An anonymous reader shared this report from the Washington Post: Facebook's loosening of its content moderation standards early this year got lots of attention and criticism. But a new study suggests that it might matter less what is taken down than when. The research finds that Facebook posts removed for violating standards or other reasons have already been seen by at least three-quarters of the people who would be predicted to ever see them.

"Content takedowns on Facebook just don't matter all that much, because of how long they take to happen," said Laura Edelson, an assistant professor of computer science at Northeastern University and the lead author of the paper in the Journal of Online Trust and Safety. Social media platforms generally measure how many bad posts they have taken down as an indication of their efforts to suppress harmful or illegal material. The researchers advocate a new metric: How many people were prevented from seeing a bad post by Facebook taking it down...?

"Removed content we saw was mostly garden-variety spam — ads for financial scams, [multilevel marketing] schemes, that kind of thing," Edelson said... The new research is a reminder that platforms inadvertently host lots of posts that everyone agrees are bad.

Remember when U.S. National Security Adviser Mike Waltz mistakenly included a journalist in an encrypted chatroom to discuss looming U.S. military action against Yemen's Houthis?

A recent photo of a high-level cabinet meeting caught Waltz using a "less-secure Signal app knockoff," reports the Guardian: The chat app Waltz was using appears to be a modified version of Signal called TM SGNL, made by a company that copies messaging apps but adds an ability to retain messages and archive them. The White House officials may be using the modified Signal in order to comply with the legal requirement that presidential records be preserved... That function suggests the end-to-end encryption that makes Signal trusted for sharing private communications is possibly "not maintained, because the messages can be later retrieved after being stored somewhere else", according to 404 Media.
Thursday the national security adviser was removed from his position, the article points out.

He was instead named America's ambassador to the United Nations.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from the New York Times: Google plans to roll out its Gemini artificial intelligence chatbot next week for children under 13 (source paywalled; alternative source) who have parent-managed Google accounts, as tech companies vie to attract young users with A.I. products. "Gemini Apps will soon be available for your child," the company said in an email this week to the parent of an 8-year-old. "That means your child will be able to use Gemini" to ask questions, get homework help and make up stories. The chatbot will be available to children whose parents useFamily Link, a Google service that enables families to set up Gmail and opt into services like YouTube for their child. To sign up for a child account, parents provide the tech company with personal data like their child's name and birth date. Gemini has specific guardrails for younger users to hinder the chatbot from producing certain unsafe content, said Karl Ryan, a Google spokesman. When a child with a Family Link account uses Gemini, he added, the company will not use that data to train its A.I.

Introducing Gemini for children could accelerate the use of chatbots among a vulnerable population as schools, colleges, companies and others grapple with the effects of popular generative A.I. technologies. Trained on huge amounts of data, these systems can produce humanlike text and realistic-looking images and videos. [...] Google acknowledged some risks in its email to families this week, alerting parents that "Gemini can make mistakes" and suggesting they "help your child think critically" about the chatbot. The email also recommended parents teach their child how to fact-check Gemini's answers. And the company suggested parents remind their child that "Gemini isn't human" and "not to enter sensitive or personal info in Gemini." Despite the company's efforts to filter inappropriate material, the email added, children "may encounter content you don't want them to see."

An anonymous reader quotes a report from CNN: Driverless trucks are officially running their first regular long-haul routes, making roundtrips between Dallas and Houston. On Thursday, autonomous trucking firm Aurora announced it launched commercial service in Texas under its first customers, Uber Freight and Hirschbach Motor Lines, which delivers time- and temperature-sensitive freight. Both companies conducted test runs with Aurora, including safety drivers to monitor the self-driving technology dubbed "Aurora Driver." Aurora's new commercial service will no longer have safety drivers.

"We founded Aurora to deliver the benefits of self-driving technology safely, quickly, and broadly, said Chris Urmson, CEO and co-founder of Aurora, in a release on Thursday. "Now, we are the first company to successfully and safely operate a commercial driverless trucking service on public roads." The trucks are equipped with computers and sensors that can see the length of over four football fields. In four years of practice hauls the trucks' technology has delivered over 10,000 customer loads. As of Thursday, the company's self-driving tech has completed over 1,200 miles without a human in the truck. Aurora is starting with a single self-driving truck and plans to add more by the end of 2025.

The U.S. government is seeking to break up Google's advertising technology business after a judge ruled the company holds an illegal monopoly over ad tools for publishers, marking the second such antitrust case following a similar request to divest Chrome. The Guardian reports: "We have a defendant who has found ways to defy" the law, US government lawyer Julia Tarver Wood told a federal court in Virginia, as she urged the judge to dismiss Google's assurance that it would change its behavior. "Leaving a recidivist monopolist" intact was not appropriate to solve the issue, she added. [...] The US government specifically alleged that Google controls the market for publishing banner ads on websites, including those of many creators and small news providers.

The hearing in a Virginia courtroom was scheduled to plan out the second phase of the trial, set for September, in which the parties will argue over how to fix the ad market to satisfy the judge's ruling. The plaintiffs argued in the first phase of the trial last year that the vast majority of websites use Google ad software products which, combined, leave no way for publishers to escape Google's advertising technology and pricing.

The district court judge Leonie Brinkema agreed with most of that reasoning, ruling last month that Google built an illegal monopoly over ad software and tools used by publishers, but partially dismissed the argument related to tools used by advertisers. The US government said it would use the trial to recommend that Google should spin off its ad publisher and exchange operations, as Google could not be trusted to change its ways. "Behavioral remedies are not sufficient because you can't prevent Google from finding a new way to dominate," Tarver Wood said.

Google countered that it would recommend that it agree to a binding commitment that it would share information with advertisers and publishers on its ad tech platforms. Google lawyer Karen Dunn did, however, acknowledge the "trust issues" raised in the case and said the company would accept monitoring to guarantee any commitments made to satisfy the judge. Google is also arguing that calls for divestment are not appropriate in this case, which Brinkema swiftly refused as an argument. The judge urged both sides to mediate, stressing that coming to a compromise solution would be cost-effective and more efficient than running a weeks-long trial.

Uber is partnering with Chinese autonomous driving startup Momenta to launch robotaxi services outside the U.S. and China, starting in Europe in early 2026 with safety operators onboard. CNBC reports: Uber said the goal is to combine its global ridesharing network with Momenta's technology to deliver safe and efficient robotaxi services. "This collaboration brings together Uber's global ridesharing expertise and Momenta's AI-first autonomous driving technology, paving the way for a future where more riders around the world experience the benefits of reliable and affordable autonomous mobility," Uber CEO Dara Khosrowshahi said in the press release. Momenta CEO Xudong Cao said the arrangement "completes the key ecosystem needed to scale autonomous driving globally."

Momenta, based in Beijing, is a leading autonomous driving company known for its "two-leg" product strategy. It offers both Mpilot, a mass-production-ready assisted driving system, and MSD (Momenta Self-Driving), aimed at full autonomy. The company has years of experience operating autonomous vehicles in cities across China and has partnerships with large equipment manufacturers.

Pinterest is facing widespread user backlash over abrupt account suspensions and pin removals, with many reporting no clear reason or warning before being locked out. The Verge reports: The r/Pinterest subreddit is also currently dominated by posts from confused users who claim their accounts have been suspended without evidence explaining how they violated the platform's guidelines. Users are also reporting they're experiencing an unusually high quantity of pins being deleted by Pinterest with absurd explanations, such as quilting magazines, cross-stitch art, and Minecraft bunk bed builds all being flagged for "adult content."

"We hear your concerns about recent account deactivations on Pinterest," the company said on X. "To ensure Pinterest remains a safe and positive platform, we continuously monitor for content that violates our Community Guidelines and accounts with violative content may be deactivated as a result." "Pinterest has long-established, public Community Guidelines that clearly outline what is and isn't allowed on the platform," Pinterest spokesperson Ivy Choi said in a statement to The Verge. "We're committed to building a safer and more positive platform, and enforce these policies rigorously and continuously. Users who believe their account may have been deactivated mistakenly may submit an appeal."

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Teslarati: Waymo Driver is already reducing severe crashes and enhancing the safety of vulnerable road users. As per a new research paper set for publication in the Traffic Injury Prevention Journal, Waymo Driver had outperformed human drivers in safety, particularly for vulnerable road users (VRUs). Over 56.7 million miles, compared to human drivers, Waymo Driver achieved a 92% reduction in pedestrian injury crashes. It also saw 82% fewer crashes with injuries with cyclists and 82% fewer crashes with injuries with motorcyclists. Waymo Driver also slashed injury-involving intersection crashes by 96%, which are a leading cause of severe road harm for human drivers. Waymo Driver saw 85% fewer crashes with suspected serious or worse injuries as well. "It's encouraging to see real-world data showing Waymo outperforming human drivers when it comes to safety. Fewer crashes and fewer injuries -- especially for people walking and biking -- is exactly the kind of progress we want to see from autonomous vehicles," said Jonathan Adkins, Chief Executive Officer at Governors Highway Safety Association.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from 404 Media: A new memo from Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth is calling on defense contractors to grant the Army the right-to-repair. The Wednesday memo is a document about "Army Transformation and Acquisition Reform" that is largely vague but highlights the very real problems with IP constraints that have made it harder for the military to repair damaged equipment.

Hegseth made this clear at the bottom of the memo in a subsection about reform and budget optimization. "The Secretary of the Army shall identify and propose contract modifications for right to repair provisions where intellectual property constraints limit the Army's ability to conduct maintenance and access the appropriate maintenance tools, software, and technical data -- while preserving the intellectual capital of American industry," it says. "Seek to include right to repair provisions in all existing contracts and also ensure these provisions are included in all new contracts." [...]

The memo would theoretically mean that the Army would refuse to sign contracts with companies that make it difficult to fix what it sells to the military. The memo doesn't carry the force of law, but subordinates do tend to follow the orders given within. The memo also ordered the Army to stop producing Humvees and some other light vehicles, and Breaking Defense confirmed that it had. "This is a victory in our work to let people fix their stuff, and a milestone on the campaign to expand the Right to Repair. It will save the American taxpayer billions of dollars, and help our service members avoid the hassle and delays that come from manufacturers' repair restrictions," Isaac Bowers, the Federal Legislative Director of U.S. PIRG, said in a statement.

Meta's Reality Labs posted a $4.2 billion operating loss in Q1 2025. According to CNBC, cumulative losses since 2020 now exceed $60 billion. From the report: Meta's Reality Labs unit is responsible for the company's Quest-branded virtual reality headsets and Ray-Ban Meta Smart Glasses. It's the key business unit that anchors CEO Mark Zuckerberg's plans to build a new computing platform involving digital worlds accessible via VR and augmented reality devices. [...]

Wall Street has questioned Meta's big spending on the metaverse, which Zuckerberg has said could take many years to turn into a real business. The company must now also contend with sweeping new tariffs from President Donald Trump and the likely increase in costs that will follow, potentially leading to higher-priced devices. Last week, Meta said that an unspecified number of Reality Labs employees were laid off. Those workers were part of the Oculus Studios unit, which creates VR and AR games and content for Quest VR headsets.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from CBS News: The House of Representatives on Thursday voted to block California from implementing plans to block new sales of gas-powered vehicles in a decade. In a 246-164 vote, members approved House Joint Resolution 88, which seeks to withdraw a waiver granted by the Environmental Protection Agency to California during the Biden administration to implement the ban. Thirty-five Democrats joined 211 Republicans in backing the measure. [...] The House also approved two other measures which withdraw waivers on the state's plans to increase sales of zero-emissions trucks in a 231-191 vote, along with the state's latest nitrogen oxide emission standards for engines in a 225-196 vote.

Following Thursday's vote, Newsom's office issued a statement saying the House illegally used the Congressional Review Act (CRA) to repeal the state's Clean Air Act waivers. The governor's office also said the move contradicts the Government Accountability Office and Senate Parliamentarian who have ruled the CRA does not apply to the state's waivers. "Trump Republicans are hellbent on making California smoggy again. Clean air didn't used to be political. In fact, we can thank Ronald Reagan and Richard Nixon for our decades-old authority to clean our air," Newsom said. "The only thing that's changed is that big polluters and the right-wing propaganda machine have succeeded in buying off the Republican Party -- and now the House is using a tactic that the Senate's own parliamentarian has said is lawless. Our vehicles program helps clean the air for all Californians, and we'll continue defending it." Sen. Alex Padilla (D-California) said in a statement: "House Republicans' misguided and cynical attempts to gut the Clean Air Act and undercut California's climate leadership ignores the reality of California's strength as the fourth largest economy in the world...

... If Senate Republicans take up these measures under the Congressional Review Act, they will be going nuclear by overruling the Parliamentarian, all to baselessly attack California."

A "small percentage" of Google's users in the US will begin seeing an AI Mode tab in Google Search "in the coming weeks," the company said Thursday, marking the tool's first deployment outside the company's experimental Labs environment.

Unlike traditional search results that display URLs based on user queries, AI Mode generates conversational responses from Google's search index. The feature will appear as a dedicated tab positioned before the standard "All," "Images," and other search filters. The deployment represents Google's direct challenge to LLM-powered search engines like Perplexity and ChatGPT.

AI Mode differs from existing AI Overviews in Google Search, which merely insert AI summaries between the search box and web results.

Meta has eliminated key privacy protections for Ray-Ban Meta smart glasses users in a policy update that took effect April 29th. The company now permanently enables Meta AI with camera functionality unless "Hey Meta" voice commands are completely disabled, while simultaneously removing users' ability to opt out of having their voice recordings stored in the cloud.

These recordings are kept for up to a year for Meta's product development, with the company only deleting accidental voice interactions after 90 days. Users can manually delete individual recordings but cannot prevent the initial collection.

The European Space Agency has launched the Biomass satellite to study the world's forests using the first space-based P-band synthetic aperture radar, aiming to accurately measure carbon storage and improve understanding of the global carbon cycle. CBS News reports: Forests on Earth collectively absorb and store about 8 billion tons of carbon dioxide annually, the ESA said. That regulates the planet's temperature. Deforestation and degradation, especially in tropical regions, means that stored carbon is being released back into the atmosphere, the ESA said, which can contribute to climate change. There's a lack of accurate data on how much carbon the planet's estimated 1.5 trillion trees store and how much human activity can impact that storage, the ESA said.

To "weigh" the planet's trees and determine their carbon dioxide capacity, Biomass will use a P-band synthetic aperture radar. It's the first such piece of technology in space. The radar can penetrate forest canopies and measure woody biomass, including trunks, branches and stems, the ESA said. Most forest carbon is stored in these parts of the trees. Those measurements will act as a proxy for carbon storage, the ESA said. [...] Once the radar takes the measurements, the data will be received by the large mesh reflector. It will then be sent to the ESA's mission control center.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from PCWorld: Windows 7 came onto the market in 2009 and put Microsoft back on the road to success after Windows Vista's annoying failures. But Windows 7 was not without its faults, as this curious story proves. Some users apparently encountered a vexing problem at the time: if they set a single-color image as the background, their Windows 7 PC always took 30 seconds to start the operating system and switch from the welcome screen to the desktop.

In a recent blog post, Microsoft veteran Raymond Chen explains the exact reason for this. According to him, a simple programming error meant that users had to wait longer for the system to boot. After logging in, Windows 7 first set up the desktop piece by piece, i.e. the taskbar, the desktop window, icons for applications, and even the background image. The system waited patiently for all components to finish loading and received feedback from each individual component. Or, it switched from the welcome screen to the desktop after 30 seconds if it didn't receive any feedback.

The problem here: The code for the message that the background image is ready was located within the background image bitmap code, which means that the message never appeared if you did not have a real background image bitmap. And a single color is not such a bitmap. The result: the logon system waited in vain for the message that the background has finished loading, so Windows 7 never started until the 30 second fallback activated and sent users to the desktop. The problem could also occur if users had activated the "Hide desktop icons" group policy. This was due to the fact that such policies were only added after the main code had been written and called by an If statement. However, Windows 7 was also unable to recognize this at first and therefore took longer to load.

New submitter LDA6502 writes: The Republican chairman of the House Transportation and Infrastructure Committee is proposing a new annual federal vehicle registration fee of $200 for full EVs, $100 for hybrid EVs, and $20 for combustion vehicles. The tax would be tied to inflation, would be collected by the states, and would expire in 2035. Critics of the proposal note that it could result in low mileage EVs paying a far higher tax rate than heavy ICE trucks and SUVs. Ars Technica notes that the bill "exempts commercial vehicles, which should see a rush from tax avoiders to register their vehicles under their businesses [...]." Farm vehicles will also be exempt from the tax.

"The Eno Center for Transportation calculates that this new tax will contribute an extra $110 billion to the highway Trust Fund by 2035 but that cuts to other taxes and more spending mean that the fund will still be $222 billion short of its commitments -- assuming that this added fee doesn't further dampen EV adoption in the U.S., that is."

Google is investing in training over 100,000 new U.S. electricians through a $10 million grant, aiming to address a critical labor shortage driven by AI-fueled data center growth and rising electricity demands. Reuters reports: A lack of access to power supplies has become the biggest problem for giant technology companies racing to develop artificial intelligence in energy-intensive data centers, which are driving up U.S. electricity demand after nearly 20 years of stagnation. The situation has led President Donald Trump to declare a national energy emergency aimed at speeding up permitting for generation and transmission projects.

Google's funding, which includes a $10 million grant for electrical worker nonprofits, is the latest in a series of recent moves by giant technology companies to alleviate power project backlogs and electricity shortfalls across the United States. [...] The Google grant will be used for electrician apprenticeship programs and the training of existing workforce through organizations, including the Electrical Training Alliance, International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers and the National Electrical Contractors Association. It could increase the pipeline of electrical workers by 70% by the end of the decade, the company said. "This initiative with Google and our partners at NECA and the Electrical Training Alliance will bring more than 100,000 sorely needed electricians into the trade to meet the demands of an AI-driven surge in data centers and power generation," said Kenneth Cooper, international president of the IBEW labor union.

Alphabet CEO Sundar Pichai told a judge who found that Google illegally monopolizes online search that a Justice Department proposal to share search data with rivals would be a "de facto" divestiture of the company's search engine. From a report: If Google were required to share both its search data and the information on how it ranks results, rivals could reverse engineer "every aspect of our technology," Pichai testified on Wednesday.

"The proposal on data sharing is so far reaching, so extraordinary," Pichai said. It "feels like de facto divestiture of search" and its entire intellectual property and technology over 25 years of research, he said. During testimony in federal court in Washington, Pichai asserted that a package of antitrust remedies proposed by the government is too extreme and will undermine Google's ability to compete in the market.

Google Play's app marketplace has seen a dramatic 47% drop in available apps -- from 3.4 million to 1.8 million -- since the start of 2024. An analysis by app intelligence provider Appfigures attributes the decline to stricter quality standards, expanded human reviews, and increased enforcement against low-quality and deceptive apps. TechCrunch reports: In July 2024, Google announced it would raise the minimum quality requirements for apps, which may have impacted the number of available Play Store app listings.

Instead of only banning broken apps that crashed, wouldn't install, or run properly, the company said it would begin banning apps that demonstrated "limited functionality and content." That included static apps without app-specific features, such as text-only apps or PDF file apps. It also included apps that provided little content, like those that only offered a single wallpaper. Additionally, Google banned apps that were designed to do nothing or have no function, which may have been tests or other abandoned developer efforts.

Reached for comment, Google confirmed that its new policies were factors here, which also included an expanded set of verification requirements, required app testing for new personal developer accounts, and expanded human reviews to check for apps that try to deceive or defraud users. In addition, the company pointed to other 2024 investments in AI for threat detection, stronger privacy policies, improved developer tools, and more. As a result, Google prevented 2.36 million policy-violating apps from being published on its Play Store and banned more than 158,000 developer accounts that had attempted to publish harmful apps, it said. TechCrunch also notes that a new trader status rule, which went into effect in the EU this February, could be another contributing factor. It requires developers to display their names and addresses in their app listings, and failure to comply would see their apps removed from EU app stores.

Ars Technica's Andrew Cunningham reports: Intel's oddball Core Ultra 200V laptop chips -- codenamed Lunar Lake -- will apparently be a one-off experiment, not to be replicated in future Intel laptop chips. They're Intel's only processors with memory integrated onto the CPU package; the only ones with a neural processing unit that meets Microsoft's Copilot+ performance requirements; and the only ones with Intel's best-performing integrated GPUs, the Intel Arc 130V and 140V.

Today, Intel announced some updates to its graphics driver that specifically benefit those integrated GPUs, welcome news for anyone who bought one and is trying to get by with it as an entry-level gaming system. Intel says that version 32.0.101.6734 of its graphics driver can speed up average frame rates in some games by around 10 percent, and can speed up "1 percent low FPS" (that is, for any given frames per second measurement, whatever your frame rate is the slowest 1 percent of the time) by as much as 25 percent. This should, in theory, make games run better in general and ease some of the stuttering you notice when your game's performance dips down to that 1 percent level.