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A plan to keep TikTok available in the U.S. "involves tapping software company Oracle and a group of outside investors," reports NPR, "to effectively take control of the app's global operations, according to two people with direct knowledge of the talks..." "[P]otential investors who are engaged in the talks include Microsoft." Under the deal now being negotiated by the White House, TikTok's China-based owner ByteDance would retain a minority stake in the company, but the app's algorithm, data collection and software updates will be overseen by Oracle, which already provides the foundation of TikTok's web infrastructure... "The goal is for Oracle to effectively monitor and provide oversight with what is going on with TikTok," said the person directly involved in the talks, who was not authorized to speak publicly about the deliberations. "ByteDance wouldn't completely go away, but it would minimize Chinese ownership...." Officials from Oracle and the White House held a meeting on Friday about a potential deal, and another meeting has been scheduled for next week, according to the source involved in the discussions, who said Oracle is interested in a TikTok stake "in the tens of billions," but the rest of the deal is in flux... Under a law passed by Congress and upheld by the Supreme Court, TikTok must execute what is known as "qualified divestiture" from ByteDance in order to stay in business in the U.S... A congressional staffer involved in talks about TikTok's future, who was not authorized to speak publicly, said binding legal agreements from the White House ensuring ByteDance cannot covertly manipulate the app will prove critical in winning lawmakers' approval. "A key part is showing there is no operational relationship with ByteDance, that they do not have control," the Congressional staffer said. "There needs to be no backdoors where China can potentially gain access...." Chinese regulators, who have for years opposed the selling of TikTok, recently signaled that they would not stand in the way of a TikTok ownership change, saying acquisitions "should be independently decided by the enterprises and based on market principles." The statement, at first, does not seem to say much, but negotiators in the White House believe it indicates that Beijing is not planning to block a deal that gives American investors a majority-stake position in the company. "Meanwhile, Apple and Google still have not returned TikTok to app stores..."

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Two computer scientists at the University of Waterloo in Canada believe changing 30 lines of code in Linux "could cut energy use at some data centers by up to 30 percent," according to the site Data Centre Dynamics. It's the code that processes packets of network traffic, and Linux "is the most widely used OS for data center servers," according to the article: The team tested their solution's effectiveness and submitted it to Linux for consideration, and the code was published this month as part of Linux's newest kernel, release version 6.13. "All these big companies — Amazon, Google, Meta — use Linux in some capacity, but they're very picky about how they decide to use it," said Martin Karsten [professor of Computer Science in the Waterloo's Math Faculty]. "If they choose to 'switch on' our method in their data centers, it could save gigawatt hours of energy worldwide. Almost every single service request that happens on the Internet could be positively affected by this." The University of Waterloo is building a green computer server room as part of its new mathematics building, and Karsten believes sustainability research must be a priority for computer scientists. "We all have a part to play in building a greener future," he said. The Linux Foundation, which oversees the development of the Linux OS, is a founder member of the Green Software Foundation, an organization set up to look at ways of developing "green software" — code that reduces energy consumption. Karsten "teamed up with Joe Damato, distinguished engineer at Fastly" to develop the 30 lines of code, according to an announcement from the university. "The Linux kernel code addition developed by Karsten and Damato was based on research published in ACM SIGMETRICS Performance Evaluation Review" (by Karsten and grad student Peter Cai). Their paper "reviews the performance characteristics of network stack processing for communication-heavy server applications," devising an "indirect methodology" to "identify and quantify the direct and indirect costs of asynchronous hardware interrupt requests (IRQ) as a major source of overhead... "Based on these findings, a small modification of a vanilla Linux system is devised that improves the efficiency and performance of traditional kernel-based networking significantly, resulting in up to 45% increased throughput..."

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Founded in 1947, the Minor Planet Center is the official worldwide authority "for observing and reporting new asteroids, comets and other small bodies in the solar system," reports USA Today. Unfortunately, "What an amateur astronomer recently took to be a newly discovered asteroid turned out to be a Tesla Roadster," The Minor Planet Center didn't initially consider the possibility when the organization announced the discovery on Jan. 2 of the unusual asteroid, complete with an official name: 2018 CN41. But less than 17 hours later, the Minor Planet Center issued an editorial notice that it would be deleting 2018 CN41 from its records... According to the Minor Planet Center's notice regarding the deletion, turns out the object was the Roadster, along with the Falcon Heavy rocket's upper stage.

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An anonymous reader shared this report from TechCrunch: The developer behind Pixelfed, Loops, and Sup, open source alternatives to Instagram, TikTok, and WhatsApp, respectively, is now raising funds on Kickstarter to fuel the apps' further development. The trio is part of the growing open social web, also known as the fediverse, powered by the same ActivityPub protocol used by X alternative Mastodon... [and] challenge Meta's social media empire... "Help us put control back into the hands of the people!" [Daniel Supernault, the Canadian-based developer behind the federated apps] said in a post on Mastodon where he announced the Kickstarter's Thursday launch. As of the time of writing, the campaign has raised $58,383 so far. While the goal on the Kickstarter site has been surpassed, Supernault said that he hopes to raise $1 million or more so he can hire a small team... A fourth project, PubKit, is also a part of these efforts, offering a toolset to support developers building in the fediverse... The stretch goal of the Kickstarter campaign is to register the Pixelfed Foundation as a not-for-profit and grow its team beyond volunteers. This could help address the issue with Supernault being a single point of failure for the project... Mastodon CEO Eugen Rochko made a similar decision earlier this month to transition to a nonprofit structure. If successful, the campaign would also fund a blogging app as an alternative to Tumblr or LiveJournal at some point in the future. The funds will also help the apps manage the influx of new users. On Pixelfed.social, the main Pixelfed instance, (like Mastodon, anyone can run a Pixelfed server), there are now more than 200,000 users, thanks in part to the mobile app's launch, according to the campaign details shared with TechCrunch. The server is also now the second-largest in the fediverse, behind only Mastodon.social, according to network statistics from FediDB. New funds will help expand the storage, CDNs, and compute power needed for the growing user base and accelerate development. In addition, they'll help Supernault dedicate more of his time to the apps and the fediverse as a whole while also expanding the moderation, security, privacy, and safety programs that social apps need. As a part of its efforts, Supernault also wants to introduce E2E encryption to the fediverse. The Kickstarter campaign promises "authentic sharing reimagined," calling the apps "Beautiful sharing platforms that puts you first. No ads, no algorithms, no tracking — just pure photography and authentic connections... More Privacy, More Safety. More Variety. " Pixelfed/Loops/Sup/Pubkit isn't a ambitious dream or vaporware — they're here today — and we need your support to continue our mission and shoot for the moon to be the best social communication platform in the world.... We're following the both the Digital Platform Charter of Rights & Ethical Web Principles of the W3C for all of our projects as guidelines to building platforms that help people and provide a positive social benefit. The campaign's page says they're building "a future where social networking respects your privacy, values your freedom, and prioritizes your safety."

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CleanTechnicareports that last year Americans "bought 37% more air source heat pumps than the next most popular heating appliance — gas furnaces." And Americans bought 21% more heat pumps than they did in 2023. Canary Media is quick to point out that in many homes, more than one heat pump is required, so that data should be interpreted with that in mind. Typically, a home uses only one furnace. Nevertheless, the trend for heat pumps is up. Russell Unger, the head of decarbonizing buildings at RMI, said, "There's just been this long term, consistent trend." It's easy to understand why heat pumps are gaining in popularity. In addition to providing heated air in the winter and cool air in the summer, they are far more efficient than conventional heat sources — delivering three to four times more heat per dollar spent than oil- or gas-fired heating equipment or old fashioned electric baseboard heat. They also create far less carbon pollution. How much less depends on the source of electricity in the local area, Thanks to long-time Slashdot reader AmiMoJo for sharing the news.

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ZDNET's senior editor sees an "overwhelmingly negative" response to Microsoft's surprise price hike for the 84 million paying subscribers to its Microsoft 365 software suite. Attempting the first price hike in more than 12 years, "they made it a 30% price increase" — going from $10 a month to $13 a month — "and blamed it all on artificial intelligence." Bad idea. Why? Because... No one wants to pay for AI... If you ask Copilot in Word to write something for you, the results will be about what you'd expect from an enthusiastic summer intern. You might fare better if you ask Copilot to turn a folder full of photos into a PowerPoint presentation. But is that task really such a challenge...? The announcement was bungled, too... I learned about the new price thanks to a pop-up message on my Android phone... It could be worse, I suppose. Just ask the French and Spanish subscribers who got a similar pop-up message telling them their price had gone from €10 a month to €13,000. (Those pesky decimals.) Oh, and I've lost count of the number of people who were baffled and angry that Microsoft had forcibly installed the Copilot app on their devices. It was just a rebranding of the old Microsoft 365 app with the new name and logo, but in my case it was days later before I received yet another pop-up message telling me about the change... [T]hey turned the feature on for everyone and gave Word users a well-hidden checkbox that reads Enable Copilot. The feature is on by default, so you have to clear the checkbox to make it go away. As for the other Office apps? "Uh, we'll get around to giving you a button to turn it off next month. Maybe." Seriously, the support page that explains where you can find that box in Word says, "We're working on adding the Enable Copilot checkbox to Excel, OneNote, and PowerPoint on Windows devices and to Excel and PowerPoint on Mac devices. That is tentatively scheduled to happen in February 2025." Until the Enable Copilot button is available, you can't disable Copilot. ZDNET's senior editor concludes it's a naked grab for cash, adding "I could plug the numbers into Excel and tell you about it, but let's have Copilot explain instead." Prompt: If I have 84 million subscribers who pay me $10 a month, and I increase their monthly fee by $3 a month each, how much extra revenue will I make each year? Copilot describes the calculation, concluding with "You would make an additional $3.024 billion per year from this fee increase." Copilot then posts two emojis — a bag of money, and a stock chart with the line going up.

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2021: "Automotive Startup Canoo Debuts a Snub-Nosed Electric Pickup" 2025: Canoo "Goes Belly-Up After Moving to Texas" "Its production volumes paled in comparison to Canoo's rate of cash burn, which was substantial, with net losses in 2023 totaling just over $300 million..." reports AutoWeek. "It was able to deliver small batches of vans to a few customers, but apparently remained distant from anything approaching volume production." "Back in 2020, electric vehicle maker Canoo snagged a $2.4 billion valuation before it had shipped a single car," remembers SFGate. "Now, just months after yanking its headquarters from Los Angeles County to Texas, the company has gone belly-up." In its four-year span as a public company, Canoo battled investor lawsuits, Securities and Exchange Commission charges, executive departures and a mixed reception of its cars. Auto tech blogger Steven Symes recently likened Canoo's cargo-style van to an "eraser on wheels." "Canoo is the latest EV startup to go bankrupt after merging with a special purpose acquisition company (SPAC) as a shortcut to going public," notes TechCrunch. "Electric Last Mile Solutions was the first in June 2022. But since then, Fisker, Lordstown Motors, Proterra, Lion Electric, and Arrival all filed for different levels of bankruptcy protection in their various home countries." In the years since it went public, [Canoo] made a small number of its bubbly electric vans and handed them over to partners — some paying — willing to trial the vehicles. The U.S. Postal Service, Department of Defense, and NASA all have or had Canoo vehicles.

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TikTok is still not available for download from U.S.-based app stores, reports CBS News. So "Some fast-acting entrepreneurs are selling phones with TikTok preloaded on devices for thousands of dollars online." The Associated Press notes that New York-based Nicholas Matthews "listed an iPhone 14 Plus with TikTok for $10,000. As of Friday, Matthews said his highest bid was for $4,550." Another example from The New York Times: An information technology engineer, Mr. Gustab listed his iPhone 15 Pro with TikTok downloaded onto it for $3,000 on Facebook Marketplace. That's about three times the cost of a brand-new iPhone 16 Pro. On Thursday night, he had an offer for $1,200, still more than almost every brand-new iPhone and nearly twice as much as a refurbished iPhone 15 Pro without TikTok. Business Insider reports the search term iPhone TikTok "yielded more than 45,000 results" on eBay...

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Slashdot reader jenningsthecat writes: 3D printer manufacturer Bambu Labs has faced a storm of controversy and protest after releasing a security update which many users claim is the first step in moving towards an HP-style subscription model. Bambu Labs responded that there's misinformation circulating online, adding "we acknowledge that our communication might have contributed to the confusion." Bambu Labs spokesperson Nadia Yaakoubi did "damage control", answering questions from the Verge: Q: Will Bambu publicly commit to never requiring a subscription in order to control its printers and print from them over a home network? A: For our current product line, yes. We will never require a subscription to control or print from our printers over a home network... Q: Will Bambu publicly commit to never putting any existing printer functionality behind a subscription? Yes... Bambu's site adds that the security update "is beta testing, not a forced update. The choice is yours. You can participate in the beta program to help us refine these features, or continue using your current firmware." Hackaday notes another wrinkle: This follows the original announcement which had the 3D printer community up in arms, and quickly saw the new tool that's supposed to provide safe and secure communications with Bambu Lab printers ripped apart to extract the security certificate and private key... As the flaming wreck that's Bambu Lab's PR efforts keeps hurtling down the highway of public opinion, we'd be remiss to not point out that with the security certificate and private key being easily obtainable from the Bambu Connect Electron app, there is absolutely no point to any of what Bambu Lab is doing. The Verge asked Bambu Labs about that too: Q: Does the private key leaking change any of your plans? No, this doesn't change our plans, and we've taken immediate action. Bambu Labs had said their security update would "ensure only authorized access and operations are permitted," remembers Ars Technica. "This would, Bambu suggested, mitigate risks of 'remote hacks or printer exposure issues' and lower the risk of 'abnormal traffic or attacks.'" This was necessary, Bambu wrote, because of increases in requests made to its cloud services "through unofficial channels," targeted DDOS attacks, and "peaks of up to 30 million unauthorized requests per day" (link added by Bambu). But Ars Technica also found some skepticism online: Repair advocate Louis Rossmann, noting Bambu's altered original blog post, uploaded a video soon after, "Bambu's Gaslighting Masterclass: Denying their own documented restrictions"... suggesting that the company was asking buyers to trust that Bambu wouldn't enact restrictive policies it otherwise wrote into its user agreements. And Ars Technica also cites another skeptical response from a video posted by open source hardware hacker and YouTube creator Jeff Geerling: "Every IoT device has these problems, and there are better ways to secure things than by locking out access, or making it harder to access, or requiring their cloud to be integrated."

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"For years, renewable energy proponents have hoped to build a U.S. electric grid powered by wind, solar, geothermal and — to a lesser extent — nuclear power..." writes the Washington Post. In America's power markets "the economics of clean energy are strong," with renewable energy cheaper than fossil fuel plants in many jurisdictions. But the Post spoke to the "electricity modeling" director at nonpartisan clean energy think tank Energy Innovation, who offered this assessment. "The technology is ready, and the financial services are ready — but the question nobody really put enough thought into was, could the government keep up? And at the moment, the answer is no." [R]enewable developers say that the new technologies are stymied by complicated local and federal regulations, a long wait to connect to the electricity grid, and community opposition... "The U.S. offshore wind business is at a very nascent stage versus Europe or China," Rob Barnett, a senior analyst at Bloomberg Intelligence, said in an email. "With the new permitting pause, it's doubtful much progress for this emerging industry will be made...." After the Inflation Reduction Act passed, Rhodium Group — an independent clean energy research firm — estimated that between 2023 and 2025, on average, the country would add between 36 and 46 gigawatts of clean electricity to the grid every year. Late last year, however, the group found that the country only installed around 27 gigawatts in 2023. The U.S.'s renewable growth is now expected to fall on the low end of that range — or miss it entirely. "It actually is really hard to build a lot of this stuff fast," said Trevor Houser, partner in climate and energy at Rhodium Group. As a result, Rhodium found, the country only cut carbon emissions by 0.2 percent in 2024... A significant amount of this lag has come from wind power, where problems with supply chains and getting permits and approval to build has put a damper on development. But solar construction is also on the low end of what experts were expecting... Developers point to lags in the interconnection queue — a system that gives new solar, wind or fossil fuel projects permission to connect to the larger electricity grid. According to a report from Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, it can now take nearly 3 years for a project to get through the queue. The grid operator that covers the Mid-Atlantic and parts of the Midwest, PJM, had over 3,300 projects in its queue at the end of 2023. The vast majority of these applications are for renewables — more than the entire number of active wind farms in the nation... There are possible solutions. Some developers hope to reuse old fossil fuel sites, like coal plants, that are already connected to the grid — bypassing the long queue entirely. The Federal Energy Regulatory Commission has instated new rules to make it easier to build transmission lines. Part of the problem is that wind and solar facilities "sometimes need to be built hundreds or even thousands of miles away" — requiring long transmission lines. Sandhya Ganapathy, CEO of EDP Renewables North America, tells the Post that in America, "The grid that we have was never designed to handle this kind of load." And yet last year just 255 miles of new transmission line were built in the U.S., according to the American Clean Power Association. And Ganapathy also complains that approval for a new renewable energy project takes "anywhere between six to eight years" — which makes developers hesitant to build. "Why are we taking a big risk of a massive investment if I will not be able to sell the electrons?" The end result? The Washington Post writes that "Experts once hoped that by the end of the decade the United States could generate up to 80 percent of its power with clean power... Now, some wonder if the country will be able to reach even 60 percent."

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An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: Late last month, researchers revealed a finding that's likely to shock some people and confirm the low expectations of others: Renewable energy facilities throughout Central Europe use unencrypted radio signals to receive commands to feed or ditch power into or from the grid that serves some 450 million people throughout the continent. Fabian Braunlein and Luca Melette stumbled on their discovery largely by accident while working on what they thought would be a much different sort of hacking project. After observing a radio receiver on the streetlight poles throughout Berlin, they got to wondering: Would it be possible for someone with a central transmitter to control them en masse, and if so, could they create a city-wide light installation along the lines of Project Blinkenlights? The first Project Blinkenlights iteration occurred in 2001 in Berlin, when the lights inside a large building were synchronized to turn on and off to give the appearance of a giant, low-resolution monochrome computer screen. The researchers, who presented their work last month at the 38th Chaos Communication Congress in Hamburg, Germany, wondered if they could control streetlights in Berlin to create a city-wide version, though they acknowledged it would likely be viewable only from high altitudes. They didn't know then, but their project was about to undergo a major transformation. After an extensive and painstaking reverse-engineering process that took about a year, Braunlein and Melette learned that they could indeed control the streetlights simply by replaying legitimate messages they observed being sent over the air previously. They then learned something more surprising — the very same system for controlling Berlin's lights was used throughout Central Europe to control other regional infrastructure, including switches that regulate the amount of power renewable electric generation facilities feed into the grid. Collectively, the facilities could generate as much as 40 gigawatts in Germany alone, the researchers estimate. In addition, they estimate that in Germany, 20 GW of loads such as heat pumps and wall boxes are controlled via those receivers. That adds up to 60 GW that might be controllable through radio signals anyone can send. When Braunlein and Melette realized how much power was controlled, they wondered how much damage might result from rogue messages sent simultaneously to multiple power facilities in strategically designed sequences and times of day. By their calculation, an optimally crafted series of messages sent under certain conditions would be enough to bring down the entire European grid. [...] The grid security experts Ars talked to for this story said they're doubtful of the assessment. "A sudden deficit of 60 GW will definitely lead to a brownout because 60 GW is far more than [the] reserves available," said Albert Moser, a RWTH Aachen professor with expertise in power grids. "A sudden deficit of 60 GW could even lead to a blackout due to the very steep fall of frequency that likely cannot be handled fast enough by underfrequency relays (load shedding)." He wasn't able to confirm that 60 GW of generation/load is controlled by radio signals or that security measures for Radio Ripple Control are insufficient. Jan Hoff, a grid security expert, was also doubtful there'd be enough electricity dropped quickly enough to cause a brownout. "He likened the grid to the roly-poly toys from the 1970s, which were built to be knocked around but not fall over," said Ars.

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NASA's Hubble Space Telescope has released the largest ever photomosaic featuring over 200 million stars -- all of which are bright than our own Sun. It consists of over 600 overlapping Hubble images and 2.5 billion pixels. "That is a huge number, yet only a fraction of the estimated one trillion stars in the Andromeda galaxy," reports TechSpot. "Many of Andromeda's less massive stars are beyond Hubble's sensitivity limit and thus, are not represented in the imaged." "NASA has multiple sizes of the panoramic available for download, including the full-size 203 MB image (42,208 x 9,870) and a more user friendly 9 MB variant (10,552 x 2,468)."

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CERN's particle accelerator is being used in a pioneering cancer treatment called Flash radiotherapy. This method delivers ultra-high radiation doses in less than a second, minimizes side effects while targeting tumors more effectively than conventional radiotherapy. The BBC reports: In a series of vast underground caverns on the outskirts of Geneva, Switzerland, experiments are taking place which may one day lead to new generation of radiotherapy machines. The hope is that these devices could make it possible to cure complex brain tumors (PDF), eliminate cancers that have metastasized to distant organs, and generally limit the toll which cancer treatment exerts on the human body. The home of these experiments is the European Laboratory for Particle Physics (Cern), best known to the world as the particle physics hub that developed the Large Hadron Collider, a 27 kilometer (16.7 mile)-long ring of superconducting magnets capable of accelerating particles to near the speed of light. Arguably Cern's crowning achievement was the 2012 discovery of the Higgs boson, the so-called "God Particle" which gives other particles their mass and in doing so lays the foundation for everything that exists in the universe. But in recent years, the centre's unique expertise in accelerating high-energy particles has found a new niche -- the world of cancer radiotherapy. Eleven years ago, Marie-Catherine Vozenin, a radiobiologist now working at Geneva University Hospitals (Hug), and others published a paper outlining a paradigm-shifting approach to traditional radiotherapy treatment which they called Flash. By delivering radiation at ultra-high dose rates, with exposures of less than a second, they showed that it was possible to destroy tumors in rodents while sparing healthy tissue. Its impact was immediate. International experts described it as a seminal breakthrough, and it galvanized fellow radiobiologists around the world to conduct their own experiments using the Flash approach to treat a wide variety of tumors in rodents, household pets, and now humans. In recent years, animal studies have repeatedly shown that Flash makes it possible to markedly increase the amount of radiation delivered to the body while minimizing the impact that it has on surrounding healthy tissue. In one experiment, healthy lab mice which were given two rounds of radiation via Flash did not develop the typical side effects which would be expected during the second round. In another study, animals treated with Flash for head and neck cancers experienced fewer side effects, such as reduced saliva production or difficulty swallowing. Loo is cautiously optimistic that going forwards, such benefits may also translate to human patients. "Flash produces less normal tissue injury than conventional irradiation, without compromising anti-tumor efficacy -- which could be game-changing," he says. An additional hope is that this could then reduce the risk of secondary cancers (PDF), resulting from radiation-induced damage later in life, although it is still too early to know if that will be the case. [...] But the next phase of research is not only about testing whether Flash works in people. It's also about identifying which kind of radiation is the best one to use.

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An anonymous reader quotes a report from Reuters: A U.S. auto safety agency said on Friday it is reconsidering a landmark rule from the administration of former President Joe Biden requiring nearly all new cars and trucks by 2029 to have advanced automatic emergency braking systems. The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration said it would delay the effective date to March 20 to give the new Trump administration time to further review the regulation. The Alliance for Automotive Innovation, representing General Motors, Toyota Motor, Volkswagen and other automakers, last week filed suit to block the rule, saying the regulation is "practically impossible with available technology." The group asked the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia to overturn the rule, saying the requirement that cars and trucks must be able to stop and avoid striking vehicles in front of them at up to 62 miles per hour (100 kph) is unrealistic. It unsuccessfully asked NHTSA last year to reconsider the rule. Come 2029, all cars sold in the U.S. "must be able to stop and avoid contact with a vehicle in front of them at speeds up to 62 mph," reports Car and Driver." "Additionally, the system must be able to detect pedestrians in both daylight and darkness. As a final parameter, the federal standard will require the system to apply the brakes automatically up to 90 mph when a collision is imminent, and up to 45 mph when a pedestrian is detected." According to the NHTSA, the rule will save at least 360 lives annually and prevent more than 24,000 injuries.

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As spotted by Tom's Hardware, Nvidia's CUDA 12.8 release notes signal the transition of Maxwell, Pascal, and Volta GPUs to the legacy driver branch. As a result, there will be no more new feature updates for these architectures; however, CUDA and gaming driver support will remain for now. From the report: It's crucial to highlight that this has nothing to do with GeForce gaming driver support. In fact, Maxwell and Pascal continue to be on the support list for the GeForce RTX series driver, unlike Kepler. Nvidia didn't detail whether or when it'll drop support for Maxwell, Pascal, and Volta GPUs for the gaming driver. Nvidia has not issued an exact date for the end of full support for these three GPU architectures, but it will soon. The current CUDA toolkit still supports the three affected architectures, but they won't receive future updates. Once the move goes through, the only remaining GTX-series GPUs with full support will be the GTX 16-series, based on the RTX 20-series' Turing architecture.

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The British Museum was partly closed after a dismissed IT contractor trespassed, shutting down systems including its ticketing platform. The move disrupted operations and forced the closure of temporary exhibitions. The Guardian reports: While the museum will remain open this weekend, only a handful of ticket holders will be able to access its paid-for exhibitions, such as its Silk Roads show, because the IT system that manages bookings has been rendered unusable. The incident caused chaos in the middle of a busy Friday afternoon and is the latest security issue to blight the institution. A statement on the museum's website on Friday said that "due to an IT infrastructure issue some galleries have had to be closed. Please note that this means capacity will be limited, and priority will be given to members and pre-booked ticket holders. Currently our exhibitions remain closed."

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Scientists have observed for the first time how microplastics move through and block blood vessels in mouse brains, according to research published in Science Advances this week. Using fluorescence imaging, researchers at Peking University tracked plastic particles as they were consumed by immune cells and accumulated in brain blood vessels, causing obstructions that persisted for up to four weeks and reduced blood flow. The study found that these blockages, which behaved similarly to blood clots, decreased the mice's mobility for several days.

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Nearly 190 million Americans were affected by February's cyberattack on UnitedHealth's Change Healthcare unit, almost double initial estimates, the company disclosed Friday. The breach, the largest in U.S. medical history, exposed sensitive data including Social Security numbers, medical records, and financial information. UnitedHealth said it has not detected misuse of the stolen data or found medical databases among compromised files. Change Healthcare, a major U.S. healthcare claims processor, paid multiple ransoms after Russian-speaking hackers known as ALPHV breached its systems using stolen credentials lacking multi-factor authentication, according to CEO Andrew Witty's testimony to Congress.

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Non-fungible tokens and memecoins are neither securities nor commodities, according to White House crypto czar David Sacks. Instead, he defines them as "collectibles." From a report: "It's like a baseball card or a stamp," Sacks said in an interview with Fox Business on Thursday, referencing Trump's explosively popular memecoin. "People buy it because they want to commemorate something." The famous venture capitalist's comments touched on a long-running debate about the crypto industry in general: how exactly to treat different digital assets. Some argue that digital assets are securities, which are tradable financial assets like stocks. But others say they're commodities, or raw materials that can be bought and sold, like gold and wheat. The classification differences have vast regulatory implications. "There's a few different categories here, so defining the market structure is important," said Sacks.

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An anonymous reader quotes a report from Bloomberg: Apple executive Kim Vorrath, a company veteran known for fixing troubled products and bringing major projects to market, has a new job: whipping artificial intelligence and Siri into shape. Vorrath, a vice president in charge of program management, was moved to Apple's artificial intelligence and machine learning division this week, according to people with knowledge of the matter. She'll be a top deputy to AI chief John Giannandrea, said the people, who asked not to be identified because the change hasn't been announced publicly. The move helps bolster a team that's racing to make Apple a leader in AI -- an area where it's fallen behind technology peers. [...] Vorrath, who has spent 36 years at Apple, is known for managing the development of tough software projects. She's also put procedures in place that can catch and fix bugs. Vorrath joins the new team from Apple's hardware engineering division, where she helped launch the Vision Pro headset. Over the years, Vorrath has had a hand in several of Apple's biggest endeavors. In the mid-2000s, she was chosen to lead project management for the original iPhone software group and get the iconic device ready for consumers. Until 2019, she oversaw project management for the iPhone, iPad and Mac operating systems, before taking on the Vision Pro software. Haley Allen will replace Vorrath overseeing program management for visionOS, the headset's operating system, according to the people. Prior to joining Giannandrea's organization, Vorrath had spent several weeks advising Kelsey Peterson, the group's previous head of program management. Peterson will now report to Vorrath -- as will two other AI executives, Cindy Lin and Marc Schonbrun. Giannandrea, who joined Apple from Google in 2018, disclosed the changes in a memo sent to staffers. The move signals that AI is now more important than the Vision Pro, which launched in February 2024, and is seen as the biggest challenge within the company, according to a longtime Apple executive who asked not to be identified. Vorrath has a knack for organizing engineering groups and creating an effective workflow with new processes, the executive said. It has been clear for some time now that Giannandrea needs additional help managing an AI group with growing prominence, according to the executive. Vorrath is poised to bring Apple's product development culture to the AI work, the person said.

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