) are scanning peoples' faces in the streets to verify citizenship.

"ICE does not provide the opportunity for individuals to decline or consent to the collection and use of biometric data/photograph collection," the document, called a Privacy Threshold Analysis (PTA), says. A PTA is a document that DHS creates in the process of deploying new technology or updating existing capabilities. It is supposed to be used by DHS's internal privacy offices to determine and describe the privacy risks of a certain piece of tech. "CBP and ICE Privacy are jointly submitting this new mobile app PTA for the ICE Mobile Fortify Mobile App (Mobile Fortify app), a mobile application developed by CBP and made accessible to ICE agents and officers operating in the field," the document, dated February, reads. 404 Media obtained the document (which you can see here) via a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request with CBP.

An anonymous reader shares a report: The International Criminal Court will switch its internal work environment away from Microsoft Office to Open Desk, a European open source alternative, the institution confirmed to Euractiv. The switch comes amid rising concerns about public bodies being reliant on US tech companies to run their services, which have stepped up sharply since the start of US President Donald Trump's second administration.

For the ICC, such concerns are not abstract: Trump has repeatedly lashed out at the court and slapped sanctions on its chief prosecutor, Karim Khan. Earlier this year, the AP also reported that Microsoft had cancelled Khan's email account, a claim the company denies. "We value our relationship with the ICC as a customer and are convinced that nothing impedes our ability to continue providing services to the ICC in the future," a Microsoft spokesperson told Euractiv.

Gallup: After peaking at a record high of 39.9% in 2022, the U.S. adult obesity rate has gradually declined to 37.0% in 2025. This is a statistically meaningful decrease representing an estimated 7.6 million fewer obese adults compared with three years ago. Meanwhile, diagnoses of diabetes -- a lifetime disease that can be managed but not cured -- have now reached an all-time high of 13.8%. Both metrics are part of the ongoing Gallup National Health and Well-Being Index.

[...] Over the past year, more Americans have turned to Type 2 antidiabetic GLP-1 drugs such as semaglutide (brand names Ozempic and Wegovy) for weight loss purposes. The percentage of adults who report taking this class of medicine specifically for weight loss has increased to 12.4%, compared with 5.8% in February 2024 when Gallup first measured it. Usage among women (15.2%) continues to outpace men (9.7%), but both groups have more than doubled their use in the past year. These results dovetail with increased awareness of the drugs used for weight loss, which has risen from 80% to 89% nationally in the same period.

Britain is facing mounting pressure to ban mercury dental fillings, one of the few countries yet to prevent the practice, as new data reveals alarming contamination levels in the nation's fish and shellfish. The Guardian: Mercury is a potent neurotoxin that can harm the nervous, digestive and immune systems, as well as the lungs, kidneys, skin and eyes, even at low levels of exposure. Its organic form, methylmercury, is particularly dangerous to unborn babies and can move through the food chain building up in insects, fish and birds.

Britain is lagging behind the rest of the world on phasing out mercury dental fillings, with 43 countries having already banned mercury amalgam, including the EU, Sweden, Norway, Tanzania, Uganda, Indonesia and the Philippines. Northern Ireland will outlaw mercury fillings from 2035 but no such ban is planned in the rest of Britain. According to new analysis by the Rivers Trust and Wildlife and Countryside Link, more than 98% of fish and mussels tested in English rivers and coastal waters contain mercury above safety limits proposed by the EU, with more than half containing more than five times the recommended safe level.

New submitter hadleyburg writes: President Trump has directed the Department of War to restart nuclear weapons testing. The directive appears to be a counter measure to rival nations catching up with the US. The last US nuclear test was an underground test, on September 23, 1992, in Nevada.

More than a half dozen federal departments and agencies have backed a proposal to ban future sales of the most popular home routers in the United States on the grounds that the vendor's ties to mainland China make them a national security risk, Washington Post reported Thursday, citing people briefed on the matter. From the report: The proposal, which arose from a months-long risk assessment, calls for blocking sales of networking devices from TP-Link Systems of Irvine, California, which was spun off from a China-based company, TP-Link Technologies, but owns some of that company's former assets in China.

The ban was proposed by the Commerce Department and supported this summer by an interagency process that includes the Departments of Homeland Security, Justice and Defense, the people said. "TP-Link vigorously disputes any allegation that its products present national security risks to the United States," Ricca Silverio, a spokeswoman for TP-Link Systems, said in a statement. "TP-Link is a U.S. company committed to supplying high-quality and secure products to the U.S. market and beyond."

If imposed, the ban would be among the largest in consumer history and a possible sign that the East-West divide over tech independence is still deepening amid reports of accelerated Chinese government-supported hacking. Only the legislated ban of Chinese-owned TikTok, which President Donald Trump has averted with executive orders and a pending sale, would impact more U.S. consumers.

Nvidia chief executive Jensen Huang said that maintaining the US edge in AI will require a steady approach that ensures China remains hooked on American technology. From a report: The chipmaker is in an "awkward place" as President Donald Trump prepares to meet with his Chinese counterpart Xi Jinping later this week, Huang told reporters Tuesday at a company conference in Washington. The Nvidia chief praised Trump's commitment to winning but urged careful engagement with China because of the country's massive software developer base and its growing technology capabilities.

During the meeting, Trump and Xi are expected to finalize an agreement to ease trade tensions between the world's two largest economies. When it comes to those negotiations, Huang said he has "no idea" if GPUs -- the chips central to artificial intelligence capabilities -- will be a topic between Trump and Xi.

Huang was careful to leave the negotiating to Trump but encouraged US leadership to think longer term on its overall AI strategy. "A policy that causes America to lose half of the world's developers is not beneficial long-term," Huang said, warning that it was still possible for the US to cede the AI race to China. Keeping US technology in front requires finesse," he said. "It requires balance. It requires long-term thinking."

YouTube says it will automatically upscale videos uploaded below 1080p (full-HD to higher resolution using AI. The Google-owned platform, however, assured that it will give creators and viewers the option to opt out of the enhancement. The feature will apply only to videos uploaded in resolutions from 240p to 720p and will not affect videos that creators have already remastered to 1080p. Creators will retain control over their original files, and viewers will be able to watch videos in their uploaded resolution through a settings option.

YouTube said it plans to support upscaling to 4K in the near future. The company also said it is expanding the video thumbnail size limit from 2MB to 50MB to support 4K images. On videos with tagged products, viewers will soon be able to scan a QR code on TV screens to purchase items directly.

Nvidia became the world's first $5 trillion company on Wednesday after its stock climbed 5% in early Wall Street trading to push its market capitalization to $5.13 trillion. The Silicon Valley chipmaker reached the milestone three months after hitting $4 trillion and three years after it was valued at roughly $400 billion before the debut of ChatGPT.

Nvidia chief executive Jensen Huang said Tuesday that Nvidia had secured half a trillion dollars in orders for its AI chips over the next five quarters. The stock had already gained 5% on Tuesday and added more than $200 billion to its market value. President Donald Trump said Wednesday he planned to discuss Nvidia's Blackwell chip with China's President Xi Jinping when the two leaders meet later this week. Nvidia's latest generation of graphics processing units is not currently available in China because of US export controls. The company's shares have risen more than 85% in the past six months.

Bill Gates is retreating from his earlier warnings about climate change. The Microsoft co-founder now argues that what he called the "doomsday view of climate change" has caused the climate community to focus too heavily on near-term emissions goals and divert resources from addressing poverty and disease in the world's poorest countries.

In a blog post, Gates wrote that climate change will have serious consequences but will not lead to humanity's demise. He acknowledges that some climate advocates will call him a hypocrite given his own carbon footprint and his 2021 book warning that climate change could be as deadly as COVID-19 by mid-century and five times as deadly by 2100.

The poorest countries receive less than 1% of rich countries' budgets at their highest level and that this share is shrinking as wealthy nations cut aid and low-income countries struggle with debt, he wrote. Rising temperatures are now inevitable and that the current consensus suggests Earth's average temperature will be between two and three degrees Celsius higher than 1850 levels by 2100.

darwinmac writes: Ubuntu Unity is staring at a possible shutdown. A community moderator has gone public pleading for help, admitting the project is "broken and needs to be fixed." Neowin reports the distro is suffering from critical bugs so severe that upgrades from 25.04 to 25.10 are failing and even fresh installs are hit. The moderator admits they lack the technical skill or time to perform a full rescue and is asking the broader community, including devs, testers, and UI designers, to step in so Ubuntu Unity can reach 26.04 LTS. If no one steps in soon, this community flavor might quietly fade away once more.

The Python Software Foundation rejected a $1.5 million U.S. government grant because it required them to renounce all diversity, equity, and inclusion initiatives. "The non-profit would've used the funding to help prevent supply chain attacks; create a new automated, proactive review process for new PyPI packages; and make the project's work easily transferable to other open-source package managers," reports The Register. From the report: The programming non-profit's deputy executive director Loren Crary said in a blog post today that the National Science Founation (NSF) had offered $1.5 million to address structural vulnerabilities in Python and the Python Package Index (PyPI), but the Foundation quickly became dispirited with the terms (PDF) of the grant it would have to follow. "These terms included affirming the statement that we 'do not, and will not during the term of this financial assistance award, operate any programs that advance or promote DEI [diversity, equity, and inclusion], or discriminatory equity ideology in violation of Federal anti-discrimination laws,'" Crary noted. "This restriction would apply not only to the security work directly funded by the grant, but to any and all activity of the PSF as a whole."

To make matters worse, the terms included a provision that if the PSF was found to have voilated that anti-DEI diktat, the NSF reserved the right to claw back any previously disbursed funds, Crary explained. "This would create a situation where money we'd already spent could be taken back, which would be an enormous, open-ended financial risk," the PSF director added. The PSF's mission statement enshrines a commitment to supporting and growing "a diverse and international community of Python programmers," and the Foundation ultimately decided it wasn't willing to compromise on that position, even for what would have been a solid financial boost for the organization. "The PSF is a relatively small organization, operating with an annual budget of around $5 million per year, with a staff of just 14," Crary added, noting that the $1.5 million would have been the largest grant the Foundation had ever received - but it wasn't worth it if the conditions were undermining the PSF's mission. The PSF board voted unanimously to withdraw its grant application.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Variety: A news special on Britain's Channel 4 titled "Will AI Take My Job?" investigated how automation is reshaping the workplace and pitting humans against machines. At the end of the hour-long program, a major twist was revealed: the anchor, who narrates and appears throughout the telecast reporting from different locations, was entirely AI-generated.

In the final moments of the special, the host says: "AI is going to touch everybody's lives in the next few years. And for some, it will take their jobs. Call center workers? Customer service agents? Maybe even TV presenters like me. Because I'm not real. In a British TV first, I'm an AI presenter. Some of you might have guessed: I don't exist, I wasn't on location reporting this story. My image and voice were generated using AI."

The hour aired Monday at 8 p.m. as part of the "Dispatches" documentary program, which Channel 4 says is now the first British television show to feature an AI presenter. The "anchor" was produced by AI fashion brand Seraphinne Vallora for Kalel Productions and was guided by prompts to create a realistic on-camera performance. "The use of an AI presenter is not something we will be making a habit of at Channel 4 -- instead our focus in news and current affairs is on premium, fact checked, duly impartial and trusted journalism -- something AI is not capable of doing," said Louisa Compton, Channel 4's head of news and current affairs. "But this stunt does serve as a useful reminder of just how disruptive AI has the potential to be -- and how easy it is to hoodwink audiences with content they have no way of verifying."

Humanity has failed to limit global heating to 1.5C and must change course immediately, the secretary general of the UN has warned. From a report: In his only interview before next month's Cop30 climate summit, Antonio Guterres acknowledged it is now "inevitable" that humanity will overshoot the target in the Paris climate agreement, with "devastating consequences" for the world. He urged the leaders who will gather in the Brazilian rainforest city of Belem to realise that the longer they delay cutting emissions, the greater the danger of passing catastrophic "tipping points" in the Amazon, the Arctic and the oceans.

"Let's recognise our failure," he told the Guardian and Amazon-based news organisation Sumauma. "The truth is that we have failed to avoid an overshooting above 1.5C in the next few years. And that going above 1.5C has devastating consequences. Some of these devastating consequences are tipping points, be it in the Amazon, be it in Greenland, or western Antarctica or the coral reefs.

He said the priority at Cop30 was to shift direction: "It is absolutely indispensable to change course in order to make sure that the overshoot is as short as possible and as low in intensity as possible to avoid tipping points like the Amazon. We don't want to see the Amazon as a savannah. But that is a real risk if we don't change course and if we don't make a dramatic decrease of emissions as soon as possible."

Chegg says it will lay off about 45% of its workforce, or 388 employees, as the "new realities" of artificial intelligence and diminished traffic from internet search have led to plummeting revenue. From a report: The online education company, founded 20 years ago, has been hit by the rise of generative AI software tools, such as OpenAI's ChatGPT, which have become increasingly popular among students.

Chegg also sued Google in February, arguing that AI summaries of search results have hurt its traffic and sales. The company reiterated that claim on Monday, saying AI and "reduced traffic from Google to content publishers" have damaged its business. "As a result, and reflecting the company's continued investment in AI, Chegg is restructuring the way it operates its academic learning products," the company said. The cuts come after Chegg in May laid off 22% of its workforce, citing increasing adoption of AI. Chegg's market cap has fallen 98.8% in recent years to about $135 million.

An anonymous reader shares a report: More than half of the grades handed out at Harvard College are A's, an increase from decades past even as school officials have sounded the alarm for years about rampant grade inflation. About 60% of the grades handed out in classes for the university's undergraduate program are A's, up from 40% a decade ago and less than a quarter 20 years ago, according to a report released Monday by Harvard's Office of Undergraduate Education.

Other elite universities, including competing Ivy League schools, have also been struggling to rein in grade inflation. The report's author, Harvard undergraduate dean Amanda Claybaugh, urged faculty to curtail the practice of awarding top scores to the majority of students, saying it undermines academic culture. "Current practices are not only failing to perform the key functions of grading; they are also damaging the academic culture of the college more generally," she said in the report.

For the first time, George Orwell's Animal Farm and 1984 have been translated into Welsh, with localized titles, character names, and even a Welsh version of Newspeak. The BBC reports: Animal Farm, a 1945 political allegory inspired by the Russian Revolution, is set in north-west Wales in the Welsh edition, Foel yr Anifeiliaid, with Orwell's classic characters given Welsh names to add authenticity. Mil Naw Wyth Deg Pedwar, or 1984, Orwell's vision of a bleak totalitarian future, published in 1949, contains a Welsh version of Newspeak, the novel's fictional language. Both books remain "seminal works with timeless relevance," said Welsh book publisher Melin Bapur, and feel "particularly relevant now in an age of 'alternative facts', AI, and misinformation."

BrianFagioli shares a report from NERDS.xyz: Mozilla is testing a new Firefox feature that delivers direct results inside the address bar instead of forcing users through a search results page. The company says the feature will use a privacy framework called Oblivious HTTP, encrypting queries so that no single party can see both what you type and who you are. Some results could be sponsored, but Mozilla insists neither it nor advertisers will know user identities. The system is starting in the U.S. and may expand later if performance and privacy benchmarks are met. Further reading: Mozilla to Require Data-Collection Disclosure in All New Firefox Extensions

An anonymous reader quotes a report from BleepingComputer: The number of victims paying ransomware threat actors has reached a new low, with just 23% of the breached companies giving in to attackers' demands. With some exceptions, the decline in payment resolution rates continues the trend that Coveware has observed for the past six years. In the first quarter of 2024, the payment percentage was 28%. Although it increased over the next period, it continued to drop, reaching an all-time low in the third quarter of 2025.

One explanation for this is that organizations implemented stronger and more targeted protections against ransomware, and authorities increasing pressure for victims not to pay the hackers. [...] Over the years, ransomware groups moved from pure encryption attacks to double extortion that came with data theft and the threat of a public leak. Coveware reports that more than 76% of the attacks it observed in Q3 2025 involved data exfiltration, which is now the primary objective for most ransomware groups. The company says that when it isolates the attacks that do not encrypt the data and only steal it, the payment rate plummets to 19%, which is also a record for that sub-category.

The average and median ransomware payments fell in Q3 compared to the previous quarter, reaching $377,000 and $140,000, respectively, according to Coveware. The shift may reflect large enterprises revising their ransom payment policies and recognizing that those funds are better spent on strengthening defenses against future attacks. The researchers also note that threat groups like Akira and Qilin, which accounted for 44% of all recorded attacks in Q3 2025, have switched focus to medium-sized firms that are currently more likely to pay a ransom. "Cyber defenders, law enforcement, and legal specialists should view this as validation of collective progress," Coveware says. "The work that gets put in to prevent attacks, minimize the impact of attacks, and successfully navigate a cyber extortion -- each avoided payment constricts cyber attackers of oxygen."

Apple is preparing to roll out a new Apple Wallet feature that lets U.S. users create digital IDs linked to their passports, usable at select TSA checkpoints. TechCrunch reports: The feature, previously announced as part of the iOS 26 release, comes on the heels of Apple's expansion of Wallet as more than a payment mechanism or ticket holder, but also a secure place to store a user's digital identity. Currently, support for government IDs in Apple Wallet has rolled out to 12 states and Puerto Rico, or roughly a third of U.S. license holders. However, the passport-tied Digital ID feature didn't arrive with the debut of iOS 26, as Apple said it would come in a future software update. [...]

The coming launch of passport-associated Digital IDs was announced on Sunday by Jennifer Bailey, VP of Apple Pay and Apple Wallet, at the Money 20/20 USA conference, where the exec also shared other stats about Wallet's adoption.

Finland's fertility rate has dropped below 1.3 children per woman, the lowest among Nordic countries and far beneath the 2.1 replacement level needed to maintain a steady population. The rate has declined by a third since 2010. Kela, Finland's social insurance agency, started distributing 2025 "baby boxes" -- filled with clothing and other infant supplies -- in August instead of spring because so many 2024 boxes remained unclaimed.

More parents now choose cash payments over the traditional boxes filled with infant supplies. The decline puzzles researchers because Finland offers paid parental leave for both mothers and fathers, subsidized childcare and national healthcare. Anneli Miettinen, Kela's research manager, said that good family policies no longer explain birth rates in Nordic countries. Immigration has offset some population loss, but officials worry about workforce shrinkage and pension system strain.

Anna Rotkirch, who authored a government-commissioned report, found that many 17-year-olds describe wanting a house, garden, spouse and three children. Her research suggests young people struggle to form relationships, focus on education and careers, and delay childbearing. Some researchers attribute relationship difficulties to technology reducing physical interactions.

The U.S. has formed a $1 billion partnership with AMD to construct two supercomputers that will tackle large scientific problems ranging from nuclear power to cancer treatments to national security, said Energy Secretary Chris Wright and AMD CEO Lisa Su. From a report: The U.S. is building the two machines to ensure the country has enough supercomputers to run increasingly complex experiments that require harnessing enormous amounts of data-crunching capability. The machines can accelerate the process of making scientific discoveries in areas the U.S. is focused on.

Energy Secretary Wright said the systems would "supercharge" advances in nuclear power and fusion energy, technologies for defense and national security, and the development of drugs. Scientists and companies are trying to replicate fusion, the reaction that fuels the sun, by jamming light atoms in a plasma gas under intense heat and pressure to release massive amounts of energy. "We've made great progress, but plasmas are unstable, and we need to recreate the center of the sun on Earth," Wright told Reuters.

Countries signed their first UN treaty targeting cybercrime in Hanoi on Saturday, despite opposition from an unlikely band of tech companies and rights groups warning of expanded state surveillance. From a report: The new global legal framework aims to strengthen international cooperation to fight digital crimes, from child pornography to transnational cyberscams and money laundering. More than 60 countries were seen to sign the declaration Saturday, which means it will go into force once ratified by those states. UN Secretary General Antonio Guterres described the signing as an "important milestone", but that it was "only the beginning".

"Every day, sophisticated scams, destroy families, steal migrants and drain billions of dollars from our economy... We need a strong, connected global response," he said at the opening ceremony in Vietnam's capital on Saturday. The UN Convention against Cybercrime was first proposed by Russian diplomats in 2017, and approved by consensus last year after lengthy negotiations. Critics say its broad language could lead to abuses of power and enable the cross-border repression of government critics.