President Donald Trump said on Friday the U.S. would take a 10% stake in Intel under a deal with the struggling chipmaker and is planning more such moves, the latest extraordinary intervention by the White House in corporate America. Reuters: The development follows a meeting between CEO Lip-Bu Tan and Trump earlier this month that was sparked by Trump's demand for the Intel chief's resignation over his ties to Chinese firms.

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Organizations still using default Microsoft 365 email domains face severe throttling starting this October. The restrictions target the onmicrosoft.com domain that Microsoft 365 automatically assigns to new tenants, limiting external messages to 100 recipients per day starting October 15. Microsoft blames spammers who exploit new tenants for quick spam bursts before detection. Affected organizations must acquire custom domains and update primary SMTP addresses across all mailboxes -- a process that requires credential updates across devices and applications.

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Apple is in early discussions about using Google Gemini to power a revamped version of the Siri voice assistant, marking a key potential step toward outsourcing more of its artificial intelligence technology. From a report: The iPhone maker recently approached Alphabet's Google to explore building a custom AI model that would serve as the foundation of the new Siri next year, according to people familiar with he matter. Google has started training a model that could run on Apple's servers, said the people, who asked not to be identified because the discussions are private. The work is part of an effort to catch up in generative AI, a field where the company arrived late and then struggled to gain traction. Earlier this year, Apple also explored partnerships with Anthropic and OpenAI, weighing whether Claude or ChatGPT could serve as Siri's new brain. Apple is still several weeks away from making a decision on whether to continue using internal models for Siri or move to a partner. And it hasn't yet determined who that partner may be.

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BrianFagioli writes: Google is preparing to bring its television platforms in line with the rest of Android. Starting August 1, 2026, both Google TV and Android TV will require app updates that include native code to provide 64-bit support. The move follows similar requirements for phones and tablets, and it paves the way for upcoming 64-bit TV devices.

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An anonymous reader shares a report: The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration is narrowing the capabilities and reducing the number of next-generation weather and climate satellites it plans to build and launch in the coming decades, two people familiar with the plans told CNN. This move -- which comes as hurricane season ramps up with Erin lashing the East Coast -- fits a pattern in which the Trump administration is seeking to not only slash climate pollution rules, but also reduce the information collected about the pollution in the first place. Critics of the plan also say it's a short-sighted attempt to save money at the expense of understanding the oceans and atmosphere better. Two planned instruments, one that would measure air quality, including pollution and wildfire smoke, and another that would observe ocean conditions in unprecedented detail, are no longer part of the project, the sources said.

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Remote work policies designed to attract top talent are becoming security vulnerabilities as state-sponsored hackers seek employment at cryptocurrency firms. Coinbase has implemented mandatory in-person orientation and US citizenship requirements for sensitive roles after detecting North Korean IT workers attempting to infiltrate the company through remote positions. CEO Brian Armstrong revealed on Stripe cofounder John Collison's podcast that the exchange now requires fingerprinting and live video interviews after discovering coordinated efforts involving US-based facilitators who reship laptops and attend virtual interviews on behalf of foreign operatives.

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An anonymous reader shares a report: As it tries to unseat Google, OpenAI is relying on search data from an unlikely source: Google. OpenAI has been using Google search results scraped from the web to help power ChatGPT responses, according to two people with knowledge of it. The Google search data helps answer ChatGPT queries on current events, such as news, sports and equity markets, one of the people said. OpenAI is getting the data from SerpApi, an eight-year-old web-scraping firm, which listed OpenAI as a customer on its website as recently as May last year. It removed the reference for reasons that couldn't be learned.

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Professional services firms are engineering AI agents through massive prompt documents to automate complex knowledge work. KPMG Australia developed a 100-page prompt that transforms tax legislation and partner expertise into an agent producing comprehensive tax advice within 24 hours rather than the traditional two-week timeline. The TaxBot searches distributed internal documents and Australian tax code to generate 25-page draft reports after collecting four to five inputs from tax agents. Chief Digital Officer John Munnelly said the system operates on KPMG Workbench, a global platform combining retrieval-augmented generation with models from OpenAI, Microsoft, Google, Anthropic, and Meta.

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An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Guardian: Denmark is to stop charging VAT on books in an attempt to get more people reading. At 25%, the country's tax rate on books is the highest in the world, a policy the government believes is contributing to a growing "reading crisis." The culture minister, Jakob Engel-Schmidt, announced on Wednesday that the government would propose in its budget bill that the tax on books be removed. The move is expected to cost 330 million kroner ($51 million) a year. "This is something that I, as minister of culture, have worked for, because I believe that we must put everything at stake if we are to end the reading crisis that has unfortunately been spreading in recent years," Engel-Schmidt told the Ritzau news agency . "I am incredibly proud. It is not every day that one succeeds in convincing colleagues that such massive money should be spent on investing in the consumption and culture of the Danes." [...] "It is also about getting literature out there," said Engel-Schmidt. "That is why we have already allocated money for strengthened cooperation between the country's public libraries and schools, so that more children can be introduced to good literature." [...] If prices do not fall as a result of the measure, Engel-Schmidt said he would reconsider whether it was the right course of action. "I will of course monitor how prices develop. If it turns out that abolishing VAT only means that publishers' profits grow and prices do not fall, then we must consider whether it was the right thing to do," he said. Further reading: Denmark Ending Letter Deliveries Is a Sign of the Digital Times

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Davis Lu, a former Eaton Corporation developer, has been sentenced to four years in prison for sabotaging his ex-employer's Windows network with malware and a custom kill switch that locked out thousands of employees once his account was disabled. The attack caused significant operational disruption and financial losses, with Lu also attempting to cover his tracks by deleting data and researching privilege escalation techniques. BleepingComputer reports: After a corporate restructuring and subsequent demotion in 2018, the DOJ says that Lu retaliated by embedding malicious code throughout the company's Windows production environment. The malicious code included an infinite Java thread loop designed to overwhelm servers and crash production systems. Lu also created a kill switch named "IsDLEnabledinAD" ("Is Davis Lu enabled in Active Directory") that would automatically lock all users out of their accounts if his account was disabled in Active Directory. When his employment was terminated on September 9, 2019, and his account disabled, the kill switch activated, causing thousands of users to be locked out of their systems. "The defendant breached his employer's trust by using his access and technical knowledge to sabotage company networks, wreaking havoc and causing hundreds of thousands of dollars in losses for a U.S. company," said Acting Assistant Attorney General Matthew R. Galeotti. When he was instructed to return his laptop, Lu reportedly deleted encrypted data from his device. Investigators later discovered search queries on the device researching how to elevate privileges, hide processes, and quickly delete files. Lu was found guilty earlier this year of intentionally causing damage to protected computers. After his four-year sentence, Lu will also serve three years of supervised release following his prison term.

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alternative_right shares a report from ScienceDaily: Southwest Research Institute led a James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) survey, discovering a previously unknown tiny moon orbiting Uranus. A team led by SwRI's Dr. Maryame El Moutamid discovered the small object in a series of images taken on Feb. 2, 2025, bringing Uranus' total moon count to 29. "As part of JWST's guest observer program, we found a previously unknown satellite of the ice giant, which has been provisionally designated S/2025 U 1," said El Moutamid, a lead scientist in SwRI's Solar System Science and Exploration Division in Boulder, Colorado. "This object, by far the smallest object discovered to date, was detected in a series of 10 long exposures obtained by the Near-Infrared Camera." Located in the outer solar system, Uranus is the seventh planet from the Sun. Known as "the sideways planet" for its extreme axial tilt, the cyan-colored ice giant has a deep atmosphere composed of hydrogen, helium and methane. Scientists think Uranus' larger moons are roughly equal parts water ice and silicate rock. "Assuming that the new moon has an albedo comparable to other nearby satellites, this object is probably around six miles (10 km) in diameter," El Moutamid said. "It is well below the detection threshold for the Voyager 2 cameras."

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An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: Time and again, surveys and studies show that fears and concerns about charging are the main barriers standing in the way of someone switching from gas to EV. A new market research study by Telemetry Vice President Sam Abuelsamid confirms this, as it analyzes the charging infrastructure needs over the next decade. And one of the biggest hurdles -- one that has gone mostly unmentioned across the decade-plus we've been covering this topic -- is all the junk clogging up Americans' garages. lThat's because, while DC fast-charging garners all the headlines and much of the funding, the overwhelming majority of EV charging is AC charging, usually at home -- 80 percent of it, in fact. People who own and live in a single family home are overrepresented among EV owners, and data (PDF) from the National Renewable Energy Laboratory from a few years ago found that 42 percent of homeowners park near an electrical outlet capable of level 2 (240 V) AC charging. But that could grow by more than half (to 68 percent of homeowners) if those homeowners changed their parking behavior, "most likely by clearing a space in their garage," the report finds. "90 percent of all houses can add a 240 V outlet near where cars could be parked," said Abuelsamid. "Parking behavior, namely whether homeowners use a private garage for parking or storage, will likely become a key factor in EV adoption. Today, garage-use intent is potentially a greater factor for in-house charging ability than the house's capacity to add 240 V outlets." Creating garage space would increase the number of homes capable of EV charging from 31 million to more than 50 million. And when we include houses where the owner thinks it's feasible to add wiring, that grows to more than 72 million homes. And that's far more than Telemetry's most optimistic estimate of U.S. EV penetration for 2035, which ranges from 33 million to 57 million EVs on the road 10 years from now.

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alternative_right shares a report from Phys.org: Now, for the first time, quantum scientists at the Quantum Control Laboratory at the University of Sydney Nano Institute have demonstrated a type of quantum logic gate that drastically reduces the number of physical qubits needed for its operation. To do this, they built an entangling logic gate on a single atom using an error-correcting code nicknamed the "Rosetta stone" of quantum computing. It earns that name because it translates smooth, continuous quantum oscillations into clean, digital-like discrete states, making errors easier to spot and fix, and importantly, allowing a highly compact way to encode logical qubits. The curiously named Gottesman-Kitaev-Preskill (GKP) code has for many years offered a theoretical possibility for significantly reducing the physical number of qubits needed to produce a functioning "logical qubit." Albeit by trading efficiency for complexity, making the codes very difficult to control. Research published in Nature Physics demonstrates this as a physical reality, tapping into the natural oscillations of a trapped ion (a charged atom of ytterbium) to store GKP codes and, for the first time, realizing quantum entangling gates between them. Led by Sydney Horizon Fellow Dr. Tingrei Tan at the University of Sydney Nano Institute, scientists have used their exquisite control over the harmonic motion of a trapped ion to bridge the coding complexity of GKP qubits, allowing a demonstration of their entanglement. "Our experiments have shown the first realization of a universal logical gate set for GKP qubits," Dr. Tan said. "We did this by precisely controlling the natural vibrations, or harmonic oscillations, of a trapped ion in such a way that we can manipulate individual GKP qubits or entangle them as a pair." [...] Across three experiments described in the paper, Dr. Tan's team used a single ytterbium ion contained in what is known as a Paul trap. This uses a complex array of lasers at room temperature to hold the single atom in the trap, allowing its natural vibrations to be controlled and utilized to produce the complex GKP codes. This research represents an important demonstration that quantum logic gates can be developed with a reduced physical number of qubits, increasing their efficiency.

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LinkedIn's engagement-driven algorithm systematically elevates shallow, meaningless content over substantive professional discourse, according to a new analysis that highlights how major platforms prioritize user retention metrics over content quality. Entrepreneur and product executive Elliot Smith describes encountering a "seemingly endless stream of posts that are over fluffed, over produced and ultimately say nothing" that he categorizes as "toxic mediocrity." Smith argues the platform's reward system creates a destructive cycle where "comments, likes and other engagement" signal user activity to LinkedIn's algorithm, which then promotes similar vapid content. "LinkedIn wants you on LinkedIn," Smith writes, noting the Microsoft-owned platform correlates engagement with ad clicks and premium conversions. Smith recommends professionals focus on substantive work rather than platform gaming, arguing "nothing you post there is going to change your career."

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Starting September 1st, Russia will require all smartphones and tablets sold in the country to come with MAX, a state-backed messaging app seen as a rival to WhatsApp and Telegram. Critics say the app could be used to track users. Reuters reports: The Russian government said in a statement that MAX, which will be integrated with government services, would be on a list of mandatory pre-installed apps on all "gadgets," including mobile phones and tablets, sold in Russia from September 1. State media says accusations from Kremlin critics that MAX is a spying app are false and that it has fewer permissions to access user data than rivals WhatsApp and Telegram. It will also be mandatory that from September 1, Russia's domestic app store, RuStore, which is pre-installed on all Android devices, will be pre-installed on Apple devices. A Russian-language TV app called LIME HD TV, which allows people to watch state TV channels for free, will be pre-installed on all smart TVs sold in Russia from January 1, the government added. [...] MAX said this week that 18 million users had downloaded its app, parts of which are still in a testing phase. Russia's interior ministry said on Wednesday that MAX was safer than foreign rivals, but that it had arrested a suspect in the first fraud case using the new messenger.

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Reviewers are more likely to approve a manuscript if their own work is cited in subsequent versions than are reviewers who are not cited, according to an analysis of 18,400 articles from four open-access publications. From a report: The study, which is yet to be peer reviewed, was posted online as a preprint earlier this month. The study was inspired by anecdotes from authors who cited articles only because reviewers asked them to, says study author Adrian Barnett, who researches peer review and meta-research at Queensland University of Technology in Brisbane, Australia. Sometimes, these requests are fine, he says. But if reviewers ask for too many citations or the reason to cite their work is not justified, the peer-review process can become transactional, says Barnett. Citations increase a researcher's h-index, a metric reflecting the impact of their publications.

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Google's Android 16 QPR2 beta 1 is rolling out with new customization features, including the ability to force dark mode and icon themes on apps that don't support them. The update also adds enhanced parental controls, better data migration, PDF editing, and Bluetooth audio sharing, with a full release expected in December. The Verge reports: The beta includes a new dark theme option that will "intelligently invert the UI of apps that appear light despite users having selected the dark theme" when enabled, according to Google's announcement, forcibly making apps that don't natively support the feature to appear darker. Google says this is "largely intended as an accessibility feature" for users with low vision or photosensitivity, and will also automatically darken app splash screens and adjust status bar colors to match the darker theming. Another feature will allow users to forcibly apply themed icon colors to apps that don't natively support them. Android's icon theming currently only works if app developers have provided a monochrome version of their app icon that can be adjusted, which is annoying for users who want to apply a consistent aesthetic across their entire home page. Auto-themed app icons spare developers from adding this capability manually, removing the hassle for users to customize their phone's theme. The full list of features in the QPR2 beta 1 update can be found on the Android developers' blog.

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An anonymous reader quotes a report from the New York Times: Jay Blahnik was a fitness superstar with a book and nearly two decades of work with Nike before he was hired in 2013 to work on the Apple Watch. He became known inside Apple as the creator of the watch's signature fitness feature: three circular bands that people could complete through the day by exercising, standing and burning calories. Marketed with the tagline "Close Your Rings," the concept helped galvanize sales of Apple's first breakout product after Steve Jobs's death. But along the way, Mr. Blahnik created a toxic work environment (Warning: source may be paywalled; alternative source), said nine current and former employees who worked with or for Mr. Blahnik and spoke about personnel issues on the condition of anonymity. They said Mr. Blahnik, 57, who leads a roughly 100-person division as vice president for fitness technologies, could be verbally abusive, manipulative and inappropriate. His behavior contributed to decisions by more than 10 workers to seek extended mental health or medical leaves of absence since 2022, about 10 percent of the team, these people said. When confronted with Mr. Blahnik's behavior, Apple moved to protect him after an internal investigation. The company settled one complaint alleging sexual harassment by Mr. Blahnik and is fighting a lawsuit by an employee, Mandana Mofidi, who said he had bullied her. Mr. Blahnik stayed in his job after company officials said their investigation had found no evidence of wrongdoing, according to interviews and Ms. Mofidi's lawsuit, which she filed against Mr. Blahnik and Apple last year in Los Angeles County Superior Court. The tension inside Mr. Blahnik's division speaks to workplace dysfunction at the heart of one of Apple's signature health initiatives. These employees said the company was more willing to protect a star executive than address the concerns of rank-and-file workers.

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Google is rolling out AI Mode in Search to 180 countries, expanding beyond the US, UK, and India, with even more countries being added soon. The search giant is also expanding its AI Mode's agentic capabilities, so you can now use natural language to find restaurant reservations. Engadget reports: Google says you can ask about getting a dinner reservation with conditions such as group size, date, location and your preference of cuisine, all of which be taken into consideration when AI Mode pulls in its results from across the web. Suggestions will be presented in list form with the available reservation slots. It'll also provide a link to the booking page you need. Google also plans to add local service appointments and event ticketing capabilities soon, with Ticketmaster and StubHub among its partners. AI Mode leverages Google's web-browsing AI agent Project Mariner' its direct partners on Search and resources like Knowledge Graph and Google Maps when prompted to find you somewhere to eat. It has partnered with the likes of OpenTable, Resy and Tock to incorporate as many restaurants as possible and streamline the booking process. Right now, this feature is exclusive to those subscribed to the wildly expensive Google AI Ultra plan in the US, and can be accessed through its Labs platform. If you opt into the AI Mode experiment it can also remember your previous conversations and searches to give you results that more closely match your preferences.

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Light pollution extends the active hours of birds worldwide by nearly an hour, fundamentally altering the natural rhythms of over 500 species across multiple continents. Analysis of 60 million bird call recordings reveals that artificial lighting causes birds to begin vocalizing 20 minutes earlier each morning and continue 30 minutes later each evening. The effect varies significantly by species anatomy and behavior. Birds with proportionally larger eyes experience the strongest responses, with American Robins in highly illuminated areas beginning their songs up to two hours before sunrise. Species nesting in tree cavities or enclosed spaces show minimal changes, as opaque barriers shield them from artificial light. The research, drawing from BirdWeather devices deployed globally by birdwatchers, is the largest analysis of light pollution's biological impacts to date.

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