An anonymous reader quotes a report from Politico: A top Commerce Department official sent a blistering email to his former colleagues on his way out the door Sunday warning that the Trump administration is poised to unduly enrich Elon Musk's satellite internet company with money for rural broadband. The technology offered by Starlink ... is inferior, wrote Evan Feinman, who had directed the $42.5 billion broadband program for the past three years. "Stranding all or part of rural America with worse internet so that we can make the world's richest man even richer is yet another in a long line of betrayals by Washington," Feinman said.

Feinman's lengthy email, totaling more than 1,100 words and shared with POLITICO, is a sign of deep discomfort about the changes underway that will likely transform the Broadband Equity, Access and Deployment Program. Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick recently pledged a vigorous review of BEAD, with an aim to rip out what he sees as extraneous requirements and remove any preference for particular broadband technologies like fiber. The program, created in the 2021 infrastructure law program, became a source of partisan fighting last year on the campaign trail as Republicans attacked the Biden administration for its slow pace. No internet expansion projects have begun using BEAD money, although some states were close at the beginning of this year. Feinman's critique: In his email, Feinman notes Friday was his last day leading BEAD and that he's "disappointed not to be able to see this project through."

Feinman's email warns the Trump administration could undermine BEAD and he encourages people to fight to retain its best aspects. Feinman said the administration should "NOT change it to benefit technology that delivers slower speeds at higher costs to the household paying the bill," adding that this isn't what rural America, congressional Republicans or Democrats, the states or the telecom industry wants. "Reach out to your congressional delegation and reach out to the Trump Administration and tell them to strip out the needless requirements, but not to strip away from states the flexibility to get the best connections for their people," Feinman wrote. He said he's not worried about the Trump administration nixing requirements around climate resiliency, labor and middle class affordability, saying those issues "were inserted by the prior administration for messaging/political purposes, and were never central to the mission of the program." Feinman warns that changes to the BEAD program under the Trump administration could stall state-level broadband progress, with Louisiana, Delaware, and Nevada already stuck in review.

Meanwhile, no specific guidance or timeline for these changes has been provided, and Arielle Roth's confirmation as NTIA head is still pending in the Senate.

Google's parent company Alphabet is reportedly in talks to acquire cybersecurity startup Wiz for approximately $30 billion. Last July, negotiations had advanced on a $23 billion deal, but the talks were put on hold to prioritize Wiz's IPO. Around the same time, Alphabet also walked away from a potential acquisition of online marketing software company HubSpot. Reuters reports: The startup provides cloud-based cybersecurity solutions powered by artificial intelligence that help companies identify and remove critical risks on cloud platforms. A buyout of this size will most likely face regulatory scrutiny as tech giants are kept under close watch for possible monopolistic practices.

If the deal goes through, it could help Alphabet tap into the cybersecurity industry and expand its booming cloud infrastructure segment, which generated more than $43 billion in revenue last year. Wiz was last valued at $12 billion in a private funding round in May 2024.

GIMP 3.0 has been released after over a decade of development. Highlights include a refined GTK3 interface with scroll wheel tab navigation, a new splash screen, improved HiDPI icon support, enhanced color management, a stable public API, and support for more file formats. 9to5Linux reports: GIMP 3.0 also brings improvements to non-destructive editing by introducing an optional "Merge Filters" checkbox at the bottom of NDE filters that merges down the filter immediately after it's committed, along with non-destructive filters on layer groups and the implementation of storing version of filters in GIMP's XCF project files. Among other noteworthy changes, the GEGL and babl components have been updated with new features and many improvements, such as Inner Glow, Bevel, and GEGL Styles filters, some plugins saw small enhancements, and it's now possible to export images with different settings while leaving the original image unchanged.

There's also a new PDB call that allows Script-Fu writers to use labels to specify filter properties, a brand new named-argument syntax, support for loading 16-bits-per-channel LAB PSD files, support for loading DDS images with BC7 support, early-binding CMYK support, and support for PSB and JPEG-XL image formats. On top of that, GIMP 3.0 introduces new auto-expanding layer boundary and snapping options, an updated search pop-up to show the menu path for all entries while making individual filters searchable, a revamped alignment tool, and support for "layer sets," replacing the older concept of linked layers. You can download GIMP 3.0 from the official website.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from TechCrunch: Last week, Google expanded access to its Gemini 2.0 Flash model's image generation feature, which lets the model natively generate and edit image content. It's a powerful capability, by all accounts. But it also appears to have few guardrails. Gemini 2.0 Flash will uncomplainingly create images depicting celebrities and copyrighted characters, and -- as alluded to earlier -- remove watermarks from existing photos.

As several X and Reddit users noted, Gemini 2.0 Flash won't just remove watermarks, but will also attempt to fill in any gaps created by a watermark's deletion. Other AI-powered tools do this, too, but Gemini 2.0 Flash seems to be exceptionally skilled at it -- and free to use. To be clear, Gemini 2.0 Flash's image generation feature is labeled as "experimental" and "not for production use" at the moment, and is only available in Google's developer-facing tools like AI Studio. The model also isn't a perfect watermark remover. Gemini 2.0 Flash appears to struggle with certain semi-transparent watermarks and watermarks that canvas large portions of images.

Huawei will no longer be able to produce or sell Windows-based PCs as Microsoft's supply license to the Chinese tech company expires this month, according to Chinese tech site MyDrivers. The restriction comes as Huawei remains on the U.S. Department of Commerce's Entity List, requiring American companies to obtain special export licenses to conduct business with the firm.

Richard Yu, executive director of Huawei's consumer business unit, said the company is preparing to pivot to alternative operating systems. Huawei had previously announced plans to abandon Windows for future PC generations. The Chinese tech giant will introduce a new "AI PC" laptop in April running its own Kunpeng CPU and HarmonyOS, alongside a MateBook D16 Linux Edition, its first Linux-based laptop.

Alphabet is spinning out Taara, a laser-based internet company from its X "moonshot" incubator, securing backing from Series X Capital while retaining a minority stake.

Taara's technology transmits data at 20 gigabits per second over 20km by firing pencil-width light beams between traffic light-sized terminals, extending traditional fiber-optic networks with minimal construction costs.

Based in Sunnyvale, California, the company operates in 12 countries, including India and parts of Africa, where it created a 5km laser link over the Congo River between Brazzaville and Kinshasa. The two-dozen-strong team partners with telecommunications firms like Bharti Airtel and T-Mobile to extend core fiber-optic networks to remote locations or dense urban areas.

Taara originated from Project Loon, which was shut down in 2021 after facing regulatory challenges. The company is developing silicon photonic chips to replace mirrors and lenses in its terminals and potentially enable multiple connections from a single transmitter.

HR software provider Rippling has sued competitor Deel for allegedly planting a spy in its Dublin office to steal trade secrets, court documents [PDF] showed on Monday. Rippling claims the employee, identified as D.S., systematically searched internal Slack channels for competitor information, including sales leads and pitch decks.

The company discovered the alleged scheme through a "honeypot" trap -- a specially created Slack channel mentioned in a letter to Deel executives. When served with a court order to surrender his phone, D.S. locked himself in a bathroom before fleeing, according to the lawsuit. "We're all for healthy competition, but we won't tolerate when a competitor breaks the law," said Vanessa Wu, Rippling's general counsel. Both companies operate multibillion-dollar HR platforms, with Rippling valued at $13.5 billion and Deel at over $12 billion.

An anonymous reader shared this article from TechCrunch: Social network Bluesky recently published a proposal on GitHub outlining new options it could give users to indicate whether they want their posts and data to be scraped for things like generative AI training and public archiving.

CEO Jay Graber discussed the proposal earlier this week, while on-stage at South by Southwest, but it attracted fresh attention on Friday night, after she posted about it on Bluesky. Some users reacted with alarm to the company's plans, which they saw as a reversal of Bluesky's previous insistence that it won't sell user data to advertisers and won't train AI on user posts.... Graber replied that generative AI companies are "already scraping public data from across the web," including from Bluesky, since "everything on Bluesky is public like a website is public." So she said Bluesky is trying to create a "new standard" to govern that scraping, similar to the robots.txt file that websites use to communicate their permissions to web crawlers...

If a user indicates that they don't want their data used to train generative AI, the proposal says, "Companies and research teams building AI training sets are expected to respect this intent when they see it, either when scraping websites, or doing bulk transfers using the protocol itself."
Over on Threads someone had a different wish for our AI-enabled future. "I want to be able to conversationally chat to my feed algorithm. To be able to explain to it the types of content I want to see, and what I don't want to see. I want this to be an ongoing conversation as it refines what it shows me, or my interests change."

"Yeah I want this too," posted top Instagram/Threads executive Adam Mosseri, who said he'd talked about the idea with VC Sam Lessin. "There's a ways to go before we can do this at scale, but I think it'll happen eventually."

Google collaborated with Imperial College London and its "Fleming Initiative" partnership with Imperial NHS, giving their scientists "access to a powerful new AI designed" built with Gemini 2.0 "to make research faster and more efficient," according to an announcement from the school. And the results were surprising...

"José Penadés and his colleagues at Imperial College London spent 10 years figuring out how some superbugs gain resistance to antibiotics," writes LiveScience. "But when the team gave Google's 'co-scientist'' — an AI tool designed to collaborate with researchers — this question in a short prompt, the AI's response produced the same answer as their then-unpublished findings in just two days." Astonished, Penadés emailed Google to check if they had access to his research. The company responded that it didn't. The researchers published their findings [about working with Google's AI] Feb. 19 on the preprint server bioRxiv...

"What our findings show is that AI has the potential to synthesise all the available evidence and direct us to the most important questions and experimental designs," co-author Tiago Dias da Costa, a lecturer in bacterial pathogenesis at Imperial College London, said in a statement. "If the system works as well as we hope it could, this could be game-changing; ruling out 'dead ends' and effectively enabling us to progress at an extraordinary pace...."

After two days, the AI returned suggestions, one being what they knew to be the correct answer. "This effectively meant that the algorithm was able to look at the available evidence, analyse the possibilities, ask questions, design experiments and propose the very same hypothesis that we arrived at through years of painstaking scientific research, but in a fraction of the time," Penadés, a professor of microbiology at Imperial College London, said in the statement. The researchers noted that using the AI from the start wouldn't have removed the need to conduct experiments but that it would have helped them come up with the hypothesis much sooner, thus saving them years of work.

Despite these promising findings and others, the use of AI in science remains controversial. A growing body of AI-assisted research, for example, has been shown to be irreproducible or even outright fraudulent.
Google has also published the first test results of its AI 'co-scientist' system, according to Imperial's announcement, which adds that academics from a handful of top-universities "asked a question to help them make progress in their field of biomedical research... Google's AI co-scientist system does not aim to completely automate the scientific process with AI. Instead, it is purpose-built for collaboration to help experts who can converse with the tool in simple natural language, and provide feedback in a variety of ways, including directly supplying their own hypotheses to be tested experimentally by the scientists."

Google describes their system as "intended to uncover new, original knowledge and to formulate demonstrably novel research hypotheses and proposals, building upon prior evidence and tailored to specific research objectives...

"We look forward to responsible exploration of the potential of the AI co-scientist as an assistive tool for scientists," Google adds, saying the project "illustrates how collaborative and human-centred AI systems might be able to augment human ingenuity and accelerate scientific discovery.

America's Vice President "expressed confidence Friday that a deal to sell TikTok and keep the social media app running in the U.S. would largely be in place by an April deadline," reports NBC News. (Specifically the Vice President said "There will almost certainly be a high-level agreement that I think satisfies our national security concerns, allows there to be a distinct American TikTok enterprise.")

The article adds that TikTok owner ByteDance "has not publicly confirmed negotiations with any potential U.S. buyer, nor has it confirmed its willingness to sell TikTok to a U.S. bidder." But ByteDance "favors" a deal with Oracle, according to an X.com post on Thursday from tech-publication The Information.

And today Politico adds that Oracle "is accelerating talks with the White House on a deal to run TikTok, though significant concerns remain about what role the app's Chinese founders will play in its ongoing U.S. operation, according to three people familiar with the discussions." [Oracle's discussions are happening] amid ongoing warnings from congressional Republicans and other China hawks that any new ownership deal — if it keeps TikTok's underlying technology in Chinese hands — could be only a surface-level fix to the security concerns that led to last year's sweeping bipartisan ban of the app. Key lawmakers, including concerned Republicans, are bringing in Oracle this week to discuss the possible deal and rising national security concerns, according to four people familiar with the meetings. One of the three people familiar with the discussions with Oracle said the deal would essentially require the U.S. government to depend on Oracle to oversee the data of American users and ensure the Chinese government doesn't have a backdoor to it — a promise the person warned would be impossible to keep.

"If the Oracle deal moves forward, you still have this [algorithm] controlled by the Chinese...."

The data security company HaystackID, which serves as independent security inspectors for TikTok U.S., said in February that it has found no indications of internal or external malicious activity — nor has it identified any protected U.S. user data that has been shared with China.

After Meta convinced an arbitrator to temporarily prevent a whistleblower from promoting their book about the company (titled: Careless People), the book climbed to the top of Amazon's best-seller list. And the book's publisher Macmillan released a defiant statement that "The arbitration order has no impact on Macmillan... We will absolutely continue to support and promote it." (They added that they were "appalled by Meta's tactics to silence our author through the use of a non-disparagement clause in a severance agreement.")

Saturday the controversy was even covered by Rolling Stone: [Whistleblower Sarah] Wynn-Williams is a diplomat, policy expert, and international lawyer, with previous roles including serving as the Chief Negotiator for the United Nations on biosafety liability, according to her bio on the World Economic Forum...

Since the book's announcement, Meta has forcefully responded to the book's allegations in a statement... "Eight years ago, Sarah Wynn-Williams was fired for poor performance and toxic behavior, and an investigation at the time determined she made misleading and unfounded allegations of harassment. Since then, she has been paid by anti-Facebook activists and this is simply a continuation of that work. Whistleblower status protects communications to the government, not disgruntled activists trying to sell books."
But the negative coverage continues, with the Observer Sunday highlighting it as their Book of the Week. "This account of working life at Mark Zuckerberg's tech giant organisation describes a 'diabolical cult' able to swing elections and profit at the expense of the world's vulnerable..."

Though ironically Wynn-Williams started their career with optimism about Facebook's role in the app internet.org. . "Upon witnessing how the nascent Facebook kept Kiwis connected in the aftermath of the 2011 Christchurch earthquake, she believed that Mark Zuckerberg's company could make a difference — but in a good way — to social bonds, and that she could be part of that utopian project...

What internet.org involves for countries that adopt it is a Facebook-controlled monopoly of access to the internet, whereby to get online at all you have to log in to a Facebook account. When the scales fall from Wynn-Williams's eyes she realises there is nothing morally worthwhile in Zuckerberg's initiative, nothing empowering to the most deprived of global citizens, but rather his tool involves "delivering a crap version of the internet to two-thirds of the world". But Facebook's impact in the developing world proves worse than crap. In Myanmar, as Wynn-Williams recounts at the end of the book, Facebook facilitated the military junta to post hate speech, thereby fomenting sexual violence and attempted genocide of the country's Muslim minority. "Myanmar," she writes with a lapsed believer's rue, "would have been a better place if Facebook had not arrived." And what is true of Myanmar, you can't help but reflect, applies globally...
"Myanmar is where Wynn-Williams thinks the 'carelessness' of Facebook is most egregious," writes the Sunday Times: In 2018, UN human rights experts said Facebook had helped spread hate speech against Rohingya Muslims, about 25,000 of whom were slaughtered by the Burmese military and nationalists. Facebook is so ubiquitous in Myanmar, Wynn-Williams points out, that people think it is the entire internet. "It's no surprise that the worst outcome happened in the place that had the most extreme take-up of Facebook." Meta admits it was "too slow to act" on abuse in its Myanmar services....

After Wynn-Williams left Facebook, she worked on an international AI initiative, and says she wants the world to learn from the mistakes we made with social media, so that we fare better in the next technological revolution. "AI is being integrated into weapons," she explains. "We can't just blindly wander into this next era. You think social media has turned out with some issues? This is on another level."

A ransomware-as-a-service variant called "Medusa" has claimed over 300 victims in "critical infrastructure sectors" (including medical), according to an joint alert from CISA, the FBI, and the Multi-State Information Sharing Analysis Center.

And that alert reminds us that Medusa is a globe-spanning operation that recruits third-party affiliates to plant ransomware and negotiate with victims, notes the Register. "Even organizations that have good ransomware recovery regimes, meaning they don't need to unscramble encrypted data as they have good backups and fall-back plans, may consider paying to prevent the release of their stolen data, given the unpleasant consequences that follow information leaks. Medusa actors also set a deadline for victims to pay ransoms and provide a countdown timer that makes it plain when stolen info will be sprayed across the internet. If victims cough up $10,000 in cryptocurrency, the crims push the deadline forward by 24 hours.

The advisory reveals one Medusa actor has taken things a step further. "FBI investigations identified that after paying the ransom, one victim was contacted by a separate Medusa actor who claimed the negotiator had stolen the ransom amount already paid," the advisory states. That separate actor then "requested half of the payment be made again to provide the 'true decryptor'," the advisory states, describing this incident as "potentially indicating a triple extortion scheme."
The security groups' advisory stresses that they "do not encourage paying ransoms as payment does not guarantee victim files will be recovered. Furthermore, payment may also embolden adversaries to target additional organizations..." (But "Regardless of whether you or your organization have decided to pay the ransom, FBI, CISA, and MS-ISAC urge you to promptly report ransomware incidents...)

Besides updating software and operating systems, the alert makes these recommendations for organizations:

• Require VPNs (or jump hosts) for remote network access

• Block remote access from unknown/untrusted origins, and disable unused ports

• Segment networks to help prevent the spread of ransomware

• Use a networking monitoring tool to spot and investigate abnormal activity — including lateral movement (using endpoint detection and response tools). Log all network traffic, and monitor it for unauthorized scanning and access attempts.

• Create recovery plans with encrypted offline backups of sensitive/proprietary data and servers

• Require multifactor authentication, use strong (and long) passwords, and "consider not requiring frequently recurring password changes, as these can weaken security." (Also audit access control following the principle of least privilege, and watch for new and/or unrecognized accounts.)

• Disable command-line and scripting activities and permissions.

Long-time Slashdot reader BenFenner writes: For the third time in recent memory, CloudFlare has blocked large swaths of niche browsers and their users from accessing web sites that CloudFlare gate-keeps. In the past these issues have been resolved quickly (within a week) and apologies issued with promises to do better. (See 2024-03-11, 2024-07-08, and 2025-01-30.)

This time around it has been over six weeks and CloudFlare has been unable or unwilling to fix the problem on their end, effectively stalling any progress on the matter with various tactics including asking browser developers to sign overarching NDAs.
That last link is an update posted today by Pale Moon's main developer: Our current situation remains unchanged: CloudFlare is still blocking our access to websites through the challenges, and the captcha/turnstile continues to hang the browser until our watchdog terminates the hung script after which it reloads and hangs again after a short pause (but allowing users to close the tab in that pause, at least). To say that this upsets me is an understatement. Other than deliberate intent or absolute incompetence, I see no reason for this to endure. Neither of those options are very flattering for CloudFlare.

I wish I had better news.
In a comment, Slashdot reader BenFenner shares a list posted by Pale Moon's developer of reportedly affected browsers:

• Pale Moon
• Basilisk
• Waterfox
• Falkon
• SeaMonkey
• Various Firefox ESR flavors
• Thorium (on some systems)
• Ungoogled Chromium
• K-Meleon
• LibreWolf
• MyPal 68
• Otter browser

Slashdot reader Z00L00K speculates that "this is some kind of anti-bot measure that fails. I suspect that the reason for them wanting a NDA to be signed is to prevent ways to circumvent the anti-bot measures..."

Cities in Europe "are dramatically scaling back their relationship with the car," reports the Washington Post: They are removing parking spaces and creating dedicated bike lanes. They are installing cameras at the perimeter of urban centers and either charging the most-polluting vehicles or preventing them from entering. Some are going so far as to put entire neighborhoods off-limits to vehicles. In Norway, Oslo promotes "car-free livability." Paris Mayor Anne Hidalgo touts the "end of car dependence." And while those ideas might sound radical to car-loving Americans, they are fast becoming the norm across the Atlantic, where 340 European cities and towns — home to more than 150 million people — have implemented some kind of restrictions on personal car usage...

[V]irtually every major European city is imposing some kind of rule. Milan has a system similar to New York's, charging for access to the city core — while entirely banning older, highly polluting vehicles. London charges vehicles that don't meet emissions standards, in what it calls the "largest clean-air zone in the world." The programs are not just the purview of liberal Western Europe: Warsaw, Poland, and Sofia, Bulgaria, recently adopted similar schemes. Even little Italian villages have added vehicle restrictions to reinforce their historic feel. And the Netherlands just broke ground on a 12,000-person neighborhood that will be entirely car-free. The neighborhood, known as Merwede, will be connected by public transport to Utrecht, a medium-size city that — perhaps no surprise — has a low-emissions zone of its own...

Perhaps the most elaborate and transformative effort has come in Paris, where Anne Hidalgo was elected mayor in 2014. Since then, Paris has banned the most-polluting vehicles from the city, eliminated 50,000 parking spaces and added hundreds of miles of bike lanes. It turned a bank of the Seine from a busy artery into a pedestrian zone, and closed off the famed Rue de Rivoli to traffic... Journeys by car in Paris have dropped by about 45 percent since 1990. The city has now become a source for striking before-and-after photos: of clogged streets that have transitioned into tree-lined areas where people can walk and play.
In London government officials say inhalable particular matter has fallen, according to the article, while combustion-produced nitrogen dioxide "is 53% lower than it would have been without the restrictions."

"Alphabet's Waymo autonomous vehicles are programmed to follow the rules of the road..." notes the Washington Post. But while the cars obey speed limits and properly use their turn signals — they also "routinely violate parking rules." Waymo vehicles driving themselves received 589 tickets for parking violations in 2024, according to records from San Francisco's Municipal Transportation Agency... The robots incurred $65,065 in fines for violations such as obstructing traffic, disobeying street cleaning restrictions and parking in prohibited areas... [Waymo is responsible for 0.05% of the city's fines, according to statistics from the article.]

Parking violations are one of the few ways to quantify how often self-driving companies' vehicles break the rules of the road... Some parking violations, such as overstaying in a paid spot, cause inconvenience but do not directly endanger other people. Others increase the risk of crashes, said Michael Brooks, executive director of the Center for Auto Safety. Anytime a vehicle is obstructing the flow of traffic, other drivers might be forced to brake suddenly or change lanes, he said, creating risks for drivers, pedestrians or other road users...

San Francisco transit operators lost 2 hours and 12 minutes of service time in 2024 because of Waymo vehicles blocking or colliding with transit vehicles, according to San Francisco Municipal Transportation Agency records. Autonomous vehicles have obstructed firefighters responding to emergency scenes in San Francisco, triggering city officials to ask for tougher oversight from state regulators.
The article adds that driverless Waymo vehicles in Los Angeles received 75 more tickets in 2024 — "with $543 in fines still outstanding, according to records from the Los Angeles Department of Transportation."

With Microsoft ending free security updates for Windows 10 in October, millions of PCs that don't meet Windows 11's hardware requirements face an uncertain fate... Charities that refurbish and distribute computers to low-income individuals must choose between providing soon-to-be-insecure Windows 10 machines, transitioning to Linux -- despite usability challenges for non-tech-savvy users -- or recycling the hardware, contributing to ewaste. Tom's Hardware reports: So how bad will it really be to run an end-of-lifed Windows 10? Should people worry? [Chester Wisniewski, who serves as Director and Global Field CISO for Sophos, a major security services company] and other experts I talked to are unequivocal. You're at risk. "To put this in perspective, today [the day we talked] was Patch Tuesday," he said. "There were 57 vulnerabilities, 6 of which have already been abused by criminals before the fixes were available. There were also 57 in February and 159 in January. Windows 10 and Windows 11 largely have a shared codebase, meaning most, if not all, vulnerabilities each month are exploitable on both OSs. These will be actively turned into digital weapons by criminals and nation-states alike and Windows 10 users will be somewhat defenseless against them."

So, in short, even though Windows 10 has been around since 2015, there are still massive security holes being patched. Even within the past few weeks, dozens of vulnerabilities were fixed by Microsoft. So what's a charity to do when these updates are running out and clients will be left vulnerable? "What we decided to do is one year ahead of the cutoff, we discontinued Windows 10," said Casey Sorensen, CEO of PCs for People, one of the U.S.'s largest non-profit computer refurbishers. "We will distribute Linux laptops that are 6th or 7th gen. If we distribute a Windows laptop, it will be 8th gen or newer." Sorensen said that any PC that's fifth gen or older will be sent to an ewaste recycler.

[...] Sorensen, who founded the company in 1998, told us that he's comfortable giving clients computers that run Linux Mint, a free OS that's based on Ubuntu. The latest version of Mint, version 22.1, will be supported until 2029. "Ten years ago if we distributed Linux, they would be like what is it," he said. But today, he notes that many view their computers as windows to the Internet and, for that, a user-friendly version of Linux is acceptable. Further reading: Is 2025 the Year of the Linux Desktop?

Google announced today that Gemini will replace Google Assistant on Android phones later in 2025. "[T]he classic Google Assistant will no longer be accessible on most mobile devices or available for new downloads on mobile app stores," says Google in a blog post. "Additionally, we'll be upgrading tablets, cars and devices that connect to your phone, such as headphones and watches, to Gemini. We're also bringing a new experience, powered by Gemini, to home devices like speakers, displays and TVs." 9to5Google reports: There will be an exception for phones running Android 9 or earlier and don't have at least 2 GB of RAM, with the existing Assistant experience remaining in place for those users. Google replacing Assistant follows new Android phones, including Pixel, Samsung, OnePlus, and Motorola, launched in the past year making Gemini the default experience. Meanwhile, the company says "millions of people have already made the switch."

Before Assistant's sunset, Google is "continuing to focus on improving the quality of the day-to-day Gemini experience, especially for those who have come to rely on Google Assistant." In winding down Google Assistant, the company notes how "natural language processing and voice recognition technology unlocked a more natural way to get help from Google" in 2016. Further reading: Google's Gemini AI Can Now See Your Search History

A controversial VAR (Video Assistant Referee) decision helped eliminate Atletico Madrid from the Champions League after Julian Alvarez's penalty was disallowed for a near-microscopic double touch. Despite referee Szymon Marciniak standing just feet away and missing the infraction, VAR officials intervened without the typically required "clear and obvious error" standard.

This incident has exemplified the paradox of video review technology in football: introduced to reduce controversies, VAR has instead multiplied them. Technical implementation varies significantly across competitions -- some MLS stadiums have fewer cameras available for review than others -- creating inconsistent application. The Premier League claims VAR increased correct decisions from 82% to 96%, yet the remaining errors dominate match-day discourse. The Guardian adds: VAR incidents are now so endemic that Norway's clubs were compelled to vote on whether use of the technology should be scrapped two weeks ago. Ultimately, they decided to stick with VAR, even though most of the country's professional clubs want rid of it.

In the Norwegian league, the use of VAR has become so unpopular that fans felt they had no choice but to pelt the field with fishcakes in protest, which may or may not be A Norwegian Thing. Ultimately, the decision on whether to keep or scrap VAR devolved into a power struggle of a sort between Norway's 32 top professional clubs and the federation. Whereas the vote to introduce VAR -- which Norway didn't adopt until 2023, years later than most European countries -- was conducted by those pro teams alone, the decision to scrap it was voted on by every club in the country.

Several amateur clubs told the Guardian they felt conflicted about being dragged into a fight about a technology not in use at their level. Had it been left up to the pros, VAR would have been scrapped, by a 19-13 margin. Instead, the federation orchestrated a vote among all the country's clubs to force the retention of VAR -- and avoid becoming the first nation to scrap it -- prevailing by 321 votes to 129.

Apple is planning a new AirPods feature that allows the earbuds to live-translate an in-person conversation into another language, Bloomberg reports, citing people with knowledge of the matter. From the report: The capability will be offered as part of an AirPods software upgrade due later this year, said the people, who asked not to be identified because the effort is private. It will be tied to iOS 19, the upcoming update to Apple's mobile-device operating system.

Windows Defender has begun identifying WinRing0 -- a kernel-level driver used by numerous hardware monitoring applications -- as malicious software, causing widespread functionality issues for affected tools. The driver, which provides low-level hardware access necessary for reading fan speeds, controlling RGB lighting, and monitoring system components, is being quarantined due to potential security vulnerabilities that could be exploited by malware.

WinRing0 gained popularity among developers because it's one of only two freely available Windows drivers capable of accessing the SMBus registers needed for hardware monitoring functions. The affected applications include Fan Control, OpenRGB, MSI Afterburner, LibreHardwareMonitor, and multiple others that rely on this driver to communicate with system hardware.