According to The Verge, legacy G Suite accounts will soon lose their individual storage allotment perks and be transitioned to pooled storage, which will be "shared across all users within your organization." The changes will come into effect starting May 1st. From the report: G Suite was rebranded as Workspace in 2020. G Suite legacy free edition, which Google stopped offering in 2012, provides each user with 15GB of free allocated storage and was offered for personal use -- making it ideal for families or groups that need to share a collective domain. Existing users have been permitted to access Workspace services at no additional charge, but Google says it's now making this change because pooled storage provides a "simpler and more flexible way to manage storage." "Google Workspace customers have had the benefit of pooled storage for years, and now we're rolling it out to users with this legacy offering," Google spokesperson Jenny Thomson told The Verge. No action is required for the switch according to Google, and users cannot opt out of the pooled storage transition. The total amount of storage allocated to the entire G Suite account won't be reduced, but if more storage is required then it can be purchased "at a discount" starting at increments of 100GB, which typically costs $15. Google hasn't specified how large this discount will be. Storage limitations can still be set for each user within the G Suite account after the transition to prevent the collective storage pool from being hogged by individual users. These limits will have to be manually assigned by an account admin, however.

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Roku is testing autoplaying video ads that play before users can access the home screen. While Roku claims this is just an experiment, users are threatening to abandon the platform if the change becomes permanent. Ars Technica reports: Reports of Roku customers seeing video ads automatically play before they could view the OS' home screen started appearing online this week. A Reddit user, for example, posted yesterday: "I just turned on my Roku and got an unskippable ad for a movie, before I got to the regular Roku home screen." Multiple apparent users reported seeing an ad for the movie Moana 2. When reached for comment, a Roku spokesperson shared a company statement that confirms that the autoplaying ads are expected behavior but not a permanent part of Roku OS currently. Instead, Roku claimed, it was just trying the ad capability out. Roku's representative said that Roku's business "has and will always require continuous testing and innovation across design, navigation, content, and our first-rate advertising products," adding: "Our recent test is just the latest example, as we explore new ways to showcase brands and programming while still providing a delightful and simple user experience."

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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.

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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.

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Apple will introduce a slimmer iPhone 17 "Air" this fall, marking a strategic shift toward potentially port-free devices in future product lines, according to a Bloomberg report. The new model will feature a 6.6-inch display with ProMotion scrolling, Dynamic Island interface, and a Camera Control button while measuring approximately 2 millimeters thinner than current models -- roughly a 20% reduction in depth, the report said. Despite its slimmer profile, the device will maintain battery life comparable to existing iPhones through redesigned display and silicon components. It will incorporate Apple's power-efficient C1 in-house modem chip but will retain USB-C connectivity, despite earlier internal discussions about eliminating ports entirely.

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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.

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Most mobile apps fail to reach $1,000 in monthly revenue within their first two years, according to a new report from RevenueCat examining data from over 75,000 mobile apps. Across all categories, only about 20% of apps achieve the $1,000 threshold, while just 5% reach $10,000 monthly. In 2025, the top 5% of apps generate 500 times more revenue than the remaining 95% -- up from 200 times in 2024. After one year, elite performers in gaming, photo and video, health and fitness, and social categories exceed $5,000 monthly, while those in the 25th percentile earn a meager $5-20 per month. The report also highlights North American developers' heavy iOS dependence, with 76.1% making over 80% of their revenue from Apple's platform. Subscription retention presents another challenge, with barely 10% of monthly subscribers staying beyond the first year.

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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.

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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.

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An anonymous reader shares a report: Xbox 360 modders have discovered a new way to get homebrew apps and games running on the console. A new software-only exploit known as BadUpdate allows you to use a USB key to hack past Microsoft's Hypervisor protections and run unsigned code and games. Modern Vintage Gamer has tested BadUpdate and found that you don't even have to open up your Xbox 360 console to get it running. Unlike the RGH or JTAG exploits for the Xbox 360, this BadUpdate method just requires a USB key. If you have the time and patience to get this running successfully, you'll be able to run the Xbox 360 homebrew store which includes games, apps, emulators, utilities, and even custom dashboards.

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Harvard University on Monday announced that tuition will be free for students from families with annual incomes of $200,000 or less starting in the 2025-26 academic year. From a report: "Putting Harvard within financial reach for more individuals widens the array of backgrounds, experiences, and perspectives that all of our students encounter, fostering their intellectual and personal growth," Harvard University President Alan M. Garber said in a statement. "By bringing people of outstanding promise together to learn with and from one another, we truly realize the tremendous potential of the University." The new plan will enable about 86% of U.S. families to qualify for Harvard financial aid and expand the Ivy League college's commitment to providing all undergrads the resources they need to enroll and graduate, according to Garber.

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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.

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More than 80 signatories representing about 100 European tech organizations have urged EU leaders to take "radical action" to reduce reliance on foreign digital infrastructure, according to a letter sent to European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen. The coalition, including Airbus, Proton, and OVHCloud, warns Europe "will lose out on digital innovation" and become almost completely dependent on non-European technologies "in less than three years at current rates." The group calls for public procurement requirements mandating European-made tech solutions, development of common standards, and creation of a "Sovereign Infrastructure Fund" for capital-intensive areas like chips and quantum computing. "Our reliance on non-European technologies will become almost complete in less than three years at current rates," the letter states, citing concerns over U.S. technological dominance following recent comments from Vice President JD Vance criticizing European regulations.

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Across high-income countries, humans' ability to reason and solve problems appears to have peaked in the early 2010s and declined since. Despite no changes in fundamental brain biology, test scores for both teenagers and adults show deteriorating performance in reading, mathematics and science. In an eye-opening statistic, 25% of adults in high-income countries now struggle to "use mathematical reasoning when reviewing statements" -- rising to 35% in the US. This cognitive decline coincides with a fundamental shift in our relationship with information. Americans reading books has fallen below 50%, while difficulty thinking and concentrating among 18-year-olds has climbed sharply since the mid-2010s. The timing points to our changing digital habits: a transition from finite web pages to infinite feeds, from active browsing to passive consumption, and from focused attention to constant context-switching. Research shows that intentional use of digital technologies can be beneficial, but the passive consumption dominating recent years impairs verbal processing, attention, working memory and self-regulation. Some of the cited research in the story: New PIAAC results show declining literacy and increasing inequality in many European countries â" Better adult learning is necessary; Have attention spans been declining?; Short- and long-term effects of passive and active screen time on young children's phonological memory; Efficient, helpful, or distracting? A literature review of media multitasking in relation to academic performance.

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Abstract of a paper published on National Bureau of Economic Research: This paper investigates self-reported wedges between how much people work and how much they want to work, at their current wage. More than two-thirds of full-time workers in German survey data are overworked -- actual hours exceed desired hours. We combine this evidence with a simple model of labor supply to assess the welfare consequences of tighter weekly hours limits via willingness-to-pay calculations. According to counterfactuals, the optimal length of the workweek in Germany is 37 hours. Introducing such a cap would raise welfare by .8-1.6% of GDP. The gains from a shortened workweek are largest for workers who are married, female, white collar, middle aged, and high income. An extended analysis integrates a non-constant wage-hours relationship, falling capital returns, and a shrinking tax base.

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Prolonged exposure to extreme heat accelerates biological aging in older adults, increasing the risk of age-related illnesses, according to research published in Science Advances. In a nationally representative study of 3,686 U.S. adults over age 56, scientists found that long-term exposure to high heat days was associated with accelerated epigenetic aging - molecular changes that affect how genes function without altering DNA itself. Researchers from the University of Southern California discovered that individuals living in areas where heat index values regularly exceed 90F showed signs of being biologically older than those in cooler regions, even after controlling for factors like wealth, education, and lifestyle habits. Six-year cumulative heat exposure linked to as much as 2.48 years of accelerated aging in one measurement.

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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.

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This week the Free Software Foundation published memorabilia items for an online silent auction — part of their big 40th anniversary celebration. "Starting March 17, the FSF will unlock items each day for bidding on the LibrePlanet wiki at 12:00 EDT.. Bidding on all items will conclude at 15:00 EDT on March 21, 2025... "During the auction, the FSF welcomes everyone who supports user freedom to bid on historical and symbolic free software memorabilia," they annouced this week: The auction is split into two parts: a silent auction hosted on the LibrePlanet wiki from March 17 through March 21 and a live auction held on the FSF's Galène videoconferencing server on March 23 from 14:00-17:00. The auction is only the opening act to a months-long itinerary celebrating forty years of free software activism... Executive director Zoë Kooyman adds: "These items are valuable pieces of FSF history, and some of them are emblematic of the free software movement. We want to entrust these memorabilia in the hands of the free software community for preservation and would love to see some of these items displayed in exhibitions." All in all, there are twenty-five pieces that are either directly part of the FSF's history and/or representative of the free software movement that will be available in the silent auction. Winning bidders can rest assured that all proceeds from this auction will go towards the FSF's continued work to promote computer user freedom worldwide. Silent auction items include: A print of the famous Gnu-with-Tux-as-superheroes poster signed by Richard Stallman and artist Lissanne Lake. Bids start at $300... A mid-1980s VT220 terminal that "still works, and can be connected to your favorite free machine over the serial interface... This is the same terminal that was on the FSF reception desk for some time, introducing visitors to ASCII art, NetHack, and other free software lore." Bids start at $250... (with estimate shipping costs of $100) An Amiga 3000UX donated to the GNU project "sometime in 1990." While it now has a damaged battery, "FSF staff programmers used it at MIT to help further some early development of the GNU operating system." Starting bid: $300 (with estimated shipping costs of $400). "A variety of plush animals that had greeted visitors at its former offices in Boston on 51 Franklin Street..." "The most notable items have been reserved for the live auction on Sunday, March 23," they note — including the Internet Hall of Fame medal awarded to FSF founder Richard Stallman in 2013 "as ultimate recognition of free software's immense impact on the development and advancement of the Internet."

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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."

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Fresh out of university, Remco accepted a job that allowed him to relocate to a different country. While entering the workforce for the first time, he was also adjusting to a new home and culture, which is probably why the red flags didn't look quite so red.

The trouble had actually begun during his interview. While being questioned about his own abilities, Remco learned about Conglomcorp's healthy financial position, backed by a large list of clients. Everything seemed perfect, but Remco had a bad gut feeling he could neither explain nor shake off. Being young and desperate for a job, he ignored his misgivings and accepted the position. He hadn't yet learned how scarily accurate intuition often proves to be.

The second red flag was run up the mast at orientation. While teaching him about the company's history, one of the senior managers proudly mentioned that Conglomcorp had recently fired 50% of their workforce, and were still doing great. This left Remco feeling more concerned than impressed, but he couldn't reverse course now.

Flag number three waved during onboarding, as Remco began to learn about the Java application he would be helping to develop. He'd been sitting at the cubicle of Lars, a senior developer, watching over his shoulder as Lars familiarized him with the application's UI.

"Garbage Collection." Using his mouse, Lars circled a button in the interface labeled just that. "We added this to solve a bug some users were experiencing. Now we just tell everyone that if they notice any weird behavior in the application, they should click this button."

Remco frowned. "What happens in the code when you click that?"

"It calls System.gc()."

But that wasn't even guaranteed to run! The Java virtual machine handled its own garbage collection. And in no universe did you want to put a worse-than-useless button in your UI and manipulate clients into thinking it did something. But Remco didn't feel confident enough to speak his mind. He kept silent and soldiered on.

When Remco was granted access to the codebase, it got worse. The whole thing was a pile of spaghetti full of similar design brillance that mostly worked well enough to satisfy clients, although there was a host of bugs in the bug tracker, some of which had been rotting there for over 7 years. Remco had been given the unenviable task of fixing the oldest ones.

Remco slogged through another few months. Eventually, he was tasked with implementing a new feature that was supposed to be similar to existing features already in the application. He checked these other features to see how they were coded, intending to follow the same pattern. As it turned out, each and every one of them had been implemented in a different, weird way. The wheel had been reinvented over and over, and none of the implementations looked like anything he ought to be imitating.

Flummoxed, Remco approached Lars' cubicle and explained his findings. "How should I proceed?" he finally asked.

Lars shrugged, and looked up from a running instance of the application. "I don't know." Lars turned back to his screen and pushed "Garbage Collect".

Fairly soon after that enlightening experience, Remco moved on. Conglomcorp is still going, though whether they've retained their garbage collection button is anyone's guess.

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