Technology

MidnightBSD, a FreeBSD-based desktop operating system, has quietly updated its README to reflect a new geographic restriction. The project has added a clause that bars residents of any country, state, or territory with OS-level age verification mandates from using MidnightBSD

Late last month, at an event in Washington, D.C., Andrew Yang delivered a bleak message. “I have bad news, America,” he told the crowd. “The Fuckening is here.”

Autonomous vehicles are already doing so well with two dimensions, why not add a z-axis?

Reddit.

Who needs affordable PCs and oil, anyway?

Public water supplies in America will need billions invested to meet the peak requirements of datacenters during the hottest periods of the year, even if their overall annual consumption is relatively modest.

After the website archive.today launched a DDoS campaign against a small blog in January 2026, a request for comment was started. After the discovery of tampered archives, consensus was reached to deprecate the site used almost 700 thousand times on the English Wikipedia.

Archive: https://archive.ph/MESzb

In order to help train its AI models, Meta (and others) have been using pirated versions of copyrighted books, without the consent of authors or publishers. The company behind Facebook and Instagram faces an ongoing class-action lawsuit brought by authors including Richard Kadrey, Sarah Silverman, and Christopher Golden, and one in which it has already scored a major (and surprising) victory: The Californian court concluded last year that using pirated books to train its Llama LLM did qualify as fair use.

What do you think guys? Which important milestones have they missed?

[ Web Archive | archive.ph ]

Starting in Firefox version 142, Mozilla released a “Link Previews” feature.

Nearly 40 employees of OpenAI and Google filed an amicus brief in support of Anthropic’s Monday lawsuit.

Part of a larger $550 billion investment framework.

The proposed age limit, which aimed to address concerns over online harms, was defeated in a Commons vote by 307 to 173, a majority of 134

AI is everywhere. It’s in your phones, in your Internet searches, in defense software. And it’s expanding. The big tech giants—Alphabet, Microsoft, Meta and Amazon—are planning on spending nearly $700 billion this year alone on building out AI infrastructure.

After becoming the first country to ban under-16s from social media, Australia has now gone further by implementing one of the world’s most comprehensive age verification regimes for underage users, covering AI chatbots, app stores, online gaming, search engines, messaging services and pornography sites. The rules are already drawing criticism from some firms: Aylo, the owner of explicit sites including Pornhub, has responded by blocking Australian users from its platforms entirely.

I think this recent post by AI industry CEO Matt Shumer is worth a read. In it, he basically explains how quickly LLMs (large language models) are evolving to supplant many developers and programmers, and how that disruption is coming to other industries quickly. He also warns critics of AI to adjust their priors and realize the AI tools you mocked just six months ago, aren’t the ones in use today:

An investigation into the AI bots that appeared on Reddit after they partnered with OpenAI.

From the official Dutch Intelligence and Security Service

AI-based assistants or “agents” — autonomous programs that have access to the user’s computer, files, online services and can automate virtually any task — are growing in popularity with developers and IT workers. But as so many eyebrow-raising headlines over the past few weeks have shown, these powerful and assertive new tools are rapidly shifting the security priorities for organizations, while blurring the lines between data and code, trusted co-worker and insider threat, ninja hacker and novice code jockey…

Because even if they say “no mass donestic surveillance,” and “no autonomous weapons”, the pentagon just has other companies for that.

Reddit.

The Foundation sees this as a contradiction to the EU’s own interoperability goals. Although XLSX is standardized as OOXML according to ISO/IEC 29500, Microsoft’s implementations often deviate from the specifications. Furthermore, features often change undocumented, which complicates compatibility with open-source software such as LibreOffice.

Reddit.

Implementation of the White House’s return-to-office directive will be aided by the tech firm Palantir. It remains unclear why a spy-tech company should be tasked with things like “employee seat assignments.”

Your daily reminder that by supporting Big Tech, you are contributing to the insane wealth disparity.

cross-posted from : https://lemmy.zip/post/60387085

Over the past few weeks, several US banks have pulled off from lending to Oracle for expanding its AI data centres, as per a report.

It is worth noting that both the hardware and software of Fairphone is heavily dependent on a Chinese company T2Mobile.

About a year and a half ago, I wrote about my kid’s experience with an AI checker tool that was pre-installed on a school-issued Chromebook. The assignment had been to write an essay about Kurt Vonnegut’s Harrison Bergeron—a story about a dystopian society that enforces “equality” by handicapping anyone who excels—and the AI detection tool flagged the essay as “18% AI written.” The culprit? Using the word “devoid.” When the word was swapped out for “without,” the score magically dropped to 0%.

Planet Labs, one of the world’s leading commercial satellite imaging companies, said Friday it is placing a hold on releasing imagery of some parts of the Middle East as a regional war enters its second week.

Norway’s Forbrukerrådet consumer council is taking aim at the creeping enshittification of modern life in a 100-page report – and a splendid four-minute video which we highly recommend.

Wikipedia editors have implemented new policies and restricted a number of contributors who were paid to use AI to translate existing Wikipedia articles into other languages after they discovered these AI translations added AI “hallucinations,” or errors, to the resulting article.

To help train AI models, Meta and other tech companies have downloaded and shared pirated books via BitTorrent from Anna’s Archive and other shadow libraries. In an ongoing lawsuit, Meta now argues that uploading pirated books to strangers via BitTorrent qualifies as fair use. The company also stresses that the data helped establish U.S. global leadership in AI.

Are you still a user of WhatsApp after the app become this much worse with AI, Channels, Worst Design, etc…? Primarily a Meta owned spyware!

The Wikimedia Foundation suffered a security incident today after a self-propagating JavaScript worm began modifying user scripts and vandalizing Meta-Wiki pages.

Elon Musk’s xAI has lost its bid for a preliminary injunction that would have temporarily blocked California from enforcing a law that requires AI firms to publicly share information about their training data.

Liberty has costs, but it’s worth it.

Earlier this week, PCWorld published a roundup of Windows 12 rumors translated from PCWelt that does not meet our editorial standards. We’re deeply embarrassed by it, and I personally apologize that the article was published. It should not have been, but we’re keeping the article live (with an editor’s note at the top) so it remains in the public record.

Hacker News. - We introduce a new measure of AI displacement risk, observed exposure, that combines theoretical LLM capability and real-world usage data, weighting automated (rather than augmentative) and work-related uses more heavily - AI is far from reaching its theoretical capability: actual coverage remains a fraction of what’s feasible - Occupations with higher observed exposure are projected by the BLS to grow less through 2034 - Workers in the most exposed professions are more likely to be older, female, more educated, and higher-paid - We find no systematic increase in unemployment for highly exposed workers since late 2022, though we find suggestive evidence that hiring of younger workers has slowed in exposed occupations

Following a two month consultation, passage of the UK’s AI law will reportedly be ‘kicked down the road.’

In a blog post Richell notes that the New York version as far worse since it “explicitly forbids self-reporting and leaves the allowed methods to regulations written by the Attorney General” and so developers of operating systems and devices would have to have more than just your date of birth to put you into some age bracket like the California law seems to allow.

“Breaking Free: Pathways to a fair technological future” is a new report from Forbrukerrådet. The report itself is a light read: it’s in English, and while it is 100 pages long [PDF], it is in fact enjoyable and even amusing – we laughed quite a few times when reading it. For one thing, it contains a surprising number of puns and the occasional starred-out swearword, such as “Do androids dream of electric s*.” A stodgy bureaucratic report this is not.

This post provides arguments, asks questions, and documents some examples of Anthropic’s leadership being misleading and deceptive, holding contradictory positions that consistently shift in OpenAI’s direction, lobbying to kill and water down regulation so helpful that employees of all major AI companies speak out to support it, and violating the fundamental promise the company was founded on. It also shares a few previously unreported details on Anthropic leadership’s promises and efforts.