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Kevin Barry, founder and sole developer of Nova Launcher, has left parent company Branch Metrics after being told to stop work on both the launcher and an open-source release. While the app remains on Google Play, the launcher's website currently shows a 404 error. The Verge reports: Mobile analytics company Branch Metrics acquired Nova in 2022. The company's CEO at the time, co-founder Alex Austin, said on Reddit that if Barry were to leave Branch, "it's contracted that the code will be open-sourced and put in the hands of the community." Austin left Branch in 2023, and now with Barry officially gone from the company, too, it's unclear if the launcher will now actually be open-sourced. "I think the newer leadership since Alex Austin left has put a different focus on the company and Nova simply isn't part of that focus in any way at all," Cliff Wade, Nova's former customer relations lead who left as part of the 2024 layoffs, tells The Verge. "It's just some app that they own but no longer feel they need or want." Wade also said that "I don't believe Branch will do the right thing any time soon with regards to open-sourcing Nova. I think they simply just don't care and don't want to invest time, unless of course, they get enough pressure from the community and individuals who care." Users have started a change.org petition to ask for the project to be open-sourced, and Wade says it's a "great start" to apply that pressure. Wade said he hasn't personally seen Barry's contract, so couldn't corroborate the claim of a contractual obligation to open-source Nova. Still, he said that the community "deserves" for the launcher to be open-sourced. "Branch just simply needs to do the right thing here and honor what they as a company have stated as well as what then CEO Alex Austin has stated numerous times prior to him leaving Branch."

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Jaguar Land Rover has extended the shutdown of its UK and overseas factories after a cyberattack forced it to take IT systems offline, disrupting production, dealerships, and suppliers. The BBC reports: Jaguar Land Rover's (JLR) UK factories are now expected to remain closed until at least Wednesday after work was disrupted by a cyber attack just over a week ago. The car plants at Halewood and Solihull and its Wolverhampton engine facility, along with production facilities in Slovakia, China and India, have been unable to operate since the company fell victim to the cyber attack. Staff who work on the production lines have been told to remain at home. JLR shut down its IT systems in response to the attack on 31 August, in order to protect them from damage. However, this caused major disruption. [...] Under normal circumstances, the company builds about 1,000 cars a day. The production stoppage has had a significant impact on the company's suppliers, with some understood to have told their own staff not to come into work. As well as forcing the factories to stop building cars, it also left dealerships unable to register new cars and garages that maintain JLR vehicles unable to order the parts they needed -- although it is understood workarounds have since been put in place. The attack began at what is traditionally a popular time for consumers to take delivery of new vehicles. The latest batch of new registration plates became available on Monday, September 1.

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An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Register: All work in IT departments will be done with the help of AI by 2030, according to analyst firm Gartner, which thinks massive job losses won't result. Speaking during the keynote address of the firm's Symposium event in Australia today, VP analyst Alicia Mullery said 81 percent of work is currently done by humans acting alone without AI assistance. Five years from now Gartner believes 75 percent of IT work will be human activity augmented by AI, with the remainder performed by bots alone. Distinguished VP analyst Daryl Plummer said this shift will mean IT departments gain labor capacity and will need to show they deserve to keep it. "You never want to look like you have too many people," he advised, before suggesting technology leaders consult with peers elsewhere in a business to identify value-adding opportunities IT departments can execute. Plummer said Gartner doesn't foresee an "AI jobs bloodbath" in IT or other industries for at least five years, adding that just one percent of job losses today are attributable to AI. He and Mullery did predict a reduction in entry-level jobs, as AI lets senior staff tackle work they would once have assigned to juniors. The two analysts also forecast that businesses will struggle to implement AI effectively, because the costs of running AI workloads balloon. ERP, Plummer said, has straightforward up-front costs: You pay to license and implement it, then to train people so they can use it. AI needs that same initial investment but few organizations can keep up with AI vendors' pace of innovation. Adopting AI therefore creates a requirement for near-constant exploration of use cases and subsequent retraining. Plummer said orgs that adopt AI should expect to uncover 10 unanticipated ancillary costs, among them the need to acquire new datasets, and the costs of managing multiple models. The need to use one AI model to check the output of others -- a necessary step to verify accuracy -- is another cost to consider. AI's hidden costs mean Gartner believes 65 percent of CIOs aren't breaking even on AI investments.

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An anonymous reader shares a report: In what is being called the largest supply chain attack in history, attackers have injected malware into NPM packages with over 2.6 billion weekly downloads after compromising a maintainer's account in a phishing attack. The package maintainer whose accounts were hijacked in this supply-chain attack confirmed the incident earlier today, stating that he was aware of the compromise and adding that the phishing email came from support [at] npmjs [dot] help, a domain that hosts a website impersonating the legitimate npmjs.com domain. In the emails, the attackers threatened that the targeted maintainers' accounts would be locked on September 10th, 2025, as a scare tactic to get them to click on the link redirecting them to the phishing sites.

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Signal has begun rolling out end-to-end encrypted cloud backups in its latest Android beta release. The opt-in feature allows users to restore message history if their phone is lost or damaged. Free backups include all text messages and 45 days of media attachments. A $1.99 monthly subscription extends media storage to 100GB. Users generate a 64-character recovery key on their device that Signal's servers never access. Backups refresh daily, excluding view-once messages and those set to disappear within 24 hours. The nonprofit cited storage costs as the reason for its first paid tier. iOS and Desktop support will follow the Android rollout. Signal said it stores backup archives without linking them to specific user accounts or payment information.

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Google has stated in a court filing that "the open web is already in rapid decline," contradicting recent public statements from executives including its CEO Sundar Pichai and Search VP Nick Fox, who maintained in May that web publishing and the web were thriving. The admission appeared in Google's response to a divestiture proposal, arguing that breaking up the company would accelerate the decline and harm publishers dependent on open-web display advertising revenue. Google's VP of Global Ads Dan Taylor has since clarified the company was referring specifically to open-web display advertising, not the entire open web.

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The Aikido blog describes an apparently ongoing series of phishing attacks against npm package maintainers, resulting in the uploading of compromised versions of heavily used packages:

All together, these packages have more than 2 billion downloads per week.

The packages were updated to contain a piece of code that would be executed on the client of a website, which silently intercepts crypto and web3 activity in the browser, manipulates wallet interactions, and rewrites payment destinations so that funds and approvals are redirected to attacker-controlled accounts without any obvious signs to the user.

A 67-year-old US man is still alive more than six months after receiving a kidney from a genetically modified pig. This is the longest a pig organ has survived in a living person. From a report: Researchers say the outcome is a landmark case of successful xenotransplantation -- the process of transplanting organs from animals to humans. The recipient, Tim Andrews, had end-stage kidney disease and had been receiving dialysis for more than two years before he underwent the surgery in January. He has been dialysis-free since receiving the kidney. Andrews was one of three patients to receive genetically modified pig kidneys supplied by the biotechnology company eGenesis in Cambridge, Massachusetts, on compassionate grounds. Reaching six months' survival is an amazing feat, says Wayne Hawthorne, a transplant surgeon at the University of Sydney in Australia. The first six months is the period of "highest risk for the patient and also the transplant," he adds. Possible complications include anaemia and graft rejection, when the immune system attacks the new organ. "The six-month time point marks that things have gone extremely well," Hawthorne says. Reaching 12 months would be another milestone and a "fantastic long-term outcome," he adds. Previously, the recipient with longest-surviving genetically modified pig organ was a 53-year-old US woman, Towana Looney, who had a functioning pig kidney for four months and nine days. However, the organ was removed earlier this year because her immune system began to reject it.

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The former head of security for WhatsApp filed a lawsuit on Monday accusing Meta of ignoring major security and privacy flaws that put billions of the messaging app's users at risk, the latest in a string of whistle-blower allegations against the social media giant. The New York Times: In the lawsuit filed in the U.S. District Court of the District of Northern California, Attaullah Baig claimed that thousands of WhatsApp and Meta employees could gain access to sensitive user data including profile pictures, location, group memberships and contact lists. Meta, which owns WhatsApp, also failed to adequately address the hacking of more than 100,000 accounts each day and rejected his proposals for security fixes, according to the lawsuit. Mr. Baig tried to warn Meta's top leaders, including its chief executive, Mark Zuckerberg, that users were being harmed by the security weaknesses, according to the lawsuit. In response, his managers retaliated and fired him in February, he claims. Mr. Baig, who is represented by the whistle-blower organization Psst.org and the law firm Schonbrun, Seplow, Harris, Hoffman & Zeldes, argued in the suit that the actions violated a privacy settlement Meta reached with the Federal Trade Commission in 2019, as well as securities laws that require companies to disclose risks to shareholders.

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University of Luxembourg mathematicians tested whether GPT-5 could extend a qualitative fourth-moment theorem to include explicit convergence rates, a previously unaddressed problem in the Malliavin-Stein framework. The September 2025 experiment, prompted by claims GPT-5 solved a convex optimization problem, revealed the AI made critical errors requiring constant human correction. GPT-5 overlooked an essential covariance property easily deducible from provided documents. The researchers compared the experience to working with a junior assistant needing careful verification. They warned AI reliance during doctoral training risks students losing opportunities to develop fundamental mathematical skills through mistakes and exploration.

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An anonymous reader shares a report: Two cultivated meat companies have filed a lawsuit against officials in Texas over the law that bans the sales of lab-grown meat in the state for two years. California-based companies UPSIDE Foods, which makes cultivated chicken, and Wildtype, which makes cultivated salmon are suing Attorney General Ken Paxton, Texas Department of State Health Services, Texas Health and Human Services, and Travis County, accusing them of government overreach. "This law has nothing to do with protecting public health and safety and everything to do with protecting conventional agriculture from innovative out-of-state competition," said Paul Sherman, a senior attorney at the Institute for Justice, a nonprofit law firm that is representing UPSIDE Foods and Wildtype. "That is not a legitimate use of government power." In June, lawmakers passed Senate Bill 261, which bans the sale of lab-grown meat in Texas for two years. Lab-grown meat, also known as cell cultivated meat or cultured meat, is made from taking animal cells and growing them in an incubator or bioreactor until they form an edible product.

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Framework Computer is a US-based computer manufacturer with a line of Linux-supported, modular, easily repairable and upgradeable laptops. In February, the company announced a new model, the Framework Laptop 12, an "entry-level" 12.2-inch convertible notebook that can be used as a laptop or tablet. The systems were made available for pre-order in April, I received mine in mid-August. Since then, I have been putting it through its paces with Debian 13 ("trixie") and Fedora Linux 42. It's a good choice for users who want a Linux-friendly, lightweight, 2-in-1 device—if they are willing to make a few concessions on storage capacity, RAM, and CPU/GPU choices.