An anonymous reader shares a report: It looks like Samsung is finally ready to roll out a paid subscription for its AI-powered smartphones, but it might not look like what we were expecting. According to ETNews, Samsung Electronics vice chair Han Jong-hee has confirmed that the company's AI Subscription Club, which launched last December for some of Samsung's home appliances in South Korea, will soon roll out to both Galaxy phones and the upcoming Ballie AI robot. "We will apply the subscription service to Galaxy smartphones starting next month," he says. "Ballie will be introduced first in Korea and the US, and we plan to supply it as a subscription in Korea."

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An anonymous reader shares a report: As music sales and streaming revenue reaches a high of $3 billion -- the highest since 2001, not accounting for significant inflation -- the UK video game market, which has grown almost continually for decades, has shrunk by 4.4%. The most significant decline was in boxed video game sales, down 35%. Data from Digital Entertainment and Retail Association (ERA) puts the total worth of the UK video game market in 2024 at $5.7 billion, double the music market and behind TV and movies at $6.2 billion. The numbers show a shift in players' purchasing habits that has been ongoing for years, from physical games to digital downloads and in-game purchases in popular, established games such as Fortnite and Roblox. Boxed games now account for 27.7% of new game sales in the UK, according to ERA data.

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Microsoft will begin enforcing storage limits on unlicensed OneDrive accounts from January 27, 2025, ending a loophole that allowed organizations to retain departed employees' data without cost. Data from accounts unlicensed for over 93 days will move to recycle bins for another 93 days before permanent deletion, unless under retention policies. Archived data retrieval will cost $0.60 per gigabyte plus $0.05 monthly per gigabyte. Organizations must either retrieve data, add licenses, or risk losing access, Microsoft has warned.

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The Japanese government published an alert on Wednesday accusing a Chinese hacking group of targeting and breaching dozens of government organizations, companies, and individuals in the country since 2019. From a report: Japan's National Police Agency and the National Center of Incident Readiness and Strategy for Cybersecurity attributed the years-long hacking spree to a group called MirrorFace. "The MirrorFace attack campaign is an organized cyber attack suspected to be linked to China, with the primary objective of stealing information related to Japan's national security and advanced technology," the authorities wrote in the alert, according to a machine translation. A longer version of the alert said the targets included Japan's Foreign and Defense ministries, the country's space agency, as well as politicians, journalists, private companies and tech think tanks, according to the Associated Press. In July 2024 Japan's Computer Emergency Response Team Coordination Center (JPCERT/CC) wrote in a blog post that MirrorFace's "targets were initially media, political organisations, think tanks and universities, but it has shifted to manufacturers and research institutions since 2023."

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An anonymous reader shares a report: The six biggest banks in the US have all quit the global banking industry's net zero target-setting group, with the imminent inauguration of Donald Trump as president expected to bring political backlash against climate action. JP Morgan is the latest to withdraw from the UN-sponsored net zero banking alliance (NZBA), following Citigroup, Bank of America, Morgan Stanley, Wells Fargo and Goldman Sachs. All six have left since the start of December. Analysts have said the withdrawals are an attempt to head off "anti-woke" attacks from rightwing US politicians, which are expected to escalate when Trump is sworn in as the country's 47th president in just under a fortnight. Trump's vows to deregulate the energy sector, dismantle environmental rules and "drill, baby, drill," were a big part of his campaign platform and are expected to form a key part of his blueprint for governing the US, the world's biggest oil and gas producer.

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Former MoviePass CEO Theodore Farnsworth has pleaded guilty to securities fraud and conspiracy charges for misleading investors about the movie subscription service's "unlimited plan" and its parent company's capabilities, U.S. prosecutors said. Farnsworth falsely claimed the $9.95 monthly unlimited movie plan was sustainable and that Helios & Matheson Analytics could monetize subscriber data through artificial intelligence, knowing both statements were untrue. He faces up to 20 years in prison for MoviePass-related fraud and five years for a separate conspiracy charge involving Vinco Ventures.

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Nvidia's AI chips are advancing faster than Moore's Law, the semiconductor industry's historical performance benchmark, according to chief executive Jensen Huang. "Our systems are progressing way faster than Moore's Law," Huang told TechCrunch. Nvidia's chips have improved thousand-fold over the past decade, outpacing Moore's Law's prediction of doubled transistor density every year, Huang said. He adds: We can build the architecture, the chip, the system, the libraries, and the algorithms all at the same time. If you do that, then you can move faster than Moore's Law, because you can innovate across the entire stack. [...] Moore's Law was so important in the history of computing because it drove down computing costs. The same thing is going to happen with inference where we drive up the performance, and as a result, the cost of inference is going to be less.

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Nvidia founder and chief executive Jensen Huang believes "very useful" quantum computers are likely decades away, tempering expectations for the emerging technology. "If you kind of said 15 years for very useful quantum computers, that would probably be on the early side. If you said 30, it's probably on the late side," Huang said during Nvidia's analyst day. "If you picked 20, I think a whole bunch of us would believe it."

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An anonymous reader shares a report: Akamai has decided to end its content delivery network services in China, but not because it's finding it hard to do business in the Middle Kingdom. News of Akamai's decision to end CDN services in China emerged in a letter it recently published and sent to customers and partners that opens by reminding them the company has a "commitment to providing world-class delivery and security solutions" -- and must therefore inform them that "Effective June 30, 2026, all China CDN services will reach their decommission date." Customers are offered a choice: do nothing and then be moved to an Akamai CDN located outside China, or use similar services from Chinese companies Tencent Cloud and Wangsu Science & Technology.

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An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Guardian: People who get their coffee hit in the morning reap benefits that are not seen in those who have shots later in the day, according to the first major study into the health benefits of the drink at different times. Analysis of the coffee consumption of more than 40,000 adults found that morning coffee drinkers were 16% less likely to die of any cause and 31% less likely to die from cardiovascular disease during a 10-year follow-up period than those who went without. But the benefits to heart health appeared to vanish in people who drank coffee throughout the day, the researchers found, with medical records showing no significant reduction in mortality for all-day drinkers compared with those who avoided coffee. [...] The study suggests that a morning dose of coffee is better for the heart than an evening one, but it does not explain why. One possible explanation is that drinking coffee later in the day can disrupt circadian rhythms and levels of hormones such as melatonin. This in turn affects sleep, inflammation and blood pressure, all of which can harm heart health. In an accompanying editorial, Prof Thomas Luscher, a consultant cardiologist at the Royal Brompton and Harefield hospitals in London, notes that many all-day drinkers sleep poorly, adding that coffee seems to suppress melatonin, a hormone that is important for inducing sleep in the brain. The effects are driven largely by caffeine, but coffee contains hundreds of other bioactive compounds that affect our physiology. The researchers say some substances in the blood that drive inflammation often peak in the morning and could be countered by anti-inflammatory compounds in a morning coffee. "This explanation applies to both caffeinated and decaffeinated coffee," they write. "Overall, we must accept the now substantial evidence that coffee drinking, particularly in the morning hours, is likely to be healthy," Luscher writes. "Thus, drink your coffee, but do so in the morning!" The study has been published in the European Heart Journal.

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China's Xiangshan project aims to deliver a high-performance RISC-V processor by 2025. If it succeeds, it could be "enormously significant" for three reasons, writes The Register's Simon Sharwood. It would elevate RISC-V from low-end silicon to datacenter-level capabilities, leverage the open-source Mulan PSL-2.0 license to disrupt proprietary chip models like Arm and Intel, and reduce China's dependence on foreign technology, mitigating the impact of international sanctions on advanced processors. From the report: The prospect of a 2025 debut appeared on Sunday in a post to Chinese social media service Weibo, penned by Yungang Bao of the Institute of Computing Technology at the Chinese Academy of Sciences. The academy has created a project called Xiangshan that aims to use the permissively licensed RISC-V ISA to create a high-performance chip, with the Scala source code to the designs openly available. Bao is a leader of the project, and has described the team's ambition to create a company that does for RISC-V what Red Hat did for Linux -- although he said that before Red Hat changed the way it made the source code of RHEL available to the public. The Xiangshan project has previously aspired to six-monthly releases, though it appears its latest design to be taped out was a second-gen chip named Nanhu that emerged in late 2023. That silicon ran at 2GHz and was built on a 14nm process node. The project has since worked on a third-gen design, named Kunminghu, and published the image [here] depicting an overview of its non-trivial micro-architecture.

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Scientists have discovered that quarks and gluons inside protons are quantum entangled, challenging traditional views of proton structure and revealing a more complex, dynamic system influenced by strong interactions. Space.com reports: Entanglement is the aspect of quantum physics that says two affected particles can instantaneously influence each other's "state" no matter how widely separated they are -- even if they are on opposite sides of the universe. Albert Einstein founded his theories of relativity on the notion that nothing can travel faster than the speed of light, however, something that should preclude the instantaneous nature of entanglement. As a result, Einstein was so troubled by entanglement he famously described it as "spukhafte Fernwirkung" or "spooky action at a distance." Yet, despite Einstein's skepticism about entanglement, this "spooky" phenomenon has been verified over and over again. Many of those verifications have concerned testing increasing distances over which entanglement can be demonstrated. This new test took the opposite approach, investigating entanglement over a distance of just one quadrillionth of a meter, finding it actually occurs within individual protons. The team found that the sharing of information that defines entanglement occurs across whole groups of fundamental particles called quarks and gluons within a proton. "Before we did this work, no one had looked at entanglement inside of a proton in experimental high-energy collision data," team member and Brookhaven Lab physicist Zhoudunming Tu said in a statement. "For decades, we've had a traditional view of the proton as a collection of quarks and gluons, and we've been focused on understanding so-called single-particle properties, including how quarks and gluons are distributed inside the proton. "Now, with evidence that quarks and gluons are entangled, this picture has changed. We have a much more complicated, dynamic system." The team's research, the culmination of six years of work, refines scientists' understanding of how entanglement influences the structure of protons. The team's research was published in the journal Reports on Progress in Physics.

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An anonymous reader quotes a report from the New York Times: To members of his synagogue, the voice that played over the speakers of Congregation Emanu El in Houston sounded just like Rabbi Josh Fixler's. In the same steady rhythm his congregation had grown used to, the voice delivered a sermon about what it meant to be a neighbor in the age of artificial intelligence. Then, Rabbi Fixler took to the bimah himself. "The audio you heard a moment ago may have sounded like my words," he said. "But they weren't." The recording was created by what Rabbi Fixler called "Rabbi Bot," an A.I. chatbot trained on his old sermons. The chatbot, created with the help of a data scientist, wrote the sermon, even delivering it in an A.I. version of his voice. During the rest of the service, Rabbi Fixler intermittently asked Rabbi Bot questions aloud, which it would promptly answer. Rabbi Fixler is among a growing number of religious leaders experimenting with A.I. in their work, spurring an industry of faith-based tech companies that offer A.I. tools, from assistants that can do theological research to chatbots that can help write sermons. [...] Religious leaders have used A.I. to translate their livestreamed sermons into different languages in real time, blasting them out to international audiences. Others have compared chatbots trained on tens of thousands of pages of Scripture to a fleet of newly trained seminary students, able to pull excerpts about certain topics nearly instantaneously. The report's author draws a parallel to previous generations' initial apprehension -- and eventual embrace -- of transformative technologies like radio, television, and the internet. "For centuries, new technologies have changed the ways people worship, from the radio in the 1920s to television sets in the 1950s and the internet in the 1990s," the report says. "Some proponents of A.I. in religious spaces have gone back even further, comparing A.I.'s potential -- and fears of it -- to the invention of the printing press in the 15th century."

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The shift from paywalled to open-access scientific publishing is progressing, driven in part by platforms like Sci-Hub -- a website that allows users to upload PDFs of published papers and share them with anyone. While the shadow library website has faced ongoing attempts by publishers to block access, it has another problem: the platform features many outdated or retracted papers that could spread misinformation or flawed findings. Ars Technica reports: Sci-Hub works a bit like a combination of cache and aggregator for published materials. Whenever it gets a request for a paper that's not already in its database, it uses leaked login credentials to go to the website of whatever journal published the paper and obtain a copy. If it already has a copy, however, it will simply serve that up instead. This leaves open the possibility that it will have obtained a copy of a paper prior to its retraction and continue to distribute that copy after the paper has been retracted. To check this, the researchers obtained a list of nearly 17,000 retracted papers and searched for them on Sci-Hub. They then visually examined the documents that were returned. They found that 85 percent of them contained no indication that the paper had been retracted. "The availability of [unlabeled retracted articles] in the field of health sciences is particularly high," they note, "which indicates a significant risk of their unintended use and further citation in future research." While corrections are less severe than retractions, they're likely to suffer a similar problem. And corrections will often involve the technical details of a paper -- the experimental approaches or raw data that will be critical for anyone wanting to replicate or extend previously published results. So, if anything, their impact will be more significant. Ars notes that a system called Crossmark is available to help find the most up-to-date version of a paper, including any corrections or retraction notices.

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According to police, the man killed in the January 1st Las Vegas Cybertruck blast used ChatGPT to plan the explosion. The Hill reports: In a press conference, Tuesday, Las Vegas police released more details of the intentions of 37-year-old Matthew Livelsberger, who died of a gunshot wound prior to the car exploding. Las Vegas Sheriff Kevin McMahill said it was concerning that Livelsberger used ChatGPT, a popular artificial intelligence model created by OpenAI, to carry out the explosion. According to police, Livelsberger asked ChatGPT various questions, including where the largest gun stores in Denver were, information about the explosive targets Tannerite and pistols. "We knew that AI was going to change the game at some point or another in really all of our lives and certainly, I think this is the first incidence that I'm aware of on U.S. soil where ChatGPT is utilized to help an individual build a particular device, to learn information all across the country as they're moving forward," McMahill said. "And so, absolutely, it's a concerning moment for us," he continued.

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At CES 2025 today, Lenovo introduced the Legion Go S handheld gaming console. It marks the first officially licensed handheld that comes pre-loaded with Valve's Arch Linux based SteamOS operating system. Phoronix reports: This first officially licensed SteamOS handheld is making use of the AMD Ryzen Z1 Extreme SoC with Radeon 700M graphics, an 8-inch 1200p LCD touchscreen with VRR support, up to 32GB of LPDDR5x-6400 memory, up to 1TB of PCIe Gen4 SSD storage, and a 55 Whr battery. Pricing starts at $500 USD with availability beginning in May. Sadly this Lenovo Legion Go handheld running SteamOS is making use of the Ryzen Z1 Extreme and not the Ryzen Z2 announced by AMD yesterday with the Zen 5 cores. But at CES Lenovo is showing off the Lenovo Legion Go (8.8", 2) prototype that uses the AMD Ryzen Z2 Go SoC along with an OLED display albeit a Windows gaming device. Additional details are available in Lenovo's press release.

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An anonymous reader quotes a report from Wired: Laptop screens can feel cramped. But what if you could magically get more real estate without having to carry around a portable monitor? That's precisely the purpose of Lenovo's ThinkBook Plus Gen 6 Rollable AI PC -- yes, rollable. It has an OLED display that, with the push of a button, extends the 14-inch screen upward to make for an awkward aspect ratio, but roughly doubles the screen space to 16.7 inches. Two screens are better than one for productivity, but what if one screen could be two but still one? Yes. It plays a fun animation and some music when it does its rolling thing. You can also activate the rolling action with a palm gesture; once it scans your palm, shift it up or down to raise or lower the screen. (Pressing the button on the keyboard is way faster.) You can take advantage of Windows 11 window snapping features to put apps one on top of the other. I stacked two browser windows, but you can put other apps below too. Considering I'm already that guy who brings a spare portable monitor everywhere, this just seems like a more elegant solution that takes up less space in my bag. And of course, anyone can take advantage of the long aspect ratio to get a better look at documents, PDFs, and web pages. Lenovo says it has tested the rolling function 30,000 times, and it has performed without flaws, so you can rest a little easier about reliability, though repairing this machine sounds like it will be a task. The whole laptop doesn't feel significantly different from a normal machine, weighing just 3.7 pounds -- that's 1 pound less than the 16-inch MacBook Pro. However, walking with your laptop open in your hand might be weird, as it feels a little top heavy. When closed, it's 19.9 mm thin -- the 16-inch MacBook Pro is 15.4 mm, so Lenovo's machine is thicker, but not as thick as a gaming laptop. Lenovo published a concept video on YouTube.

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The OnePlus 13 launched in the North American market today, making it the first flagship smartphone of 2025. As the smartphone market continues to consolidate, it has become increasingly difficult for non-Samsung, Google, and Apple devices to gain significant traction in the competitive U.S. market. Nevertheless, OnePlus has continually released premium flagship-tier devices at relatively modest price points, hoping to pry users away from the Big Tech monoliths. The OnePlus 13 features Qualcomm's latest Snapdragon 8 Elite chipset, up to 16GB of RAM, a 6.82" QHD+ OLED display, a triple Hasselblad-branded camera system, a massive 6,000mAh battery, and support for 5G networks across all major carriers in the U.S. and Canada. A full list of specifications can be found here. Based on the early reviews, the OnePlus 13 appears to set the bar high with not a lot of faults to highlight among reviewers. Here are some of our favorite reviews published today: OnePlus 13 review: finally, a flagship that can hang (The Verge) OnePlus 13 review: I'm dumbfounded, I can't find anything wrong with this phone (TechRadar) OnePlus 13 Review: Ship Shape? (Michael Fisher) OnePlus 13 Review: The Bar Has Been Set! (Marques Brownlee) The OnePlus 13 is finally a OnePlus flagship I trust to do it all (Android Authority) OnePlus 13 Review: 2025's First Flagship Finds Success (Forbes) OnePlus 13 review: The complete package (BGR) The OnePlus 13 sets a new bar for smartphone performance (Business Insider) This is not a Slashvertisement. We just like shiny, new tech.

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"Nvidia has officially introduced its highly anticipated GeForce 50 Series graphics cards, accompanied by the debut of DLSS 4 technology," writes Slashdot reader jjslash. "The lineup includes four premium GPUs: the RTX 5080 and RTX 5090 are slated for release on January 30, with the RTX 5070 and RTX 5070 Ti following in February. TechSpot recount of the Jensen Huang keynote tries to differentiate between dubious performance claims and actual expected raw output": The new RTX 5090 flagship comes packing significantly more hardware over its predecessor. Not only does this GPU use Nvidia's new Blackwell architecture, but it also packs significantly more CUDA cores, greater memory bandwidth, and a higher VRAM capacity. The SM count has increased from 128 with the RTX 4090 to a whopping 170 with the RTX 5090 -- a 33% increase in the core size. The memory subsystem is overhauled, now featuring GDDR7 technology on a massive 512-bit bus. With this GDDR7 memory clocked at 28 Gbps, memory bandwidth reaches 1,792 GB/s -- a near 80% increase over the RTX 4090's bandwidth. It also includes 32GB of VRAM, the most Nvidia has ever provided on a consumer GPU. [...] As for the performance claims... Nvidia has - as usual - used its marketing to obscure actual gaming performance. RTX 50 GPUs support DLSS 4 multi-frame generation, which previous-generation GPUs lack. This means RTX 50 series GPUs can generate double the frames of previous-gen models in DLSS-supported games, making them appear up to twice as "fast" as RTX 40 series GPUs. But in reality, while FPS numbers will increase with DLSS 4, latency and gameplay feel may not improve as dramatically. [...] The claim that the RTX 5070 matches the RTX 4090 in performance seems dubious. Perhaps it could match in frame rate with DLSS 4, but certainly not in raw, non-DLSS performance. Based on Nvidia's charts, the RTX 5070 seems 20-30% faster than the RTX 4070 at 1440p. This would place the RTX 5070 slightly ahead of the RTX 4070 Super for about $50 less, or alternatively, 20-30% faster than the RTX 4070 for the same price. These GeForce 50 series wasn't the only announcement Nvidia made at CES 2025. The chipmaker unveiled a $3,000 personal AI supercomputer, capable of running sophisticated AI models with up to 200 billion parameters. It also announced plans to introduce AI-powered autonomous characters in video games this year, starting with a virtual teammate in the battle royale game PUBG.

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An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: The US Justice Department today announced it filed an antitrust lawsuit against "six of the nation's largest landlords for participating in algorithmic pricing schemes that harmed renters." One of the landlords, Cortland Management, agreed to a settlement "that requires it to cooperate with the government, stop using its competitors' sensitive data to set rents and stop using the same algorithm as its competitors without a corporate monitor," the DOJ said. The pending settlement requires Cortland to "cooperate fully and truthfully... in any civil investigation or civil litigation the United States brings or has brought" on this subject matter. The US previously sued RealPage, a software maker accused of helping landlords collectively set prices by giving them access to competitors' nonpublic pricing and occupancy information. The original version of the lawsuit described actions by landlords but did not name any as defendants. The Justice Department filed an amended complaint (PDF) today in order to add the landlords as defendants. The landlord defendants are Greystar, LivCor, Camden, Cushman, Willow Bridge, and Cortland, which collectively "operate more than 1.3 million units in 43 states and the District of Columbia," the DOJ said. "The amended complaint alleges that the six landlords actively participated in a scheme to set their rents using each other's competitively sensitive information through common pricing algorithms," the DOJ said. The phrase "price fixing" came up in discussions between landlords, the amended complaint said: "For example, in Minnesota, property managers from Cushman & Wakefield, Greystar, and other landlords regularly discussed competitively sensitive topics, including their future pricing. When a property manager from Greystar remarked that another property manager had declined to fully participate due to 'price fixing laws,' the Cushman & Wakefield property manager replied to Greystar, 'Hmm... Price fixing laws huh? That's a new one! Well, I'm happy to keep sharing so ask away. Hoping we can kick these concessions soon or at least only have you guys be the only ones with big concessions! It's so frustrating to have to offer so much.'" The Justice Department is joined in the case by the attorneys general of California, Colorado, Connecticut, Illinois, Massachusetts, Minnesota, North Carolina, Oregon, Tennessee, and Washington. The case is in US District Court for the Middle District of North Carolina. Further reading: Are We Entering an AI Price-Fixing Dystopia?

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