California's legislature this week approved a bill to let renters opt out of bulk-billing arrangements that force them to pay for Internet service from a specific provider. ArsTechnica: The bill says that by January 1, a landlord must "allow the tenant to opt out of paying for any subscription from a third-party Internet service provider, such as through a bulk-billing arrangement, to provide service for wired Internet, cellular, or satellite service that is offered in connection with the tenancy." If a landlord fails to do so, the tenant "may deduct the cost of the subscription to the third-party Internet service provider from the rent," and the landlord would be prohibited from retaliating. The bill passed the state Senate in a 30-7 vote on Wednesday but needs Gov. Gavin Newsom's signature to become law. It was approved by the state Assembly in a 75-0 vote in April. Assemblymember Rhodesia Ransom, a Democratic lawmaker who authored the bill, told Ars today that lobby groups for Internet providers and real estate companies have been "working really hard" to defeat it. But she expects Newsom will approve. "I strongly believe that the governor is going to look at what this bill provides as far as protections for tenants and sign it into law," Ransom said in a phone interview.

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An anonymous reader shares a report: European Union countries have shelved plans to approve a new climate change target next week, after pushback from governments including France and Germany over plans to quickly land a deal, three EU diplomats told Reuters on Friday. Countries are discussing a legally-binding target to cut net EU greenhouse gas emissions by 90% by 2040, from 1990 levels - with a share of this covered by buying foreign carbon credits. The European Commission has said this would offer investors certainty and keep Europe on track for net zero emissions by 2050. Climate change has made Europe the world's fastest-warming continent, unleashing deadly heatwaves and record-breaking wildfires. But EU governments are divided over how ambitious to be in tackling global warming, as governments also try to increase defence spending and support struggling industries.

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US colleges face a prolonged enrollment decline beginning this fall as high school graduating classes shrink for the first time since the Great Recession. The incoming freshman class marks the start of a 13% drop in high school graduates through 2041, falling from 3.9 million to 3.4 million students. The decline stems from reduced birth rates during the 2008 financial crisis and subsequent years. Regional four-year institutions in the Northeast and Midwest states face potential applicant pool contractions of 15% or more. Small liberal arts colleges, comprising 40% of the higher education market, are particularly vulnerable. 40% of private colleges posted financial losses in 2023. Top-ranked schools in the US News top 50 are expected to experience minimal impact due to sustained national demand for limited seats.

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US retail coffee prices surged 21% year-over-year in August, the largest annual increase since October 1997, according to Thursday's Consumer Price Index. The monthly 4% jump marks the steepest rise in 14 years. Trump administration tariffs on major coffee exporters -- 50% on Brazil, 20% on Vietnam, and 10% on Colombia -- are driving costs higher as 99% of US coffee consumption relies on imports. J.M. Smucker plans its third price increase this winter for Folgers and Cafe Bustelo brands after raising prices in May and August. New Orleans chain French Truck Coffee has implemented a 4% tariff surcharge. Starbucks expects peak cost impacts in 2026 due to its advance purchasing practices. KPMG chief economist Diane Swonk predicts prices will exceed historical records as Brazilian tariff effects reach retail shelves.

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Smart glasses development has expanded beyond Meta, Google and Apple to include dozens of manufacturers across three distinct categories, UploadVR reports. HTC launched its Vive Eagle glasses in Taiwan this month at $550, while Solos' AirGo V2 arrives in Q4 2025 for $300. The market segments into displayless models featuring cameras and AI assistants, heads-up display glasses providing contextual information overlays and true AR glasses capable of spatial object positioning. Chinese manufacturers dominate the sub-$100 segment. Snap plans consumer AR glasses for 2026. Amazon is reportedly developing two HUD models targeting delivery drivers and consumers for mid-2026 release.

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Keith Rabois, co-founder and newly minted board chair of Opendoor, said remote work and a "bloated" workforce have been a drag on the online real estate platform's culture, as he vowed to slash headcount. CNBC: "There's 1,400 employees at Opendoor. I don't know what most of them do. We don't need more than 200 of them," Rabois told CNBC's "Squawk on the Street" on Friday.

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A anonymous reader shares a report: Microsoft AI launched its first in-house models last month, adding to the already complicated relationship with its OpenAI partner. Now, Microsoft AI chief Mustafa Suleyman says the company is making "significant investments" in the compute capacity required to Microsoft's own future frontier models. "We should have the capacity to build world class frontier models in house of all sizes, but we should be very pragmatic and use other models where we need to," said Suleyman during Microsoft's employee-only town hall on Thursday. "We're also going to be making significant investments in our own cluster, so today MAI-1-preview was only trained on 15,000 H100s, a tiny cluster in the grand scheme of things." Suleyman hinted that Microsoft has ambitions to train models that are comparable to Meta, Google, and xAI's efforts on clusters that are "six to ten times larger in size" than what Microsoft used for its MAI-1-preview. "Much more to do, but it's good to take the first steps," said Suleyman.

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An anonymous reader shares a report: Medical researchers at some institutions in Canada, the United States and Italy are using data created by artificial intelligence (AI) from real patient information in their experiments without the need for permission from their institutional ethics boards, Nature has learnt. To generate what is called 'synthetic data', researchers train generative AI models using real human medical information, then ask the models to create data sets with statistical properties that represent, but do not include, human data. Typically, when research involves human data, an ethics board must review how studies affect participants' rights, safety, dignity and well-being. However, institutions including the IRCCS Humanitas Research Hospital in Milan, Italy, the Children's Hospital of Eastern Ontario (CHEO) in Ottawa and the Ottawa Hospital, both in Canada, and Washington University School of Medicine (WashU Medicine) in St. Louis, Missouri, have waived these requirements for research involving synthetic data. The reasons the institutions use to justify this decision differ. However, the potential benefits of using synthetic data include protecting patient privacy, being more easily able to share data between sites and speeding up research, says Khaled El Emam, a medical AI researcher at the CHEO Research Institute and the University of Ottawa.

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Google Tables, a work-tracking tool and competitor to the popular spreadsheet-database hybrid Airtable, is shutting down. TechCrunch: In an email sent to Tables users this week, Google said the app will not be supported after December 16, 2025, and advised that users export or migrate their data to either Google Sheets or AppSheet instead, depending on their needs. Launched in 2020, Tables focused on making project tracking more efficient with automation. It was one of the many projects to emerge from Google's in-house app incubator, Area 120, which at the time was devoted to cranking out a number of experimental projects. Some of these projects later graduated to become a part of Google's core offerings across Cloud, Search, Shopping, and more. Tables was one of those early successes: Google said in 2021 that the service was moving from a beta test to become an official Google Cloud product. At the time, the company said it saw Tables as a potential solution for a variety of use cases, including project management, IT operations, customer service tracking, CRM, recruiting, product development and more.

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The Swiss government could soon require service providers with more than 5,000 users to collect government-issued identification, retain subscriber data for six months and, in many cases, disable encryption. From a report: The proposal, which is not subject to parliamentary approval, has alarmed privacy and digital-freedoms advocates worldwide because of how it will destroy anonymity online, including for people located outside of Switzerland. A large number of virtual private network (VPN) companies and other privacy-preserving firms are headquartered in the country because it has historically had liberal digital privacy laws alongside its famously discreet banking ecosystem. Proton, which offers secure and end-to-end encrypted email along with an ultra-private VPN and cloud storage, announced on July 23 that it is moving most of its physical infrastructure out of Switzerland due to the proposed law. The company is investing more than $117 million in the European Union, the announcement said, and plans to help develop a "sovereign EuroStack for the future of our home continent." Switzerland is not a member of the EU. Proton said the decision was prompted by the Swiss government's attempt to "introduce mass surveillance."

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An anonymous reader shares a report: An attempt to ban social media in Nepal ended this week in violent protest with the prime minister ousted, the Parliament in flames and soldiers on the streets of the capital. Now, the very technology the government tried to outlaw is being harnessed to help select the country's next leader, as more than 100,000 citizens are meeting regularly in a virtual chat room to debate the country's future. More than 30 people were killed in clashes with the police during youth-led protests that convulsed the capital in a paroxysm of outrage over wealth inequality, corruption and plans to ban some social media platforms. After the government's collapse on Tuesday, the military imposed a curfew across the capital, Kathmandu, and restricted large gatherings. With the country in political limbo and no obvious next leader in place, Nepalis have taken to Discord, a platform popularized by video gamers, to enact the digital version of a national convention. "The Parliament of Nepal right now is Discord," said Sid Ghimiri, 23, a content creator from Kathmandu, describing how the site has become the center of the nation's political decision making. The conversation inside the Discord channel, taking place in a combination of voice, video, and text chats, is so consequential that it is being discussed on national television and live streamed on news sites.

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The Apache Software Foundation has unveiled a major branding overhaul that retires its three-decade-old feather logo after criticism from Native American activists. In its place is a new oak leaf design to symbolize endurance, resilience, and global reach. Along with the new visual identity, the group will emphasize "The ASF" as its shorthand name while keeping its full legal title intact. Apache.org explained: "The oak is one of the most enduring trees and is found around the world. It grows slowly but steadily, supporting vast ecosystems and lasting for centuries. In the same way, The ASF has served as a stable, resilient steward of open source for more than 25 years and is looking to the long future ahead. Choosing the oak leaf as our new logo represents the enduring power of our ethos: community over code."

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A new study published in Nature links more than 200 severe heat waves directly to greenhouse gas pollution from major fossil fuel producers like ExxonMobil, Chevron, and BP. Researchers found that up to a quarter of these heat waves would have been virtually impossible without emissions from oil, coal, and cement companies. NPR reports: The new study, published Wednesday in the journal Nature, found that 213 heat waves were substantially more likely and intense because of the activity of major fossil fuel producers, also called carbon majors. They include oil, coal and cement companies, as well as some countries. The scientists found as much as a quarter of the heat waves would be "virtually impossible" without the climate pollution from major fossil fuel producers. Some individual fossil fuel companies, such as ExxonMobil, Chevron and BP, had emissions high enough to cause some of the more extreme heat waves, the research found. For the new study, the scientists looked at something called the disaster database, a global list of disasters maintained by university researchers, to identify heat waves "with significant casualties, economic losses and calls for international assistance. The scientists then used historical reconstructions and statistical models to see how human-caused global warming made each heat wave more likely and more intense. Then, to examine the link to major fossil fuel producers, the researchers relied on the Carbon Majors Database to understand the emissions of major oil, gas, coal and cement producers. "We ran a climate model to reconstruct the historical period, and then we ran it again but without the emissions of a specific carbon major, thus deducing its contribution to global warming," Yann Quilcaille, climate scientist at ETH Zurich and lead author of the study, says in an email. While some of the contributions to heat waves came from larger well-known fossil fuel companies, the study found that some smaller, lesser-known fossil fuel companies are producing enough greenhouse gas emissions to cause heat waves too, Quilcaille says.

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Physicists have confirmed Stephen Hawking's 1971 black hole area theorem with near-absolute certainty, thanks to gravitational waves from an exceptionally loud black hole collision detected by upgraded LIGO instruments. New Scientist reports: Hawking proposed his black hole area theorem in 1971, which states that when two black holes merge, the resulting black hole's event horizon -- the boundary beyond which not even light can escape the clutches of a black hole -- cannot have an area smaller than the sum of the two original black holes. The theorem echoes the second law of thermodynamics, which states that the entropy, or disorder within an object, never decreases. Black hole mergers warp the fabric of the universe, producing tiny fluctuations in space-time known as gravitational waves, which cross the universe at the speed of light. Five gravitational wave observatories on Earth hunt for waves 10,000 times smaller than the nucleus of an atom. They include the two US-based detectors of the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory (LIGO) plus the Virgo detector in Italy, KAGRA in Japan and GEO600 in Germany, operated by an international collaboration known as LIGO-Virgo-KAGRA (LVK). The recent collision, named GW250114, was almost identical to the one that created the first gravitational waves ever observed in 2015. Both involved black holes with masses between 30 and 40 times the mass of our sun and took place about 1.3 billion light years away. This time, the upgraded LIGO detectors had three times the sensitivity they had in 2015, so they were able to capture waves emanating from the collision in unprecedented detail. This allowed researchers to verify Hawking's theorem by calculating that the area of the event horizon was indeed larger after the merger. The findings have been published in the journal Physical Review Letters.

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"These results are incomprensible," Brian wrote testily. "The developers at SkillCertPro must use math derived from an entirely different universe than ours. I can boast a world record number of answered questions in one hour and fifteen minutes somewhere."

 

"How I Reached Inbox -1," Maia titled her Tickity Tock. "Apparently I've read my messages so thoroughly that my email client (Mailspring) time traveled into the future and read a message before it was even sent."

 

... which taught Jason how to use Mailspring to order timely tunes. "Apparently, someone invented a time machine and is able to send us vinyls from the future..."

 

"Yes, we have no bananas," sang out Peter G. , rapping "... or email addresses or phone numbers, but we're going to block your post just the same (and this is better than the previous result of "Whoops something went wrong", because you'd never be able to tell something had gone wrong without that helpful message)."

 

Finally, our favorite cardsharp Adam R. might have unsharp eyes but sharp browser skills. "While reading an online bridge magazine, I tried to zoom out a bit but was dismayed to find I couldn't zoom out. Once it zooms in to NaN%, you're stuck there."

 

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An anonymous reader quotes a report from Gizmodo: [D]espite the AI industry's attempts to make itself seem omnipresent, a new report this week shows that adoption at large U.S. companies has declined. The report comes from the Census Bureau and shows that the rate of AI adoption by large companies -- that is, firms with over 250 employees -- has been declining slightly in recent weeks. The report is based on a biweekly survey, dubbed Business Trends and Outlook (or BTOS), of some 1.2 million U.S. firms. The survey, which asks businesses about their use of AI tools, such as machine learning and agents, found that -- between June and now -- the rate of adoption had declined from 14 to 12 percent. Futurism notes that this is the largest drop-off in the adoption rate since the survey first began in 2023, although the survey also showed a slight increase in AI use among smaller companies. The moderate drop off comes after the rate of adoption had climbed precipitously over the last few years. When the survey first began, in September of 2023, the AI adoption rate hovered around 3.7 percent (PDF), while the adoption rate in December 2024 was around 5.7 percent. In the second quarter of this year, the rate also rose significantly, climbing from 7.4 percent to 9.2. The new drop-off in reported usage comes not long after another study, this one published by MIT, found that a vast majority of corporate AI pilot programs had failed to produce any material benefit to the companies involved.

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Microsoft has eliminated the one-time fee for publishing apps on its Windows Store. According to The Verge, "Individual developers in nearly 200 countries can now sign up to publish apps on the Microsoft Store with just a personal Microsoft account, and no more one-time fees." From the report: Microsoft started cutting its $19 one-time fee to publish apps to its Windows store in June in certain markets, and it's now essentially removing this fee for all developers worldwide. Apple still charges an annual $99 fee to developers, and Google charges a one-time registration fee of $25. "Developers will no longer need a credit card to get started, removing a key point of friction that has affected many creators around the world," explains Chetna Das, senior product manager at Microsoft. "By eliminating these one-time fees, Microsoft is creating a more inclusive and accessible platform that empowers more developers to innovate, share and thrive on the Windows ecosystem." [...] The Microsoft Store is now used by more than 250 million monthly active users, according to Microsoft. Microsoft is now encouraging more developers to make use of the store, where they can publish a variety of Win32, UWP, PWA, .NET, MAUI, or Electron apps. Developers can even use their own in-app commerce system to keep 100 percent of their revenues on non-gaming apps.

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"President Trump's One Big Beautiful Bill Act may have quietly changed the economics of the creator economy," reports the Hollywood Reporter. The Treasury Department has ruled this past week that digital creators, including podcasters, influencers, and streamers, qualify for the U.S. "no tax on tips" policy, allowing them to deduct tipped income up to $25,000. From the report: The change could cause digital creators to rethink how they seek income. Platforms like TikTok, YouTube, Twitch and Snapchat all offer a variety of ways for creators to generate income, be it a share of advertising revenue or creator funding programs, or options to launch subscription tiers for their channels or profiles. But they also give creators the option to turn on tips or gifts. If revenue from user tips or gifts is eligible, while recurring subscription revenue is not, it could shift how streamers, podcasters or influencers ask their followers to support them. To be sure, there are limitations: The tax deduction is capped at $25,000 per year, and it begins to phase out at $150,000 in income for single filers and $300,000 for married joint filers. The act also provides that tips do not qualify for the deduction if they are received "in the course of certain specified trades or businesses -- including the fields of health, performing arts, and athletics," Treasury says, further limiting the deduction opportunity for some in entertainment-adjacent lines of work. But by making influencers, Twitch streamers and podcasters eligible, the administration has nonetheless changed the incentive structure for digital creators, and the ramifications could be felt across the creator economy in the name of tax efficiency (Don't be surprised if users are asked to like, subscribe, and tip). Platforms may also develop more ways to more prominently feature tips and gifts, pushing creators to add more opportunities for that income. But the inclusion of digital creators is also a recognition of how the power dynamics have shifted in media.

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Amid yesterday's news of Oracle's soaring stock, which propelled founder Larry Ellison to the top of the world's richest list, the Wall Street Journal reported that the cloud giant and OpenAI have struck one of the largest cloud contracts ever signed. Under the deal, OpenAI will purchase $300 billion worth of compute power from Oracle over roughly five years, with purchases beginning in 2027. "This move away from Microsoft was timed with OpenAI's involvement with the Stargate Project, in which OpenAI, SoftBank, and Oracle have committed to invest $500 billion into domestic data center projects over the next four years," notes TechCrunch. OpenAI also recently signed a cloud deal with Google. "The deal ... underscores the fact that the two are willing to overlook heavy competition between them to meet the massive computing demands," wrote analyst in Reuter's report.

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An anonymous reader quotes a report from Wired: The United States has emerged as the largest investor in commercial spyware -- a global industry that has enabled the covert surveillance of journalists, human rights defenders, politicians, diplomats, and others, posing grave threats to human rights and national security. In 2024, 20 new US-based spyware investors were identified, bringing the total number of American backers of this technology to 31. This growth has largely outpaced other major investing countries such as Israel, Italy, and the United Kingdom, according to a new report published today by the Atlantic Council. The study surveyed 561 entities across 46 countries between 1992 and 2024, identifying 34 new investors. This brings the total to 128, up from 94 in the dataset published last year. The number of identified investors in the EU Single Market, plus Switzerland, stands at 31, with Italy -- a key spyware hub -- accounting for the largest share at 12. Investors based in Israel number 26. US-based investors include major hedge funds D.E. Shaw & Co. and Millennium Management, prominent trading firm Jane Street, and mainstream financial-services company Ameriprise Financial -- all of which, according to the Atlantic Council, have channeled funds to Israeli lawful-interception software provider Cognyte, a company allegedly linked to human rights abuses in Azerbaijan and Indonesia, among others. [...] Apart from focusing on investment, the Atlantic Council notes that the global spyware market is "growing and evolving," with its dataset expanded to include four new vendors, seven new resellers or brokers, 10 new suppliers, and 55 new individuals linked to the industry. Newly identified vendors include Israel's Bindecy and Italy's SIO. [...] The study reveals the addition of three new countries linked to spyware activity -- Japan, Malaysia, and Panama. Japan in particular is a signatory to international efforts to curb spyware abuse, including the Joint Statement on Efforts to Counter the Proliferation and Misuse of Commercial Spyware and the Pall Mall Process Code of Practice for States. The Atlantic Council's Jen Roberts, who also worked on the report, urged expanding Executive Order 14105 to also include spyware. He also emphasized preserving Executive Order 14093, noting that U.S. purchasing power is a key lever in shaping and constraining the global spyware market. "US purchasing power is a significant tool in shaping and constraining the global market for spyware," said Roberts.

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