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The credit-card market has quietly split in two, Atlantic argues in a new story: one offering generous benefits to wealthy Americans, the other offering expensive debt to the poor. Credit-card balances have reached an all-time high of $1.2 trillion, with serious delinquency rates climbing to their highest point since the Great Recession. "Transactors" pay off balances monthly and earn valuable rewards worth up to $3,000 annually in taxable income equivalent, while "revolvers" carry balances at a brutal 21.5% average APR. The poor subsidize the rich through two mechanisms: swipe fees that drive up retail prices by $1,700 annually for the average family, and late fees and interest charges that finance rewards programs. Interest revenue for credit-card companies has ballooned from $76 billion in 2020 to $170 billion in 2024. The economy now appears to be slowing down. High-income families are increasingly resembling working-class families in credit data, with three in five households earning over $80,000 annually carrying balances for more than a year. Card companies are now offering fewer cards to subprime borrowers, creating a troubling dilemma - while expensive credit cards are harmful, having no credit access might be worse. Bipartisan legislation now aims to cap interest rates and lower swipe fees.

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Microsoft is developing a new Windows 11 feature that will explain how hardware limitations affect PC performance. The latest preview builds include a hidden FAQ section in system settings that addresses GPU memory, system RAM, and OS version impacts. The feature, discovered by Windows observer "phantomofearth" in this week's Dev Channel build, requires manual activation. It provides specific recommendations for configurations like low RAM or GPUs with less than 4GB memory, and flags outdated Windows versions.

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The National Archives has released thousands of pages of declassified records related to the assassination of President John F. Kennedy in 1963. From a report: The records were posted to the National Archives' website, joining recently released records posted in 2023, 2022, 2021 and 2017-2018. "This release consists of approximately 80,000 pages of previously-classified records that will be published with no redactions," said the announcement from the Office of the Director of National Intelligence. "Additional documents withheld under court seal or for grand jury secrecy, and records subject to section 6103 of the Internal Revenue Code, must be unsealed before release." President Donald Trump signed an executive order on Jan. 23 directing the release of all remaining records related to the assassination, saying it was in the "public interest" to do so. Tuesday's initial release contained 1,123 records comprising 32,000 pages. A subsequent release on Tuesday night contained 1,059 records comprising 31,400 additional pages.

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Nvidia has not been approached about acquiring a stake in Intel, CEO Jensen Huang said on Wednesday, addressing speculation about potential semiconductor industry consolidation. "Nobody's invited us to a consortium," Huang told reporters at Nvidia's annual developer conference. "Nobody invited me. Maybe other people are involved, but I don't know. There might be a party. I wasn't invited." Reuters previously reported that Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co (TSMC) had approached Nvidia, Broadcom and Advanced Micro Devices about joining a potential joint venture to operate Intel's factories. Other media outlets reported Intel was considering separating its manufacturing operations with U.S. President Donald Trump's support, potentially transferring control to a TSMC-led consortium.

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prisoninmate writes: GNOME 48 desktop environment has been released after six months of development with major new features that have been expected for more than four years, such as dynamic triple buffering, HDR support, and much more. 9to5Linux reports: "Highlights of GNOME 48 include dynamic triple buffering to boost the performance on low-end GPUs, such as Intel integrated graphics or Raspberry Pi computers, Wayland color management protocol support, new Adwaita fonts, HDR (High Dynamic Range) support, and a new Wellbeing feature with screen time tracking. "GNOME 48 also introduces a new GNOME Display Control (gdctl) utility to view the active monitor configuration and set new monitor configuration using command line arguments, implements a11y keyboard monitoring support, adds output luminance settings, and it now centers new windows by default."

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OpenAI has launched a more powerful version of its o1 "reasoning" AI model, o1-pro, in its developer API. From a report: According to OpenAI, o1-pro uses more computing than o1 to provide "consistently better responses." Currently, it's only available to select developers -- those who've spent at least $5 on OpenAI API services -- and it's pricey. Very pricey. OpenAI is charging $150 per million tokens (~750,000 words) fed into the model and $600 per million tokens generated by the model. That's twice the price of OpenAI's GPT-4.5 for input and 10x the price of regular.

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An anonymous reader shares a report: LG has ceased its XR product commercialization efforts, it confirmed, though will still continue long-term R&D. The news of LG ending its XR product plans was first reported by South Korean news outlet The Bell, citing an industry source. In a statement given to the outlet, LG confirmed the claim but clarified that it will still continue long-term XR research and development. According to The Bell, LG took the decision because it believes the XR market isn't growing as quickly as it expected, and it wants to focus more on heating, ventilation, air conditioning (HVAC) and robotics.

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Inside this week's LWN.net Weekly Edition:

• Front: Oxidizr; Spectre mitigations; Frozen pages; Mapcount madness; Open-source risks; /e/OS.
• Briefs: Supply chain attacks; SystemRescue 12.00; Casual Make; GIMP 3.0; Git 2.49.0; GNOME 48; PeerTube 7.1; Quotes; ...
• Announcements: Newsletters, conferences, security updates, patches, and more.

An anonymous reader shares a report: PCI Express 7 is nearing completion, the PCI Special Interest Group said, and the final specification should be released later this year. PCI Express 7, the backbone of the modern motherboard, is at the stage 0.9, which the PCI-SIG characterizes as the "final draft" of the specification. The technology was at version 0.5 a year ago, almost to the day, and originally authored in 2022. The situation remains the same, however. While modern PC motherboards are stuck on PCI Express 5.0, the specification itself moves ahead. PCI Express has doubled the data rate about every three years, from 64 gigtransfers per second in PCI Express 6.0 to the upcoming 128 gigatransfers per second in PCIe 7. (Again, it's worth noting that PCIe 6.0 exists solely on paper.) Put another way, PCIe 7 will deliver 512GB/s in both directions, across a x16 connection. It's worth noting that the PCI-SIG doesn't see PCI Express 7 living inside the PC market, at least not initially. Instead, PCIe 7 is expected to be targeted at cloud computing, 800-gigabit Ethernet and, of course, artificial intelligence. It will be backwards-compatible with the previous iterations of PCI Express, the SIG said.

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Streaming service provider Plex announced Wednesday its first price increase in a decade for its premium Plex Pass subscription, raising monthly rates to $6.99 from $4.99, yearly subscriptions to $69.99 from $39.99, and lifetime access to $249.99 from $119.99, effective April 29. The company is also making remote playback of personal media a paid feature, introducing a Remote Watch Pass subscription at $1.99 monthly or $19.99 annually for users who don't need full Plex Pass features, and removing its one-time mobile activation fee. The price increase applies to new and existing subscriptions, with the exception of existing Lifetime Plex Pass holders, the company said.

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EU antitrust regulators ordered Apple on Wednesday to open its closed ecosystem to competitors, detailing how the company must comply with the bloc's Digital Markets Act or face potential fines. The European Commission's decision comes six months after initiating proceedings against the tech giant. The first order requires Apple to grant rival smartphone, headphone and VR headset manufacturers access to its technology for seamless connectivity with Apple devices. A second order establishes specific processes for responding to app developers' interoperability requests. Apple criticized the decision, saying: "Today's decisions wrap us in red tape, slowing down Apple's ability to innovate for users in Europe." EU antitrust chief Teresa Ribera countered: "We are simply implementing the law." Non-compliance could trigger investigations resulting in fines up to 10% of Apple's global annual sales.

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GNOME 48 ("Bengaluru") has been released. As usual, this release includes a number of new features and enhancements including support for shortcuts in the Orca screen reader on Wayland, new fonts, addition of image editing to Image Viewer, and more.

GNOME 48 includes a number of notable performance improvements. The most significant of these is the introduction of dynamic triple buffering. This change has undergone significant review and testing over a period of five years and improves the perceived smoothness of changes on screen, with fewer skipped frames and more fluid animations. This has been achieved by enhancing the concurrency capabilities of Mutter, the GNOME display manager, and is particularly effective at handling sudden bursts of activity.

The GNOME 48 release also adds new applications to the GNOME Circle collection, such as Drum Machine and the Iotas note-taking application. See "What's new for developers" a rundown of improvements for developers in GNOME 48.

SourceHut, an open-source-friendly git-hosting service, says web crawlers for AI companies are slowing down services through their excessive demands for data. From a report: "SourceHut continues to face disruptions due to aggressive LLM crawlers," the biz reported Monday on its status page. "We are continuously working to deploy mitigations. We have deployed a number of mitigations which are keeping the problem contained for now. However, some of our mitigations may impact end-users." SourceHut said it had deployed Nepenthes, a tar pit to catch web crawlers that scrape data primarily for training large language models, and noted that doing so might degrade access to some web pages for users. "We have unilaterally blocked several cloud providers, including GCP [Google Cloud] and [Microsoft] Azure, for the high volumes of bot traffic originating from their networks," the biz said, advising administrators of services that integrate with SourceHut to get in touch to arrange an exception to the blocking.

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The devastating impacts of the climate crisis reached new heights in 2024, with scores of unprecedented heatwaves, floods and storms across the globe, according to the UN's World Meteorological Organization. From a report: The WMO's report on 2024, the hottest year on record, sets out a trail of destruction from extreme weather that took lives, demolished buildings and ravaged vital crops. More than 800,000 people were displaced and made homeless, the highest yearly number since records began in 2008. The report lists 151 unprecedented extreme weather events in 2024, meaning they were worse than any ever recorded in the region. Heatwaves in Japan left hundreds of thousands of people struck down by heatstroke. Soaring temperatures during heatwaves peaked at 49.9C at Carnarvon in Western Australia, 49.7C in the city of Tabas in Iran, and 48.5C in a nationwide heatwave in Mali. Record rains in Italy led to floods, landslides and electricity blackouts; torrents destroyed thousands of homes in Senegal; and flash floods in Pakistan and Brazil caused major crop losses. Storms were also supercharged by global heating in 2024, with an unprecedented six typhoons in under a month hitting the Philippines. Hurricane Helene was the strongest ever recorded to strike the Big Bend region of Florida in the US, while Vietnam was hit by Super Typhoon Yagi, affecting 3.6 million people. Many more unprecedented events will have passed unrecorded.

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Federal authorities have broken up an international crime ring that stole thousands of iPhones from porches nationwide [non-paywalled link], arresting 13 people last month after a sophisticated operation that combined high-tech tools with old-fashioned bribery. The thieves created software to scrape FedEx tracking numbers and paid AT&T store employees to provide customer order details and delivery addresses, according to WSJ, which cites prosecutors. Armed with this information, runners intercepted packages at doorsteps moments after delivery. Demetrio Reyes Martinez, known online as "CookieNerd," developed code that circumvented FedEx limits on delivery-data requests, while AT&T employee Alejandro Then Castillo used his credentials to track hundreds of shipments and reportedly received up to $2,500 for recruiting other employees. Stolen devices were funneled through Wyckoff Wireless in Brooklyn, a store owned by Joel Suriel, who was already on supervised release from a previous wire-fraud conviction. The merchandise was then shipped overseas for sale and activation.

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Modern CPUs all have multiple hardware vulnerabilities that the kernel needs to mitigate; the 6.13 kernel has workarounds for 14 security-sensitive CPU bugs just on x86_64. Several of those have multiple variants, or multiple mitigations that apply on different microarchitectures. There are different kernel command-line options for each of these mitigations, which leads to a confusing situation for users trying to figure out how to configure their systems. David Kaplan recently posted a patch set that adds a single, unified command-line option for controlling mitigations and simplifies the logic for detecting, configuring, and applying them as well. If it is merged, the patch set could make it much easier for users to navigate the complicated web of CPU vulnerabilities and their mitigations.

Version 7.1 of PeerTube, a tool for sharing videos online, has been released. Notable features in this release include improved support for the Podcast 2.0 standard, better playback stability, and a new view protocol enabled by default to allow PeerTube to handle more simultaneous viewers. See the release notes for more details.

Nature: A Microsoft researcher [this week] presented results behind the company's controversial claim last month to have created the first 'topological' qubits -- a long-sought goal of quantum computing. In front of a packed room at a meeting of the American Physical Society (APS), Chetan Nayak, a theoretical physicist leading Microsoft's quantum computing effort in Redmond, Washington, explained how the company is developing topological qubits, which would be the building blocks for a noise-resistant quantum computer. Physicists in the audience told Nature's news team they are still unsure whether Microsoft really has made the first topological qubits, however. "It's a hard problem," says Ali Yazdani, an experimental physicist at Princeton University in New Jersey. To anyone trying to make topological qubits, he says, "good luck." When Nayak displayed measurement data during his presentation, he acknowledged that a characteristic signal was difficult to see due to electrical noise, prompting Cornell University theorist Eun-Ah Kim to question its robustness. Microsoft says additional details will be available in a forthcoming paper on the arXiv preprint server. Further reading: Scientists Question Microsoft's Quantum Computing Claims; Microsoft Quantum Computing 'Breakthrough' Faces Fresh Challenge

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/e⁠/⁠OS is a privacy-centric, open-source mobile operating system that has primarily been targeted at mobile phones, with only a few community supported images available for tablet devices. In December, Murena—a company that sells devices with /⁠e⁠/⁠OS preinstalled—announced that /⁠e⁠/⁠OS now officially supports tablets as well, starting with the Pixel tablet. The user experience is close enough to mainstream alternatives to make it attractive, but there are some under-the-hood problems that may give users pause.

A security company called Fenrisk has posted an overview of a pair of claimed successful supply-chain attacks on the Fedora and openSUSE distributions.

We successfully identified vulnerabilities in the Pagure, the Git forge used by Fedora to store their package definitions. We also compromised Open Build Service, the all-in-one toolchain used and developed by the openSUSE project for compilation and packaging.

Their exploitation by malicious actors would have led to the compromise of all the packages of the distributions Fedora and openSUSE, as well as their downstream distributions, impacting millions of Linux servers and desktops.