An anonymous reader quotes a report from Bloomberg: Alphabet's Google is facing billions of dollars in potential damage claims as part of mass arbitration tied to the company's online search and advertising technology businesses, which courts have ruled were illegal monopolies. Advertisers are banding together to seek payouts through mass arbitration proceedings. While many companies that displayed ads purchased through Google -- including USA Today Co. and Advance Publications -- have sued for damages since the rulings in 2024, advertiser contracts with the search giant require mandatory arbitration over legal disputes.

In arbitration, legal disputes are handled by a mediator, a process that tends to favor companies in individual claims. Mass arbitration -- where 25 or more claims against the same company are pooled together -- have become more common and provide a greater likelihood of settlement awards for claimants. Ashley Keller, a Chicago lawyer whose firm has handled mass arbitrations against DoorDash, Postmates and TurboTax-maker Intuit, said he's already signed up a "significant number" of advertisers to participate in claims against Google. The first of those are expected to be filed this week.

"Two federal judges have already adjudicated Google to be a monopolist," Keller said in an interview with Bloomberg. "It seems sensible to seek redress." Keller, who is also representing Texas and other states in a lawsuit against Google for monopolization of advertising technology, estimates potential claims for online search and display ads could reach $218 billion or more, based on calculations from an economist his firm has hired. Similar mass arbitrations have lasted 12 to 24 months between the filing of claims and resolution, he said. "Given the nature of these matters, we cannot estimate a possible loss," Google said in a recent corporate filing. "We believe we have strong arguments against these open claims and will defend ourselves vigorously."

Researchers at the University of Southern California say they've developed a memristor memory device that continued operating at 700 degrees Celsius. "And crucially, 700 degrees was not the limit, it was simply as hot as their testing equipment could go," adds ScienceAlert. "The device showed no signs of failing." From the report: The device is called a memristor and it's a nanoscale component that can both store information and perform computing operations. Think of it as a tiny sandwich with two electrode layers on the outside and a thin ceramic filling in the middle. The team built theirs from tungsten, the metal with the highest melting point of any element, combined with a ceramic called hafnium oxide, and with a layer of graphene at the bottom. Each material can withstand enormous heat. Together, they turned out to be extraordinary.

What makes graphene the key ingredient is the way it interacts with tungsten at the atomic level. In a conventional device, heat causes metal atoms to drift slowly through the ceramic layer until they bridge the two electrodes, short circuiting everything and leaving the device permanently broken. Graphene stops that process dead. Its surface chemistry with tungsten is ... almost like oil and water. Tungsten atoms that drift toward the graphene find they simply cannot take hold, no anchor, no short circuit, no failure. The team used advanced electron microscopy and quantum level computer simulations to understand exactly why, turning a single lucky result into a repeatable principle. The findings have been published in the journal Science.

"The new Linux kernel was released and it's kind of a big deal," writes longtime Slashdot reader rexx mainframe. "Here is what you can expect." Linuxiac reports: A key update in Linux 7.0 is the removal of the experimental label from Rust support. That (of course) does not make Rust a dominant language in kernel development, but it is still an important step in its gradual integration into the project. Another notable security-related change is the addition of ML-DSA post-quantum signatures for kernel module authentication, while support for SHA-1-based module-signing schemes has been removed.

The kernel now includes BPF-based filtering for io_uring operations, providing administrators with improved control in restricted environments. Additionally, BTF type lookups are now faster due to binary search. At the same time, this release continues ongoing cleanup in the kernel's lower layers. The removal of linuxrc initrd code advances the transition to initramfs as the sole early-userspace boot mechanism.

Linux 7.0 also introduces NULLFS, an immutable and empty root filesystem designed for systems that mount the real root later. Plus, preemption handling is now simpler on most architectures, with further improvements to restartable sequences, workqueues, RCU internals, slab allocation, and type-based hardening. Filesystems and storage receive several updates as well. Non-blocking timestamp updates now function correctly, and filesystems must explicitly opt in to leases rather than receiving them by default. Phoronix has compiled a list of the many exciting changes.

Linus Torvalds himself announced the release, which can be downloaded directly from his git tree or from the kernel.org website.

Linux 7.0 has a major new version number but it's "largely a numbering reset [...], not a sign of some unusually disruptive release," notes Linuxiac.

According to the Financial Times, Meta is developing an AI avatar of Mark Zuckerberg that could interact with employees using his voice, image, mannerisms, and public statements, "so that employees might feel more connected to the founder through interactions with it." The Verge reports: Meta may start allowing creators to make AI avatars of themselves if the experiment with Zuckerberg succeeds, according to the Financial Times. [...] Zuckerberg is involved in training the AI avatar, the Financial Times reports, and has also started spending five to 10 hours per week coding on Meta's other AI projects and participating in technical reviews.

Critics say social media is engineered to be as addictive as tobacco or gambling, writes the Washington Post — while adding that "the science has been moving in parallel with the court's recognition." A growing body of research links heavy social media use not only to declines in mental health but to measurable cognitive effects — on attention, memory and focus — that in some studies resemble accelerated aging. Science also suggests we have more control than we realize when it comes to reversing this damage, and the solution is surprisingly simple: Take a break... "Digital detoxes" can sound like a fad. But in one of the largest studies to date, published in PNAS Nexus and involving more than 467 participants with an average age of 32, even a short time away produced striking results — effectively erasing a decade of age-related cognitive decline.

For 14 days, participants used a commercially available app, Freedom, to block internet access on their phones. They were still allowed calls and text messages, essentially turning a smartphone into a dumb phone. Their time online decreased from 314 minutes to 161 minutes, and by the end of the period the participants had improvements in sustained attention, mental health as well as self-reported well-being. The improvement in sustained attention was about the same magnitude as 10 years of age-related decline, the researchers noted, and the effect of the intervention on depression symptoms was larger than antidepressants and similar to that of cognitive behavioral therapy.

But two things were even more mind-blowing... Even those people who cheated and broke the rules after a few days seemed to have positive effects from the break; and in follow-up reports after the two weeks, many people reported the positive effects lingered. "So you don't have to necessarily restrict yourself forever. Even taking a partial digital detox, even for a few days, seems to work," Kushlev said.
The article also notes a November study at Harvard published in JAMA Network Open where nearly 400 people 'found that even a short break can make a measurable difference: After just one week of reduced smartphone use, participants reported drops in anxiety (16.1 percent), depression (24.8 percent) and insomnia (14.5 percent)..."

"Other experiments point in the same direction — whether decreasing social media use by an hour a day for one week or stepping away from just Facebook and Instagram."

Bruce66423 shares a report from the Guardian: The European parliament has blocked the extension of a law that permits big tech firms to scan for child sexual exploitation on their platforms, creating a legal gap that child safety experts say will lead to crimes going undetected. The law, which was a carve-out of the EU Privacy Act, was put in place in 2021 as a temporary measure allowing companies to use automated detection technologies to scan messages for harms, including child sexual abuse material (CSAM), grooming and sextortion. However, it expired on April 3, and the EU parliament decided not to vote to extend it, amid privacy concerns from some lawmakers.

The regulatory gap has created uncertainty for big tech companies, because while scanning for harms on their platforms is now illegal, they still remain liable to remove any illegal content hosted on their platforms under a different law, the Digital Services Act. Google, Meta, Snap and Microsoft said they would continue to voluntarily scan their platforms for CSAM, in a joint statement posted on a Google blog. Bruce66423 adds: "Child abuse as the excuse for avoiding privacy protections. Who would have thought it?"

Microsoft has started stripping Copilot branding out of Notepad in Windows 11, replacing the old Copilot menu with a more generic "writing tools" label. The AI features themselves aren't going away, but Microsoft seems to be backing off the heavy-handed Copilot branding and extra entry points. Windows Central reports: As promised, Microsoft is now beginning its effort to reduce and remove Copilot branding across Windows 11, with the latest Notepad update for Insiders outright removing the Copilot icon and phrasing. Now, the AI menu is simply called "writing tools," and maintains the same functionality as before. Additionally, Microsoft has also removed references to AI in the Settings area in Notepad. Now, the ability to turn on or off these AI powered writing tools are now listed under "Advanced features."

This change is present in the latest preview build of Notepad which is now rolling out to all Windows Insiders. The app version is 11.2512.28.0, and you'll know you have it if you see the Copilot icon replaced with a pen icon instead. [...] For Notepad, it appears Microsoft has opted to replace the Copilot menu with something more generic. It's still the same functionally, but it's no longer leaning on the tainted Copilot brand. Of course, you can still easily turn off all AI features in Notepad if you don't want them. The Verge reports that the "unnecessary Copilot buttons" are also disappearing from the Snipping Tool, Photos, and Widgets.

Futurism found that Google News is surfacing Polymarket betting pages alongside traditional news sources. "The bets often appear in the 'For you' section of Google News, which is tailored to a user's personal interests," the publication reports. "In one instance, it was even the very top result, as with this bet on the price of Bitcoin." From the report: In our testing, Polymarket bets are also showing up on the Google News home page. But links from the prediction market can pop up all over Google News, including in searches. In further tests, looking up "will ships transit the strait," referring to the Strait of Hormuz, returned numerous credible sources like Financial Times, The Guardian, and Reuters. Just below them, however, was a Polymarket bet on the number of ships that would be allowed to pass through the critical oil passageway.

This doesn't appear to be an accident. When searching "Polymarket" in its search bar, Google News now allows users to choose it as a "source," directing them to a page that aggregates other Polymarket hits. It's not the only non-news site that's selectable as a source -- looking up "Reddit" and "X" offers the option, too -- but searching for "Kalshi," another prediction market and Polymarket's main competitor, doesn't give the option to use it as a source. [...] In light of all this, Polymarket appearing in Google News is a major victory for the prediction platform -- rubber-stamping its image as an authority on developing real-world events right alongside genuine real publishers of journalism.

Gmail's end-to-end encryption is now available on all Android and iOS devices, letting enterprise users send and read encrypted emails directly in the app without any extra tools. "This launch combines the highest level of privacy and data encryption with a user-friendly experience for all users, enabling simple encrypted email for all customers from small businesses to enterprises and public sector," Google announced in a blog post. BleepingComputer reports: Starting this week, encrypted messages will be delivered as regular emails to Gmail recipients' inboxes if they use the Gmail app. Recipients who don't have the Gmail mobile app and use other email services can read them in a web browser, regardless of the device and service they're using.

[...] This feature is now available for all client-side encryption (CSE) users with Enterprise Plus licenses and the Assured Controls or Assured Controls Plus add-on after admins enable the Android and iOS clients in the CSE admin interface via the Admin Console. Gmail's end-to-end encryption (E2EE) feature is powered by the client-side encryption (CSE) technical control, which allows Google Workspace organizations to use encryption keys they control and are stored outside Google's servers to protect sensitive documents and emails.

France says it plans to move some government computers from Windows to Linux as part of a broader push for digital sovereignty and reduced dependence on U.S. technology. TechCrunch reports: In a statement, French minister David Amiel said (translated) that the effort was to "regain control of our digital destiny" by relying less on U.S. tech companies. Amiel said that the French government can no longer accept that it doesn't have control over its data and digital infrastructure. The French government did not provide a specific timeline for the switchover, or which distributions it was considering. Microsoft did not immediately comment on the news.

[...] France's decision to ditch Windows comes months after the government announced it would stop using Microsoft Teams for video conferencing in favor of French-made Visio, a tool based on the open source end-to-end encrypted video meeting tool Jitsi. The French government said it also plans to migrate its health data platform to a new trusted platform by the end of the year.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Drive: An auto dealer software company is pitching AI-powered kiosks designed to replace car salesmen on showroom floors. Automotive News says the industry is "skeptical." But be honest -- would you really rather deal with the average car lot shark than a computer?

Epikar, a South Korean company that cooks up digital management solutions for car dealers, has named its new AI invention the Pikar Genie. The idea is that customers can talk to this device, ask it product questions, and basically do everything you'd do with a car salesman except for actually closing the deal and signing paperwork. Renault, BMW, and Volvo are already using some Epikar products at South Korean dealerships, but this new customer-facing AI product is still in its infancy.

AN reported that "Renault assigns three salespeople to its Seoul showroom enhanced with Epikar automation compared with six for other Renault showrooms in South Korea," according to Epikar CEO Bosuk Han. The company's now looking to expand into America and is apparently already testing its products at at least one dealership stateside. Car-dealer consultant Fleming Ford (Director of Strategic Growth at NCM Associates) said U.S. dealerships "aren't ready for fully automated showrooms."

"The showroom isn't just where you buy a car," Automotive News quoted him saying. "It's where you decide who to trust to help you to choose the right car."

Meta has started removing ads from law firms seeking clients for social media addiction lawsuits, just weeks after a jury found Meta and YouTube negligent in a landmark case involving harm to a young user. "Lawyers across the country now are seeking new plaintiffs, in the hopes of bringing a class action lawsuit that could result in lucrative verdicts," reports Axios. From the report: Axios has identified more than a dozen such ads that were deactivated today, some of which came from large national firms like Morgan & Morgan and Sokolove Law. Almost all of them ran on both Facebook and Instagram. Some also appeared on Threads and Messenger, plus Meta's Audience Network -- which distributes ads to thousands of third-party sites.

One such ad read: "Anxiety. Depression. Withdrawal. Self-harm. These aren't just teenage phases -- they're symptoms linked to social media addiction in children. Platforms knew this and kept targeting kids anyway." A few of the ads still remain active, including some that were posted earlier today. "We're actively defending ourselves against these lawsuits and are removing ads that attempt to recruit plaintiffs for them," a Meta spokesperson said in a statement. "We will not allow trial lawyers to profit from our platforms while simultaneously claiming they are harmful."

"One of VMware's biggest competitors, Nutanix, claims to have swiped tens of thousands of VMware customers," reports Ars Technica. They said higher prices, forced bundling, licensing changes, and more strained partner relationships have frustrated customers and driven them away from the leading virtualization firm. From the report: Speaking at a press briefing at Nutanix's .NEXT conference in Chicago this week, Nutanix CEO Rajiv Ramaswami said that "about 30,000 customers" have migrated from VMware to the rival platform, pointing to customer disapproval over Broadcom's VMware strategy, SDxCentral, a London-based IT publication, reported today. "I think there's no doubt that the customer sentiment continues to be negative about Broadcom," Ramaswami said, per SDxCentral.

Nutanix hasn't specified how many of the customers that it got from VMware are SMBs or enterprise-sized; although, adoption is said to be strongest among mid-market customers as Nutanix also tries wooing larger customers, often by starting with partial deployments. During this week's press briefing, Ramaswami reportedly said that some of the customers that moved from VMware to Nutanix during the latter's most recent fiscal quarter represented Nutanix's "strongest quarterly new logo additions in eight years." "Most of the logos came from our typical VMware migrations on to the [hyperconverged infrastructure] platform," he said.

During the Nutanix conference, Brandon Shaw, Nutanix VP and head of technology services, said that Western Union has been migrating from VMware to Nutanix for six months, The Register reported. The financial services company is moving 900 to 1,200 applications across 3,900 cores. Shaw said that Western Union has been exploring new IT suppliers to help it become more customer-focused. Despite Broadcom's history of "decent lines of communication" with Western Union, Shaw said that Western Union had "challenges partnering with them."

Shaw also pointed to Broadcom's efforts to push customers to buy the VMware Cloud Foundation (VCF), despite the product often having more features than companies need and at high prices. Since moving to Nutanix, the Denver-headquartered financial firm is also benefiting from having more flexibility around workload locations, which is important since Western Union is in over 200 countries, The Register said.

BrianFagioli writes: Mozilla is accusing Microsoft of stacking the deck against Firefox, arguing that design choices in Windows steer users toward Edge even when they explicitly choose another browser. According to Mozilla, parts of Windows still open links in Edge regardless of the default browser setting, including results from the taskbar search and links launched from apps like Outlook and Teams. Mozilla says this means Firefox often never even gets the opportunity to handle those links, which quietly shifts user activity back into Microsoft's ecosystem.

The company also points to Microsoft's aggressive rollout of Copilot as another example of platform power being used to push Microsoft services. Copilot appeared pinned to the taskbar, arrived automatically on many systems with Microsoft 365, and even received a dedicated keyboard key on some laptops. Mozilla argues that when the maker of the dominant desktop operating system promotes its own browser and AI tools at the system level, it becomes far harder for independent browsers like Firefox to compete.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from CNN: A hacker has allegedly stolen a massive trove of sensitive data -- including highly classified defense documents and missile schematics -- from a state-run Chinese supercomputer in what could potentially constitute the largest known heist of data from China. The dataset, which allegedly contains more than 10 petabytes of sensitive information, is believed by experts to have been obtained from the National Supercomputing Center (NSCC) in Tianjin -- a centralized hub that provides infrastructure services for more than 6,000 clients across China, including advanced science and defense agencies.

Cyber experts who have spoken to the alleged hacker and reviewed samples of the stolen data they posted online say they appeared to gain entry to the massive computer with comparative ease and were able to siphon out huge amounts of data over the course of multiple months without being detected. An account calling itself FlamingChina posted a sample of the alleged dataset on an anonymous Telegram channel on February 6, claiming it contained "research across various fields including aerospace engineering, military research, bioinformatics, fusion simulation and more." The group alleges the information is linked to "top organizations" including the Aviation Industry Corporation of China, the Commercial Aircraft Corporation of China, and the National University of Defense Technology.

Cyber security experts who have reviewed the data say the group is offering a limited preview of the alleged dataset, for thousands of dollars, with full access priced at hundreds of thousands of dollars. Payment was requested in cryptocurrency. CNN cannot verify the origins of the alleged dataset and the claims made by FlamingChina, but spoke with multiple experts whose initial assessment of the leak indicated it was genuine. The alleged sample data appeared to include documents marked "secret" in Chinese, along with technical files, animated simulations and renderings of defense equipment including bombs and missiles.

After nearly 20 years on the platform, The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) says it is leaving X. "This isn't a decision we made lightly, but it might be overdue," the digital rights group said. "The math hasn't worked out for a while now." From the report: We posted to Twitter (now known as X) five to ten times a day in 2018. Those tweets garnered somewhere between 50 and 100 million impressions per month. By 2024, our 2,500 X posts generated around 2 million impressions each month. Last year, our 1,500 posts earned roughly 13 million impressions for the entire year. To put it bluntly, an X post today receives less than 3% of the views a single tweet delivered seven years ago. [...]

When you go online, your rights should go with you. X is no longer where the fight is happening. The platform Musk took over was imperfect but impactful. What exists today is something else: diminished, and increasingly de minimis.

EFF takes on big fights, and we win. We do that by putting our time, skills, and our members' support where they will effect the most change. Right now, that means Bluesky, Mastodon, LinkedIn, Instagram, TikTok, Facebook, YouTube, and eff.org. We hope you follow us there and keep supporting the work we do. Our work protecting digital rights is needed more than ever before, and we're here to help you take back control.

Waymo is launching a pilot with cities and Google's Waze to share pothole data collected by its robotaxis, giving local transportation departments a new way to find and fix road damage more quickly. "We realized, hey, once we're at scale, we can actually share this data with cities, which is something that they've asked for and something that we collect at scale," said Arielle Fleisher, Waymo's policy development and research manager. "And so we figured out a way to make that happen." The Verge reports: Waymo uses its perception hardware, including cameras and radar, as well as accelerometers and the vehicle's physical feedback system, to log every pothole its vehicles encounter. These sensors detect physical changes to the road's surface, such as tilt and movement when the vehicle encounters irregularities. Originally, Waymo knew it needed the ability to detect potholes so it could ensure that its vehicles slowed down to avoid damage or injury to the passenger. Later, the company realized this could be invaluable data for cities, too.

Under the new pilot program, that data will now be made available to cities' departments of transportation through a free-to-use Waze for Cities platform, which provides access to real-time, user-generated traffic data that officials can then use to make important decisions -- such as pothole repair. The platform also allows for Waze users to validate pothole locations through their own observations, decreasing the chances that city officials will be led astray by false positives.

Currently, many cities rely on a patchwork of non-emergency 311 reports and manual inspections to address their pothole problems. Waymo developed this pilot program after collecting years of feedback from city officials about the state of their highways and surface streets. The company is launching the new pilot in the San Francisco Bay Area, as well as Los Angeles, Phoenix, Austin, and Atlanta, where Waymo says it has already helped the city identify approximately 500 potholes. Fleisher said that Waymo would be open to expanding the project to other street maladies based on further feedback from officials. The company is eager to learn what other types of street condition or safety data might be valuable, she said. "We want to be responsive to cities," Fleisher said. "They are interested in safer streets and potholes are really a tough challenge for cities. So we really wanted to meet that need as part of our desire to be a good partner and to ultimately advance our goal for safer streets."

BrianFagioli writes: Little Snitch, the well known macOS tool that shows which applications are connecting to the internet, is now being developed for Linux. The developer says the project started after experimenting with Linux and realizing how strange it felt not knowing what connections the system was making. Existing tools like OpenSnitch and various command line utilities exist, but none provided the same simple experience of seeing which process is connecting where and blocking it with a click. The Linux version uses eBPF for kernel level traffic interception, with core components written in Rust and a web based interface that can even monitor remote Linux servers.

During testing on Ubuntu, the developer noticed the system was relatively quiet on the network. Over the course of a week, only nine system processes made internet connections. By comparison, macOS reportedly showed more than one hundred processes communicating externally. Applications behave similarly across platforms though. Launching Firefox immediately triggered telemetry and advertising related connections, while LibreOffice made no network connections at all during testing. The early release is meant primarily as a transparency tool to show what software is doing on the network rather than a hardened security firewall.

Bloomberg's Mark Gurman says Apple's foldable iPhone is still "on track" for a September unveiling alongside the iPhone 18 Pro lineup. 9to5Mac reports: The report notes that Apple's stock took a hit earlier today after Nikkei Asia indicated the iPhone Fold was having serious production issues. Clearly, sources within Apple were motivated to share positive news via Gurman. Not long ago, Gurman himself said that he was expecting an iPhone Fold release date that was a little bit later than iPhone 18 Pro. That's still very possible, but it sounds like Apple is internally feeling optimistic about its targeted September launch.

The report continues: "While the complexity of the new display and materials may limit initial supply for several weeks, Apple is currently operating with a plan to put the device on sale around the same time -- or very soon after -- the new non-foldable models, the people said." Gurman adds an important qualifier: "Still, the release is six months away and production has yet to ramp up. That means the timing isn't final."

Starting May 20th, Amazon will stop Kindle Store access for Kindle and Kindle Fire devices released in 2012 and earlier. After that date, those devices will "no longer be able to purchase, borrow, or download new content." Owners can still read content already on the device, but if an affected device is reset or deregistered after the cutoff, it can't be re-registered. The Verge reports: The complete list of affected devices goes all the way back to the original Kindle that launched in 2007 with a full keyboard and scroll wheel. [...] Amazon will be notifying affected users over email ahead of May 20th with an explanation of what their older devices can and cannot do. Pre-2012 Kindle Fire devices will be subjected to the same limitations as Kindle e-readers when it comes to books, but other apps and Amazon services on those devices won't be impacted.

For longtime users wanting to take the opportunity to upgrade to newer Kindle hardware, Amazon will offer a 20 percent discount on new Kindle devices and a $20 ebook credit that will be added to their accounts after upgrading, valid until June 20th, 2026, at 11:59PM PT. Their older purchases will be available on new devices as long as they log in to the same account they've been using for the past 14 years or more.