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Disney is raising prices again for Disney+, Hulu, and ESPN Select starting October 21, 2025, with most ad-supported tiers going up by $2-3 per month and bundles also seeing increases. It marks the third consecutive year of U.S. streaming price hikes. Variety reports: It's that time of year again, apparently: Disney is raising the prices of its Disney+ and Hulu plans in the U.S., including most bundles, as of next month. The standalone Disney+ with ads service is rising from $9.99 to $11.99/month on Oct. 21, 2025, while the Disney+ Premium (without ads) is going from $15.99 to $18.99/month. The Hulu standalone plan with ads is increasing from $9.99 to $11.99/month as of the same date; the premium version of Hulu with no ads will remain at $18.99 per month. In addition, the price of ESPN Select (the service formerly known as ESPN+, which has a more limited content lineup than the recently launched ESPN Unlimited all-in app) will increase from $11.99 to $12.99 per month on Oct. 21. For now, the introductory price of the Disney+, Hulu and ESPN Unlimited bundle with ads will remain $29.99 per month (for the first 12 months). It's the third time in three years Disney is raising the prices of the streaming services in the U.S., after price hikes for Disney+ and Hulu in October 2024 and in October 2023. Disney provided notifications of the latest price hikes Tuesday on its customer support sites.

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Microsoft is preparing a Publisher Content Marketplace to pay publishers when their work is used in AI products like Copilot. Neowin reports: Microsoft is reportedly discussing with select US publishers a pilot program for its so-called Publisher Content Marketplace, a system that pays publishers for their content when it gets used by AI products, starting with its own Copilot assistant. The PCM will launch with a limited number of partners before Microsoft hopes to expand the program over time. The company pitched the idea to publishing executives at an invite-only Partner Summit in Monaco last week. Microsoft was allegedly courting them with the message: "You deserve to be paid on the quality of your IP." No concrete launch date for the pilot was shared. As Axios notes, Microsoft is the first major company to try to build a proper AI marketplace for publishers. Other AI labs like OpenAI have mostly focused on securing one-off licensing deals instead of building a platform for ongoing transactions. Companies like Cloudflare are also working on a more technical, network-level solution to this problem.

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An anonymous reader quotes a report from InsideEVs: On Monday morning, I spoke to a Volvo EX90 owner who reported a litany of issues with her 2025 EX90: malfunctioning phone-as-a-key functionality, a useless keyfob, a keycard that rarely worked quickly, constant phone connection issues, infotainment glitches and error messages. I was surprised not because I hadn't heard of these kinds of problems, but because I experienced them myself over a year ago at the EX90 first drive again. At the time, Volvo said software fixes were imminent. Today, we know the issues go deeper. To solve them, Volvo announced on Tuesday that it will replace the central computer of every 2025 EX90 with the new one from the 2026 EX90. It's a tacit admission that the company can't solve the EX90's issues while simultaneously launching its next-generation software-defined vehicles, and that it's easier to replace the original computer than to build bug-free software for it. But for some, the damage to the Volvo brand has already been done. "I say without exaggeration that this car is a dumpster fire inside a train wreck," InsideEVs reader and EX90 owner Sally Greer told InsideEVs. The report notes that Volvo will replace the computer inside the 2025 EX90 with a Nvidia Drive AGX Orin-based core computer that has contains over 500 TOPS (Trillion Operations Per Second) of power, which Volvo says will help power its autonomous driving ambitions.

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MLB has approved the use of robot umpires in the 2026 season. According to ESPN, the system will give teams two challenges per game for balls and strikes where hitters, pitchers, and catchers can request reviews. From the report: Hitters, pitchers and catchers will be the only ones allowed to trigger the system by tapping their head, and if a challenge is successful -- the pitch will be shown on in-stadium videoboards -- teams will retain it. While the vote in favor of the automated ball-strike challenge system was not unanimous -- some of the four players on the 11-man committee voted no, according to sources -- the vote was a fait accompli, with MLB owners all in favor and in possession of a six-seat majority on the committee. The ABS system uses similar technology to the line-calling system in tennis, with 12 cameras in each ballpark tracking the ball with a margin of error around one-sixth of an inch. The ABS zone will be a two-dimensional plane in the middle of the plate that spans its full width (17 inches). The zone's top will be 53.5% of a player's height and the bottom 27%. Teams that run out of challenges over the first nine innings will be granted an extra challenge in the 10th inning, while those that still have unused challenges will simply carry them into extras. If a team runs out of challenges in the 10th, it will automatically receive another in the 11th -- a rule that extends for any extra inning. During the league's spring training test this season, teams combined to average around four challenges per game and succeeded 52.2% of the time, according to the league. Catchers, whose value in framing pitches outside the zone to look like strikes could take a hit due to the new rule, were the most successful at a 56% overturn rate, while hitters were correct 50% of the time and pitchers 41%. MLB's minor league testing, which started in 2021, led to Triple-A players in 2023 using ABS challenge three days a week and a full ABS system, with every pitch adjudicated by computer, the other three.

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YouTube's parent company, Alphabet, said it will reinstate creators previously banned for spreading COVID-19 misinformation and false election claims, citing free expression and shifting policy guidelines. The Hill reports: "Reflecting the Company's commitment to free expression, YouTube will provide an opportunity for all creators to rejoin the platform if the Company terminated their channels for repeated violations of COVID-19 and elections integrity policies that are no longer in effect," the company said in a letter to Rep. Jim Jordan (R-Ohio), chair of the House Judiciary Committee. "YouTube values conservative voices on its platform and recognizes that these creators have extensive reach and play an important role in civic discourse. The Company recognizes these creators are among those shaping today's online consumption, landing 'must-watch' interviews, giving viewers the chance to hear directly from politicians, celebrities, business leaders, and more," it added in the five-page correspondence. Alphabet blamed the Biden administration for limiting political speech on the platform. "Senior Biden Administration officials, including White House officials, conducted repeated and sustained outreach to Alphabet and pressed the Company regarding certain user-generated content related to the COVID-19 pandemic that did not violate its policies," the letter read. "While the Company continued to develop and enforce its policies independently, Biden Administration officials continued to press the Company to remove non-violative user-generated content," it continued. Guidelines were changed after former President Biden took office and urged platforms to remove content that encouraged citizens to drink bleach to cure COVID-19, as President Trump suggested in 2020, or join insurrection efforts launched on Jan. 6, 2021, to overthrow his 2020 presidential win. But the company said the Biden administration's decisions were "unacceptable" and "wrong," while noting it would forgo future fact-checking mechanisms and instead allow users to add context notes to content.

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An anonymous reader quotes a report from TechCrunch: While many vibe-coding startups have become unicorns, with valuations in the billions, one area where AI-assisted coding has not yet taken off is on mobile devices. Despite the numerous apps now available that offer vibe-coding tools on mobile platforms, none are gaining noticeable downloads, and few are generating any revenue at all. According to an analysis of global app store trends by the app intelligence provider Appfigures, only a small handful of mobile apps offering vibe-coding tools have seen any downloads, let alone generated revenue. The largest of these is Instance: AI App Builder, which has seen only 16,000 downloads and $1,000 in consumer spending. The next largest app, Vibe Studio, has pulled in just 4,000 downloads but has made no money. This situation could still change, of course. The market is young, and vibe-coding apps continue to improve and work out the bugs. New apps in this space are arriving all the time, too. This year, a startup called Vibecode launched with $9.4 million in seed funding from Reddit co-founder Alexis Ohanian's Seven Seven Six. The company's service allows users to create mobile apps using AI within its own iOS app. Vibecode is so new, Appfigures doesn't yet have data on it. For now, most people who want to toy around with vibe-coding technology are doing so on the desktop.

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An analysis of a literature database finds that text-generating AI tools -- including ChatGPT and Gemini -- can be used to rewrite scientific papers and produce 'copycat' versions that are then passed off as new research. Nature: In a preprint posted on medRxiv on 12 September, researchers identified more than 400 such papers published in 112 journals over the past 4.5 years, and demonstrated that AI-generated biomedicine studies could evade publishers' anti-plagiarism checks. The study's authors warn that individuals and paper mills -- companies that produce fake papers to order and sell authorships -- might be exploiting publicly available health data sets and using large language models (LLMs) to mass-produce low-quality papers that lack scientific value. "If left unaddressed, this AI-based approach can be applied to all sorts of open-access databases, generating far more papers than anyone can imagine," says Csaba Szabo, a pharmacologist at the University of Fribourg in Switzerland, who was not involved in the work. "This could open up Pandora's box [and] the literature may be flooded with synthetic papers."

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Microsoft has successfully tested a microfluidic cooling system that removed heat up to three times better than cold plates currently used in datacenters. The technology etches tiny channels directly into silicon chips, allowing cooling liquid to flow directly onto the heat source. In lab tests announced September 23, 2025, the system reduced the maximum temperature rise inside GPUs by 65%. The channels, roughly the width of human hair, were optimized using AI to create bio-inspired patterns resembling leaf veins. Microsoft collaborated with Swiss startup Corintis on the design. The cooling fluid can operate at temperatures as high as 70C (158F) while maintaining effectiveness. The company demonstrated the technology on servers running Microsoft Teams services, where the improved cooling enables overclocking during demand spikes that occur when meetings start on the hour and half-hour. Microsoft is investigating incorporating microfluidics into future generations of its first-party chips as the company plans to spend over $30 billion on capital expenditures this quarter.

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Pope Leo XIV declined to authorize an AI avatar that would have provided virtual papal audiences to Catholics worldwide. The first American pontiff rejected the proposal during an interview with papal biographer Elise Allen. "Someone recently asked authorization to create an artificial me so that anybody could sign onto this website and have a personal audience with 'the Pope,'" he said. "This artificial intelligence Pope would give them answers to their questions, and I said, 'I'm not going to authorize that.'" The Pope expressed broader concerns about AI's societal impact. He warned that automation could leave only a few people able to live meaningful lives while others merely survive. These concerns influenced his papal name choice, taking inspiration from Pope Leo XIII, who authored Rerum novarum addressing workers' rights during the Industrial Revolution. Leo XIV maintained he isn't opposed to technological innovation but believes links between faith, humanity, and science must be preserved.

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Nearly a quarter of workers aged 18-34 fear they'll lose their jobs to AI within two years, according to a Deutsche Bank survey of 10,000 people across the US and major European economies. The survey, conducted from June through August, found 24% of younger respondents scored their concern at 8 or above on a 10-point scale, compared to just 10% among workers 55 and older. Workers anticipate growing AI risk over time. 22% expressed high concern over a five-year horizon versus 18% for the two-year timeframe, the bank wrote in a report, reviewed by Slashdot. Americans show greater concern than Europeans across all time periods, scoring roughly five percentage points higher. The survey also revealed major differences in AI adoption patterns. The US leads workplace adoption at 56%, while Spain shows the highest home adoption at 68% over three months. Germany and the UK demonstrate contrasting behaviors -- both countries report similar home usage above 50%, but workplace adoption differs significantly at 41% for Germany versus 5% for the UK. Training gaps persist across regions. Only one in four European respondents has received AI training at work compared to nearly one in three Americans, though 52% of Europeans and 54% of Americans want employer-led AI training.

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Abstract of a paper on pre-print server Arxiv: Elites disproportionately influence policymaking, yet little is known about their fairness and efficiency preferences -- key determinants of support for redistributive policies. We investigate these preferences in an incentivized lab experiment with a group of future elites -- Ivy League MBA students. We find that MBA students implement substantially more unequal earnings distributions than the average American, regardless of whether inequality stems from luck or merit. Their redistributive choices are also highly responsive to efficiency costs, with an effect that is an order of magnitude larger than that found in representative U.S. samples. Analyzing fairness ideals, we find that MBA students are less likely to be strict meritocrats than the broader population. These findings provide novel insights into how elites' redistributive preferences may shape high levels of inequality in the U.S.

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Customs and Border Protection collected DNA from nearly 2,000 US citizens between 2020 and 2024 and sent the samples to the FBI's CODIS crime database, according to Georgetown Law's Center on Privacy & Technology analysis of newly released government data. The collection included approximately 95 minors, some as young as 14, and travelers never charged with crimes. Congress never authorized DNA collection from citizens, children or civil detainees. DHS has contributed 2.6 million profiles to CODIS since 2020, with 97% collected under civil rather than criminal authority. The expansion followed a 2020 Justice Department rule that revoked DHS's waiver from DNA collection requirements. Former FBI director Christopher Wray testified in 2023 that monthly DNA submissions jumped from a few thousand to 92,000, creating a backlog of 650,000 unprocessed kits. Georgetown researchers project DHS could account for one-third of CODIS by 2034. The DHS Inspector General found in 2021 that the department lacked central oversight of DNA collection.

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An anonymous reader shares a report: Battered by funding cuts, bombarded by the White House and braced for demographic changes set to send enrollment into a nosedive, America's colleges and universities have spent this year in flux. But one of higher education's rituals resurfaced again on Tuesday, when U.S. News & World Report published the college rankings that many administrators obsessively track and routinely malign. And, at least in the judgment of U.S. News, all of the headline-making upheaval has so far led to ... well, a lot of stability. Princeton University, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Harvard University retained the top three spots in the publisher's rankings of national universities. Stanford University kept its place at No. 4, though Yale University also joined it there. Williams College remained U.S. News's pick for the best national liberal arts college, just as Spelman College was again the top-ranked historically Black institution. In one notable change, the University of California, Berkeley, was deemed the country's top public university. But it simply switched places with its counterpart in Los Angeles.

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The Open Source Security Foundation (OpenSSF) has put together a joint statement from many of the public package repositories for various languages about the need for assistance in maintaining these commons. Services such as PyPI for Python, crates.io for Rust, and many others are working together to try to find ways to sustain these services in the face of challenges from "automated CI systems, large-scale dependency scanners, and ephemeral container builds" all downloading enormous amounts of package data, coupled with the rise of generative and agentic AI "driving a further explosion of machine-driven, often wasteful automated usage, compounding the existing challenges". It is not a crisis, yet, they say, but it is headed in that direction. Despite serving billions (perhaps even trillions) of downloads each month (largely driven by commercial-scale consumption), many of these services are funded by a small group of benefactors. Sometimes they are supported by commercial vendors, such as Sonatype (Maven Central), GitHub (npm) or Microsoft (NuGet). At other times, they are supported by nonprofit foundations that rely on grants, donations, and sponsorships to cover their maintenance, operation, and staffing.

Regardless of the operating model, the pattern remains the same: a small number of organizations absorb the majority of infrastructure costs, while the overwhelming majority of large-scale users, including commercial entities that generate demand and extract economic value, consume these services without contributing to their sustainability.

mrspoonsi writes: The US Secret Service says it has dismantled a network of more than 300 SIM servers and 100,000 SIM cards in the New York area that were capable of crippling telecom systems. The devices were "concentrated within 35 miles of the global meeting of the UN General Assembly now under way in New York City" and an investigation has been launched, it adds in a press statement. The Secret Service says the dangers posed included "disabling cell phone towers, enabling denial of services attacks, and facilitating anonymous, encrypted communication between potential threat actors and criminal enterprises."

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A bug in a recent release of systemd's network manager caused headaches for people managing systems that have a virtual LAN (VLAN) interface on a bridge; something one might want to do, for example, when configuring network interfaces for virtual machines. The bug affected several Debian users when upgrading the systemd package from v257.7-1 to v257.8-1. The updated package is part of the Debian 13.1 release, and the bug has snared enough users to cause a minor stir—due in no small part to the maintainer's response as much as the bug itself.

40% of U.S. employees have received "workslop" -- AI-generated content that appears polished but lacks substance -- in the past month, according to research from BetterUp Labs and Stanford Social Media Lab. The survey of 1,150 full-time workers found recipients spend an average of one hour and 56 minutes addressing each incident of workslop, costing organizations an estimated $186 per employee monthly. For a 10,000-person company, lost productivity totals over $9 million annually. Professional services and technology sectors are disproportionately affected. Workers report that 15.4% of received content qualifies as workslop. The phenomenon occurs primarily between peers at 40%, though 18% flows from direct reports to managers and 16% moves down the hierarchy. Beyond financial costs, workslop damages workplace relationships -- half of recipients view senders as less creative, capable, and reliable, while 42% see them as less trustworthy.

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Security updates have been issued by Debian (corosync and kernel), Fedora (checkpointctl, chromium, curl, and perl-Catalyst-Authentication-Credential-HTTP), SUSE (firefox, frr, kernel, rustup, vim, and wireshark), and Ubuntu (glibc and pam).

AI companies like OpenAI have been quick to unveil plans for spending hundreds of billions of dollars on data centers, but they have been slower to show how they will pull in revenue to cover all those expenses. Now, the consulting firm Bain & Co. is estimating the shortfall could be far larger than previously understood. Bloomberg: By 2030, AI companies will need $2 trillion in combined annual revenue to fund the computing power needed to meet projected demand, Bain said in its annual Global Technology Report released Tuesday. Yet their revenue is likely to fall $800 billion short of that mark as efforts to monetize services like ChatGPT trail the spending requirements for data centers and related infrastructure, Bain predicted. The report is set to raise further questions about the AI industry's valuations and business model. The increasing popularity of services such as OpenAI's ChatGPT and Google's Gemini, as well as AI efforts by companies across the planet, means demand for computing capacity and energy is rising at a rapid clip. But the savings provided by AI and companies' ability to generate additional revenue from AI is lagging behind that pace.

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An anonymous reader quotes a report from Bloomberg: MediaTek is launching a mobile processor more capable of handling agentic AI tasks on devices, positioning to better compete with Qualcomm. The new Dimensity 9500 will provide users with better summaries of calls and meetings, improved output from AI models and superior 4K photos, the Taiwanese company said in a statement. The chip is made using an advanced 3-nanometer process by Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co., according to MediaTek, and handsets carrying the new chip will become available in the fourth quarter. Xiaomi is set to launch its latest handset range powered by Qualcomm's newest Snapdragon processor later this week, and the Chinese smartphone maker is aiming to benchmark its upcoming devices against Apple Inc.'s iPhone 17. MediaTek's processor, meanwhile, is expected to give Xiaomi's rivals including Vivo a boost in the premium segment. [...] Separately, the Taiwanese company is preparing to place chip orders for automotive and more sensitive applications with TSMC's Arizona plant as some US customers have security concerns, according to the executives.

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