Airbus's Silicon Valley innovation center Acubed and Google spinout SandboxAQ have successfully tested a quantum-sensing navigation device as an alternative to GPS during 150 hours of flights across the continental United States. The toaster-sized MagNav device uses quantum physics to measure unique magnetic signatures in Earth's crust [non-paywalled, syndicated link], with an AI algorithm matching those signatures to exact locations.

The technology achieved Federal Aviation Administration requirements by pinpointing aircraft location within two nautical miles 100% of the time and within 550 meters 64% of the time. SandboxAQ CEO Jack Hidary called it "the first novel absolute navigation system to our knowledge in the last 50 years." The analog system cannot be jammed or spoofed like GPS, which faces increasing tampering in the Middle East and around Ukraine and Russia.

Reddit has begun verifying users' ages in the UK to restrict access to "certain mature content" for minors, complying with the UK's Online Safety Act. The BBC reports: Reddit, known for its online communities and discussions, said that while it does not want to know who its audience is: "It would be helpful for our safety efforts to be able to confirm whether you are a child or an adult." Ofcom, the UK regulator, said: "We expect other companies to follow suit, or face enforcement if they fail to act." Reddit said that from 14 July, an outside firm called Persona will perform age verification for the social media platform either through an uploaded selfie or "a photo of your government ID," such as a passport. It said Reddit will not have access to the photo and will only retain a user's verification status and date of birth so people do not have to re-enter it each time they try to access restricted content. Reddit added that Persona "promises not to retain the picture for longer than seven days" and will not have access to a user's data on the site. The new rules in the UK come into force on 25 July. [...]

Companies that fail to meet the rules face fines of up to 18 million pounds or 10% of worldwide revenue, "whichever is greater." [Ofcom] added that in the most serious cases, it can seek a court order for "business disruption measures," such as requiring payment providers or advertisers to withdraw their services from a platform, or requiring Internet Service Providers to block access to a site in the UK."

Plasma Bigscreen, KDE's TV-focused interface, is being revived after years of inactivity thanks to contributor Devin, who overhauled the UI, redesigned the Settings app, improved app launching, and updated key modules. While still in progress -- with features like HDMI-CEC remote support and a virtual keyboard pending -- the project aims to rejoin KDE's official Plasma release schedule, potentially in version 6.5. Neowin reports: If you have not heard of it, Plasma Bigscreen is a Plasma shell for televisions, with original support for the now-defunct Mycroft AI assistant. It used to provide a simple launcher for apps and custom "Mycroft Skills" before development stalled, causing most distributions to drop it. The project was left behind during the big transition to Plasma 6 last year because no one had ported it in time for the megarelease. After a friend of his started poking at the code, Devin stepped in to tackle the much-needed work. [...]

For anyone who wants to test this out, you can do as Devin did by installing Plasma Bigscreen on a Raspberry Pi using postmarketOS, though you would have to compile it yourself or pull from the nightly repos to get the latest changes. Applications like Kodi and VacuumTube (smart TV version of YouTube) work well with remote navigation, and some games like SuperTuxKart are playable. Controller support exists, but getting TV remotes to work over HDMI CEC is still untested. The project is far from finished; it still needs an arrow-navigable virtual keyboard and a clearer long-term direction now that Mycroft is gone. Still, the goal is to get it back into the official Plasma release schedule, possibly for version 6.5.

BrianFagioli shares a report from NERDS.xyz: Blender 4.5 has arrived and it's a long-term support release. That means users get two full years of updates and bug fixes, making it a smart choice for anyone looking for stability in serious projects. Whether you're a solo artist or part of a studio pipeline, this version is built to last. Here's a list of key features and changes in this release:

- Vulkan backend replaces OpenGL (faster, smoother UI)
- Adaptive subdivision up to 14x faster with multithreading
- New Geometry Nodes: Camera Info, Instance Bounds
- GPU-accelerated compositor nodes with standardized inputs
- New Boolean solver: Manifold (cleaner, faster mesh operations)
- UV maps visible in Object Mode + improved selection behavior
- Grease Pencil render pass and Geometry Nodes integration
- Improved file import support: PLY, OBJ, STL, CSV, VDB
- Deprecations: Collada, Big Endian, legacy .blend, Intel Mac support
- Cycles OptiX now requires NVIDIA driver v535+
- New shader variants for add-on developers (POLYLINES_*, POINT_*)
~500 bug fixes across all major systems

Perplexity CEO Aravind Srinivas warned young entrepreneurs that tech giants will "copy anything that's good" during a talk at Y Combinator's AI Startup School, telling founders they must "live with that fear." Srinivas said that companies raising tens of billions need to justify capital expenditures and search for new revenue streams.

Perplexity pioneered web-crawling chatbots when it launched its answer engine in December 2022, but Google's Bard added internet-crawling three months later, followed by ChatGPT in May 2023 and Anthropic's Claude in March 2025. The competition has extended to browsers, with Perplexity launching its Comet browser on July 9 and Reuters reporting that OpenAI is developing a web browser to challenge Google Chrome. Perplexity's communications head Jesse Dwyer said larger companies will "drown your voice."

A team of Japanese researchers has set a new world record for internet speed, transmitting data at 125,000 gigabytes per second over 1,120 miles using a new type of 19-core optical fiber. "That's about 4 million times the average internet speed in the U.S. and would allow you to download the entire Internet Archive in less than four minutes," notes Live Science. It's also "more than twice the previous world record of 50,250 Gbps, previously set by a different team of scientists in 2024." From the report: To achieve this new speed -- which has not been independently verified -- the team developed a new form of optical fiber to send information at groundbreaking speeds over roughly the distance between New York and Florida. Details about this achievement were presented April 3 at the 48th Optical Fiber Communication Conference in San Francisco, according to a statement from Japan's National Institute of Information and Communications Technology.

The new type of optical fiber is equivalent to 19 standard optical fibers in its data transmission capacity. The new optical fiber is better suited to long-haul transmission than existing cables because the centers of all 19 fibers interact with light in the same way, so they encounter less light fluctuation, which results in less data loss. The new cable squeezes 19 separate fibers into a diameter of five-thousandths of an inch (0.127 millimeters), which is the same thickness as most existing single-fiber cables already in use. This effort means the new cable can transmit more data using existing infrastructure. [...] For this demonstration, the data ran through a transmission system 21 times, finally reaching a data receiver after traveling the equivalent of 1,120 miles.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from MIT Technology Review: California's statewide power grid operator is poised to become the first in North America to deploy artificial intelligence to manage outages, MIT Technology Review has learned. "We wanted to modernize our grid operations. This fits in perfectly with that," says Gopakumar Gopinathan, a senior advisor on power system technologies at the California Independent System Operator -- known as the CAISO and pronounced KAI-so. "AI is already transforming different industries. But we haven't seen many examples of it being used in our industry."

At the DTECH Midwest utility industry summit in Minneapolis on July 15, CAISO is set to announce a deal to run a pilot program using new AI software called Genie, from the energy-services giant OATI. The software uses generative AI to analyze and carry out real-time analyses for grid operators and comes with the potential to autonomously make decisions about key functions on the grid, a switch that might resemble going from uniformed traffic officers to sensor-equipped stoplights. But while CAISO may deliver electrons to cutting-edge Silicon Valley companies and laboratories, the actual task of managing the state's electrical system is surprisingly analog.

Today, CAISO engineers scan outage reports for keywords about maintenance that's planned or in the works, read through the notes, and then load each item into the grid software system to run calculations on how a downed line or transformer might affect power supply. "Even if it takes you less than a minute to scan one on average, when you amplify that over 200 or 300 outages, it adds up," says Abhimanyu Thakur, OATI's vice president of platforms, visualization, and analytics. "Then different departments are doing it for their own respective keywords. Now we consolidate all of that into a single dictionary of keywords and AI can do this scan and generate a report proactively." If CAISO finds that Genie produces reliable, more efficient data analyses for managing outages, Gopinathan says, the operator may consider automating more functions on the grid. "After a few rounds of testing, I think we'll have an idea about what is the right time to call it successful or not," he says.

Microsoft is testing a new adaptive energy saver mode in Windows 11 that automatically turns energy saver on or off based on system workload instead of battery percentage, aiming to extend laptop battery life without dimming screen brightness. The feature is currently available to Windows Insider testers and expected to roll out later this year. The Verge reports: The energy saver mode in Windows 11 typically dims a display brightness by 30 percent, disables transparency effects, and stop apps running in the background. Non-critical Windows update downloads are also paused, and certain apps like OneDrive, OneNote, and Phone Link may not sync fully while energy saver is enabled. This new adaptive energy saver mode, which will only be available on devices with a battery, will automatically enable or disable without affecting screen brightness. That will make it less noticeable on devices like laptops, tablets, and handhelds.

"Adaptive energy saver is an opt-in feature that automatically enables and disables energy saver, without changing screen brightness, based on the power state of the device and the current system load," explains Microsoft's Windows Insider team.

The U.S. Department of Defense has awarded contracts worth up to $200 million each to OpenAI, Google, Anthropic, and xAI to scale adoption of advanced AI. "The contracts will enable the DoD to develop agentic AI workflows and use them to address critical national security challenges," reports Reuters, citing the department's Chief Digital and Artificial Intelligence Office. From the report: Separately on Monday, xAI announced a suite of its products called "Grok for Government", making its advanced AI models -- including its latest flagship Grok 4 -- available to federal, local, state and national security customers. The Pentagon announced last month that OpenAI was awarded a $200 million contract, saying the ChatGPT maker would "develop prototype frontier AI capabilities to address critical national security challenges in both warfighting and enterprise domains."

The contracts announced on Monday deepen the ties between companies leading the AI race and U.S. government operations, while addressing concerns around the need for competitive contracts for AI use in federal agencies. "The adoption of AI is transforming the (DoD's) ability to support our warfighters and maintain strategic advantage over our adversaries," Chief Digital and AI Officer Doug Matty said.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Investing.com: Meta's newly formed superintelligence lab is discussing potential changes to the company's artificial intelligence strategy that could represent a major shift for the social media giant. A small group of top members of the lab, including 28-year-old Alexandr Wang, Meta's new chief A.I. officer, talked last week about abandoning the company's most powerful open source A.I. model, called Behemoth, in favor of developing a closed model, according to a report in the New York Times, citing people familiar with the matter.

Meta has traditionally open sourced its A.I. models, making the computer code public for other developers to build upon, and any shift toward a closed A.I. model would mark a significant philosophical change for Meta. Meta had completed training its Behemoth model by feeding in data to improve it, but delayed its release due to poor internal performance. After the company announced the formation of the superintelligence lab last month, teams working on the Behemoth model, which is considered a "frontier" model, stopped conducting new tests on it. The discussions within the superintelligence lab remain preliminary, and no decisions have been finalized. Any potential changes would require approval from Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: Samuel Herman and Alexander Baciu never liked using Comcast's cable broadband. Now, the residents of Saline, Michigan, operate a fiber Internet service provider that competes against Comcast in their neighborhoods and has ambitions to expand. "All throughout my life pretty much, I've had to deal with Xfinity's bullcrap, them not being able to handle the speeds that we need," Herman told Ars. "I lived in a house of 10. I have seven other brothers and sisters, and there's 10 of us in total with my parents." With all those kids using the Internet for school and other needs, "it just doesn't work out," he said. Herman was particularly frustrated with Comcast upload speeds, which are much slower than the cable service's download speeds. "Many times we would have to call Comcast and let them know our bandwidth was slowing down... then they would say, 'OK, we'll refresh the system.' So then it would work again for a week to two weeks, and then again we'd have the same issues," he said. Herman, now 25, got married in 2021 and started building his own house, and he tried to find another ISP to serve the property. He was familiar with local Internet service providers because he worked in construction for his father's company, which contracts with ISPs to build their networks. But no fiber ISP was looking to compete directly against Comcast where he lived, though Metronet and 123NET offer fiber elsewhere in the city, Herman said. He ended up paying Comcast $120 a month for gigabit download service with slower upload speeds. Baciu, who lives about a mile away from Herman, was also stuck with Comcast and was paying about the same amount for gigabit download speeds.

Herman said he was the chief operating officer of his father's construction company and that he shifted the business "from doing just directional drilling to be a turnkey contractor for ISPs." Baciu, Herman's brother-in-law (having married Herman's oldest sister), was the chief construction officer. Fueled by their knowledge of the business and their dislike of Comcast, they founded a fiber ISP called Prime-One. Now, Herman is paying $80 a month to his own company for symmetrical gigabit service. Prime-One also offers 500Mbps for $75, 2Gbps for $95, and 5Gbps for $110. The first 30 days are free, and all plans have unlimited data and no contracts. "We are 100 percent fiber optic," Baciu told Ars. "Everything that we're doing is all underground. We're not doing aerial because we really want to protect the infrastructure and make sure we're having a reliable connection." Each customer's Optical Network Terminal (ONT) and other equipment is included in the service plan. Prime-One provides a modem and the ONT, plus a Wi-Fi router if the customer prefers not to use their own router. They don't charge equipment or installation fees, Herman and Baciu said.

Prime-One began serving customers in January 2025, and Baciu said the network has been built to about 1,500 homes in Saline with about 75 miles of fiber installed. Prime-One intends to serve nearby towns as well, with the founders saying the plan is to serve 4,000 homes with the initial build and then expand further. [...] A bit more than 100 residents have bought service so far, they said. Herman said the company is looking to sign up about 30 percent of the homes in its network area to make a profit. "I feel fairly confident," Herman said, noting the number of customers who signed up with the initial construction not even halfway finished.

A small fraction of hyperactive social media users generates the vast majority of toxic online content, according to research by New York University psychology professor Jay Van Bavel and colleagues Claire Robertson and Kareena del Rosario. The study found that 10% of users produce roughly 97% of political tweets, while just 0.1% of users share 80% of fake news.

Twelve accounts known as the "disinformation dozen" created most vaccine misinformation on Facebook during the pandemic, the research found. In experiments, researchers paid participants to unfollow divisive political accounts on X. After one month, participants reported 23% less animosity toward other political groups. Nearly half declined to refollow hostile accounts after the study ended, and those maintaining healthier newsfeeds reported reduced animosity 11 months later. The research describes social media as a "funhouse mirror" that amplifies extreme voices while muting moderate perspectives.

Air India's chief executive urged staff to avoid drawing premature conclusions about what caused one of the airline's Boeing triangle jets to crash last month, after a preliminary investigation ruled out mechanical or maintenance issues, turning attention to the pilots' actions. WSJ: Campbell Wilson told staff that the probe into the crash was "far from over," according to an internal memo, reviewed by The Wall Street Journal, in which he set out some of the findings of a report issued by India's Aircraft Accident Investigation Bureau at the end of last week.

Wilson's memo didn't mention one of the AAIB's findings: that the airplane's fuel-control switches had been turned off one by one, seconds after takeoff, starving both engines of fuel. The switches, which sit between the two seats in the cockpit, were turned back on about 10 seconds later, but the engines apparently couldn't fully restart and gain thrust fast enough, the report said.

The crash of the London-bound Boeing 787 Dreamliner killed all but one of the 242 passengers and crew on board, as well as 19 people on the ground, when the plane slammed into a residential area beyond the airport in the Indian city of Ahmedabad. In the memo, Wilson said "over the past 30 days, we've seen an ongoing cycle of theories, allegations, rumours and sensational headlines, many of which have later been disproven."

Google will merge ChromeOS and Android into a unified platform, according to Sameer Samat, President of Android Ecosystem at Google. "We're going to be combining ChromeOS and Android into a single platform, and I am very interested in how people are using their laptops these days and what they're getting done," Samat said during a recent interview.

Mark Zuckerberg said on Monday that Meta would spend hundreds of billions of dollars to build several massive AI data centers for superintelligence, intensifying his pursuit of a technology that he has chased with a talent war for top AI engineers. From a report: The social media giant is among the large technology companies that have chased high-profile deals and doled out multi-million-dollar pay packages in recent months to fast-track work on machines that can outthink humans on most tasks.

Unveiling the spending commitment in a Threads post on Monday, CEO Zuckerberg touted the strength in the company's core advertising business to support the massive spending that has raised concerns among tech investors about potential payoffs. "We have the capital from our business to do this," Zuckerberg said. He also cited a report from a chip industry publication Semianalysis that said Meta is on track to be the first lab to bring online a 1-gigawatt-plus supercluster, which refers to a massive data center built to train advanced AI models.

VPN provider BulletVPN has shut down its servers with immediate effect, leaving subscribers without service regardless of their subscription terms. The company announced the closure on its website, citing "shifts in market demand, evolving technology requirements, and sustainability of operations."

Users with active subscriptions can receive a free six-month subscription to competitor Windscribe, "along with discounted long-term plans." Windscribe clarified it has not acquired BulletVPN or assumed control of its operations, and no user data including email addresses or account information was shared between the companies.

Bay Area Michelin-starred restaurants are conducting extensive background research on diners before they arrive, mining social media profiles and maintaining detailed guest databases to personalize dining experiences. Lazy Bear maintains records on 115,000 people and employs a guest services coordinator who creates weekly reports by researching publicly available social media information.

Staff study color-coded Google documents containing guest data before each service. SingleThread's reservation team researches social media, Google, and LinkedIn profiles for guests, where meals cost over $500 on weekends. General manager Akeel Shah told SFGate the information helps "tailor the experience and make it memorable." Acquerello has collected guest data for 36 years, initially handwritten in books. Co-owner Giancarlo Paterlini said their director of operations reviews each reservation for dining history and wine preferences to customize service.

"Steam quietly welcomed another indie game this week, but this one is distinctly different for a lot of reasons," writes Notebookcheck: Dogwalk, which debuted on July 11, is the kind of short, gentle experience that almost forces you to smile. Developed by Blender Studio, the game introduces players to a gorgeous winter landscape. You play as a cute, fluffy dog, with a small child in tow...

What's particularly interesting here is that Dogwalk is more than just another charming indie project. It's Blender Studio's showcase for what's possible using fully open-source tools. The entire project — assets, animations, and code — is made with Blender and the popular Godot Game Engine. Unlike industry giants such as Unity or Unreal, Godot is completely open source, meaning it doesn't require developers to pay royalties or follow strict licensing agreements. This should make it great for small studios and independent creators, as it lowers the entry barrier to game creation.

Dogwalk is 100% free, which fits neatly into its open-source philosophy

"In the battle for Ukraine, the front line is increasingly at a standstill" because of "rapid innovations in drone technology..." according to the Wall Street Journal. "Each side has hundreds of them constantly in the air across the 750-mile front line."

And drones "now bring everything from food and water to ammunition, power banks — and, in at least one case, a fire extinguisher — to the front, sparing soldiers trips through the most dangerous part of the battlefield where enemy drones might pick them off." Drones can lay mines, deliver everything from ammunition to medication and even evacuate wounded or dead soldiers. Crucially, drones spot any movement along the front line and are dispatched to strike enemy troops and vehicles. When Russia sent tank columns into Ukraine in February 2022, Ukraine needed to find out where they were headed — and fast. Enter the humble "wedding drone," available in stores for about $2,000 and repurposed to scan for enemy units rather than capture nuptial panoramas. Deployed by enthusiasts acting independently or attached to army units, the drones helped Ukrainian forces, which were vastly outnumbered and outgunned, to know exactly where to deploy to counter Russian arrowheads.

Surveillance drones quickly became a necessity rather than a luxury. Often provided by charity funds, they were used to scan enemy positions for equipment, stores and headquarters.... A cheap and simple tweak made the so-called wedding drones deadly. Tech buffs realized that a simple claw-like contraption, created using a 3-D printer, could be activated from the radio controller by turning on the drone's light, causing it to release a grenade. The explosion could wound or kill a soldier or even detonate an armored vehicle if dropped through its hatch. Over time, soldiers experimented with ways to add more explosives, for example by melting down explosives garnered from Soviet-era munitions and pouring them into new, lighter plastic casings.

No innovation has had a bigger impact on the war in Ukraine than first-person-view, or FPV, drones. With explosives strapped to them, FPVs fly directly into their targets, turning them into low-cost suicide bombers. Though FPVs don't deliver as much explosive punch as rockets, they are far more accurate — and the sheer volume that Ukraine has manufactured means they can be deployed to similar effect... Sitting in a bunker several miles behind the front, a drone pilot slips on FPV goggles to see the view from the drone's camera and fly it into an enemy position or asset. The Russians have since adopted FPVs en masse. Their abundance has played a central role in slowing down the movement of the front line. Anything within around 12 miles of the contact line can now become a target for FPVs. They are so cheap to make that both sides can expend them on any target — even a single infantryman.

Because they are so small and fast, FPVs are difficult to shoot down. The main defense against them has been electronic jamming systems, which disrupt the communication between the drone and the pilot. Though most drone innovations in the war have come from the Ukrainian side, the Russians pioneered the most important adaptation for FPV drones — the addition of a fiber-optic cable connecting the drone to the pilot that can overcome jamming.
Benjamin Franklin once predicted flying machines might "convince sovereigns of the folly of war... since it will be impracticable for the most potent of them to guard his dominions..."

Electrek reports on the new Omo X, a scooter planned for release in 2026 that's "full of premium tech features that blur the lines between e-scooter and self-driving EV." At its recent launch in Jakarta, the Omo X didn't just sit pretty center stage, it actually drove itself onto the stage using its "Halo Pilot" system, which apparently comes complete with adaptive cruise control, remote summon, self-parking, and even automatic reversing and self-balancing at low speeds. This is legit autonomous behavior previously reserved for cars, now shrunk down and smoothed out for a two-wheeler. Under the hood — or rather, behind the sleek bodywork — Omoway's Halo architecture delivers collision warning, emergency-brake assist, blind spot monitoring, and V2V [vehicle-to-vehicle] communication.

The frame is modular, too. It can be reconfigured in step-through, straddle, or touring posture to suit casual riders, commuters, and motorcycle wannabes alike. That kind of flexibility isn't just a marketing gimmick, but rather it looks purpose-built to capture diverse motorcycle-heavy markets like Indonesia, which counts over 120 million two-wheelers and is quickly transitioning to electric models... It's tech-rich, head-turning, and seems built to evolve with software updates. The remote summon and AI-assisted features could genuinely simplify urban mobility, and tricks like automatically driving itself to a charging station sound legitimately useful...

[But] Omoway's vision here will have to carry extra sensors, actuators, and redundant systems to support those smart functions. With added costs and complexity, will riders in developing markets pay a premium, carry extra maintenance risk, or worry about obsolescence? Much hinges on Omoway's software support and local service networks.
The article reports a projected price around €3,500 (roughly $3,800). "And while Indonesia may have been the launchpad, global markets aren't off the table..."