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A "small percentage" of Google's users in the US will begin seeing an AI Mode tab in Google Search "in the coming weeks," the company said Thursday, marking the tool's first deployment outside the company's experimental Labs environment. Unlike traditional search results that display URLs based on user queries, AI Mode generates conversational responses from Google's search index. The feature will appear as a dedicated tab positioned before the standard "All," "Images," and other search filters. The deployment represents Google's direct challenge to LLM-powered search engines like Perplexity and ChatGPT. AI Mode differs from existing AI Overviews in Google Search, which merely insert AI summaries between the search box and web results.

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An anonymous reader shares a report: The video game website Polygon has been sold to click-farm powerhouse Valnet and much of its masthead has been laid off, Kotaku has learned. The sale was subsequently announced in a press release. Multiple staff members have posted online about losing their jobs or about colleagues now being out of work.

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The Document Foundation is celebrating the 20th anniversary of the ratification of the Open Document Format (ODF) as an OASIS standard.

Two decades after its approval in 2005, ODF is the only open standard for office documents, promoting digital independence, interoperability and content transparency worldwide. [...]

To celebrate this milestone, from today The Document Foundation will be publishing a series of presentations and documents on its blog that illustrate the unique features of ODF, tracing its history from the development and standardisation process through the activities of the Technical Committee for the submission of version 1.3 to ISO and the standardisation of version 1.4.

Amazon CEO Andy Jassy has this week sounded the alarm on AI adoption speeds. Though self-described as an AI optimist, Jassy cautioned that this technological shift "may be quicker than other technology transitions in the past." Jassy pointed directly to declining education quality as "one of the biggest problems" facing AI implementation, not the technology itself. He questioned whether schools are adequately preparing students for future tool use, including coding applications.

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Nvidia publicly criticized AI startup Anthropic on Thursday over claims about Chinese smuggling tactics, just days before the Biden-era "AI Diffusion Rule" takes effect on May 15. The confrontation highlights growing tensions between AI hardware providers and model developers over export controls. "American firms should focus on innovation and rise to the challenge, rather than tell tall tales that large, heavy, and sensitive electronics are somehow smuggled in 'baby bumps' or 'alongside live lobsters,'" an Nvidia spokesperson said, responding to Anthropic's Wednesday blog post. The Amazon and Google-backed AI startup had called for tighter restrictions and enforcement, arguing that "maintaining America's compute advantage through export controls is essential for national security." Anthropic specifically proposed lowering export thresholds for Tier 2 countries to prevent China from gaining ground in AI development. Nvidia countered that policy shouldn't be used to limit competitiveness: "China, with half of the world's AI researchers, has highly capable AI experts at every layer of the AI stack. America cannot manipulate regulators to capture victory in AI."

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Meta has eliminated key privacy protections for Ray-Ban Meta smart glasses users in a policy update that took effect April 29th. The company now permanently enables Meta AI with camera functionality unless "Hey Meta" voice commands are completely disabled, while simultaneously removing users' ability to opt out of having their voice recordings stored in the cloud. These recordings are kept for up to a year for Meta's product development, with the company only deleting accidental voice interactions after 90 days. Users can manually delete individual recordings but cannot prevent the initial collection.

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Microsoft is raising prices for Xbox consoles globally, with the flagship Series X jumping $100 to $599.99 in the US. The more affordable Series S will increase by $80 to $379.99, while game prices will reach $80 later this year. The company cited "market conditions and the rising cost of development" in a statement, adding that it continues to focus on "offering more ways to play more games across any screen and ensuring value for Xbox players."

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The out-of-memory (OOM) killer has long been a scary and controversial part of the Linux kernel. It is summoned from some dark place when the system as a whole (or, more recently, any given control group) is running so low on memory that further allocations are not possible; its job is to kill off processes until a sufficient amount of memory has been freed. Roman Gushchin has found a way to make the OOM killer even scarier: adding the ability to load custom OOM killers in BPF.

Security updates have been issued by Debian (expat, fig2dev, firefox-esr, golang-github-gorilla-csrf, jinja2, libxml2, nagvis, qemu, request-tracker4, request-tracker5, u-boot, and vips), Fedora (firefox, giflib, and thunderbird), Mageia (imagemagick), Red Hat (thunderbird), SUSE (amber-cli, libjxl, and redis), and Ubuntu (h2o, poppler, and postgresql-10).

An anonymous reader shares a report: A new paper from AI lab Cohere, Stanford, MIT, and Ai2 accuses LM Arena, the organization behind the popular crowdsourced AI benchmark Chatbot Arena, of helping a select group of AI companies achieve better leaderboard scores at the expense of rivals. According to the authors, LM Arena allowed some industry-leading AI companies like Meta, OpenAI, Google, and Amazon to privately test several variants of AI models, then not publish the scores of the lowest performers. This made it easier for these companies to achieve a top spot on the platform's leaderboard, though the opportunity was not afforded to every firm, the authors say. "Only a handful of [companies] were told that this private testing was available, and the amount of private testing that some [companies] received is just so much more than others," said Cohere's VP of AI research and co-author of the study, Sara Hooker, in an interview with TechCrunch. "This is gamification." Further reading: Meta Got Caught Gaming AI Benchmarks.

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An anonymous reader writes: NIH Director Dr. Jay Bhattacharya has announced that the NIH Public Access Policy, originally slated to go into effect on December 31, 2025, will now be effective as of July 1. From Bhattacharya's announcement: NIH is the crown jewel of the American biomedical research system. However, a recent Pew Research Center study shows that only about 25% of Americans have a "great deal of confidence" that scientists are working for the public good. Earlier implementation of the Public Access Policy will help increase public confidence in the research we fund while also ensuring that the investments made by taxpayers produce replicable, reproducible, and generalizable results that benefit all Americans. Providing speedy public access to NIH-funded results is just one of the ways we are working to earn back the trust of the American people. Trust in science is an essential element in Making America Healthy Again. As such, NIH and its research partners will continue to promote maximum transparency in all that we do.

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Just a day after announcing its shift to an "AI-first" strategy -- which includes phasing out contract workers in favor of automation -- Duolingo revealed it is more than doubling its course offerings by launching 148 new language courses. The Verge reports: The company said today that it's launching 148 new language courses. "This launch makes Duolingo's seven most popular non-English languages -- Spanish, French, German, Italian, Japanese, Korean, and Mandarin -- available to all 28 supported user interface (UI) languages, dramatically expanding learning options for over a billion potential learners worldwide," the company writes. Duolingo says that building one new course historically has taken "years," but the company was able to build this new suite of courses more quickly "through advances in generative AI, shared content systems, and internal tooling." The new approach is internally called "shared content," and the company says it allows employees to make a base course and quickly customize it for "dozens" of different languages. "Now, by using generative AI to create and validate content, we're able to focus our expertise where it's most impactful, ensuring every course meets Duolingo's rigorous quality standards," Duolingo's senior director of learning design, Jessie Becker, says in a statement.

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The European Space Agency has launched the Biomass satellite to study the world's forests using the first space-based P-band synthetic aperture radar, aiming to accurately measure carbon storage and improve understanding of the global carbon cycle. CBS News reports: Forests on Earth collectively absorb and store about 8 billion tons of carbon dioxide annually, the ESA said. That regulates the planet's temperature. Deforestation and degradation, especially in tropical regions, means that stored carbon is being released back into the atmosphere, the ESA said, which can contribute to climate change. There's a lack of accurate data on how much carbon the planet's estimated 1.5 trillion trees store and how much human activity can impact that storage, the ESA said. To "weigh" the planet's trees and determine their carbon dioxide capacity, Biomass will use a P-band synthetic aperture radar. It's the first such piece of technology in space. The radar can penetrate forest canopies and measure woody biomass, including trunks, branches and stems, the ESA said. Most forest carbon is stored in these parts of the trees. Those measurements will act as a proxy for carbon storage, the ESA said. [...] Once the radar takes the measurements, the data will be received by the large mesh reflector. It will then be sent to the ESA's mission control center.

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Apple violated a court order requiring it to open up the App Store to third-party payment options and must stop charging commissions on purchases outside its software marketplace, a federal judge said in a blistering ruling that referred the company to prosecutors for a possible criminal probe. From a report: U.S. District Judge Yvonne Gonzalez Rogers sided Wednesday with "Fortnite" maker Epic Games over its allegation that the iPhone maker failed to comply with an order she issued in 2021 after finding the company engaged in anticompetitive conduct in violation of California law. Gonzalez Rogers also referred the case to federal prosecutors to investigate whether Apple committed criminal contempt of court for flouting her 2021 ruling. The U.S. attorney's office in San Francisco declined to comment. The changes the company must now make could put a sizable dent in the double-digit billions of dollars in revenue the App Store generates each year. The judge's order [PDF]: Apple willfully chose not to comply with this Court's Injunction. It did so with the express intent to create new anticompetitive barriers which would, by design and in effect, maintain a valued revenue stream; a revenue stream previously found to be anticompetitive. That it thought this Court would tolerate such insubordination was a gross miscalculation. As always, the cover-up made it worse. For this Court, there is no second bite at the apple. It Is So Ordered.

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An anonymous reader quotes a report from PCWorld: Windows 7 came onto the market in 2009 and put Microsoft back on the road to success after Windows Vista's annoying failures. But Windows 7 was not without its faults, as this curious story proves. Some users apparently encountered a vexing problem at the time: if they set a single-color image as the background, their Windows 7 PC always took 30 seconds to start the operating system and switch from the welcome screen to the desktop. In a recent blog post, Microsoft veteran Raymond Chen explains the exact reason for this. According to him, a simple programming error meant that users had to wait longer for the system to boot. After logging in, Windows 7 first set up the desktop piece by piece, i.e. the taskbar, the desktop window, icons for applications, and even the background image. The system waited patiently for all components to finish loading and received feedback from each individual component. Or, it switched from the welcome screen to the desktop after 30 seconds if it didn't receive any feedback. The problem here: The code for the message that the background image is ready was located within the background image bitmap code, which means that the message never appeared if you did not have a real background image bitmap. And a single color is not such a bitmap. The result: the logon system waited in vain for the message that the background has finished loading, so Windows 7 never started until the 30 second fallback activated and sent users to the desktop. The problem could also occur if users had activated the "Hide desktop icons" group policy. This was due to the fact that such policies were only added after the main code had been written and called by an If statement. However, Windows 7 was also unable to recognize this at first and therefore took longer to load.

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Investigative journalist and cybersecurity expert Brian Krebs reports: A 23-year-old Scottish man thought to be a member of the prolific Scattered Spider cybercrime group was extradited last week from Spain to the United States, where he is facing charges of wire fraud, conspiracy and identity theft. U.S. prosecutors allege Tyler Robert Buchanan and co-conspirators hacked into dozens of companies in the United States and abroad, and that he personally controlled more than $26 million stolen from victims. Scattered Spider is a loosely affiliated criminal hacking group whose members have broken into and stolen data from some of the world's largest technology companies. Buchanan was arrested in Spain last year on a warrant from the FBI, which wanted him in connection with a series of SMS-based phishing attacks in the summer of 2022 that led to intrusions at Twilio, LastPass, DoorDash, Mailchimp, and many other tech firms. The complain against Buchanan is available here (PDF).

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New submitter LDA6502 writes: The Republican chairman of the House Transportation and Infrastructure Committee is proposing a new annual federal vehicle registration fee of $200 for full EVs, $100 for hybrid EVs, and $20 for combustion vehicles. The tax would be tied to inflation, would be collected by the states, and would expire in 2035. Critics of the proposal note that it could result in low mileage EVs paying a far higher tax rate than heavy ICE trucks and SUVs. Ars Technica notes that the bill "exempts commercial vehicles, which should see a rush from tax avoiders to register their vehicles under their businesses [...]." Farm vehicles will also be exempt from the tax. "The Eno Center for Transportation calculates that this new tax will contribute an extra $110 billion to the highway Trust Fund by 2035 but that cuts to other taxes and more spending mean that the fund will still be $222 billion short of its commitments -- assuming that this added fee doesn't further dampen EV adoption in the U.S., that is."

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Inside this week's LWN.net Weekly Edition:

• Front: Mailman 2 vulnerabilities; AI in Debian; __nonstring__; Cache-aware scheduling; Freezing filesystems; Socket-level storage; Debugging information; LWN in 2025.
• Briefs: Debian election; Kali Linux key; OpenBSD 7.7; Firefox 138.0; GCC 15.1; Meson 1.8.0; Valgrind 3.25.0; FSF review; OSI retrospective; Mastodon; Quotes; ...
• Announcements: Newsletters, conferences, security updates, patches, and more.

After 10 consecutive quarters of rising AI-related investment, Microsoft has put on the brakes, spending over $1 billion less than the previous quarter (source paywalled; alternative source). Despite the slight slowdown, Microsoft posted stronger-than-expected results with $70 billion in revenue and $25.8 billion in profit. The New York Times reports: In the first three months of 2025, Microsoft spent $21.4 billion on capital expenses, down more than $1 billion from the previous quarter. The company is still on track to spend more than $80 billion on capital expenses in the current fiscal year, which ends in June. But the pullback, though slight, is an indication that the tech industry's appetite for spending on A.I. is not limitless. Overall, Microsoft's results showed unexpected strength in its business. Sales surpassed $70 billion, up 13 percent from the same period a year earlier. Profit rose to $25.8 billion, up 18 percent. The results far surpassed Wall Street's expectations. "Cloud and A.I. are the essential inputs for every business to expand output, reduce costs, and accelerate growth," Satya Nadella, Microsoft's chief executive, said in a statement.

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An anonymous reader quotes a report from TechCrunch: Apple sent notifications this week to several people who the company believes were targeted with government spyware, according to two of the alleged targets. In the past, Apple has sent similar notifications to targets and victims of spyware, and directed them to contact a nonprofit that specializes in investigating such cyberattacks. Other tech companies, like Google and WhatsApp, have in recent years also periodically sent such notifications to their users. As of Wednesday, only two people appear to have come forward to reveal they were among those who received the notifications from Apple this week. One is Ciro Pellegrino, an Italian journalist who works for online news outlet Fanpage. Pellegrino wrote in an article that he received an email and a text message from Apple on Tuesday notifying him that he was targeted with spyware. The message, according to Pellegrino, also said he wasn't the only person targeted. "Today's notification is being sent to affected users in 100 countries," the message read, according to Pellegrino's article. "Did this really happen? Yes, it is not a joke," Pellegrino wrote. The second person to receive an Apple notification is Eva Vlaardingerbroek, a Dutch right-wing activist, who posted on X on Wednesday. "Apple detected a targeted mercenary spyware attack against your iPhone," the Apple alert said, according to a screenshot shown in a video that Vlaardingerbroek posted on X. "This attack is likely targeting you specifically because of who you are or what you do. Although it's never possible to achieve absolute certainty when detecting such attacks, Apple has high confidence in this warning -- please take it seriously." Reacting to the notification, Vlaardingerbroek said that this was an "attempt to intimidate me, an attempt to silence me, obviously."

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