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Global telecom operators are struggling to shut down aging 2G networks despite pressure to free up spectrum for 4G and 5G services, as the transition threatens to exclude millions of vulnerable users. While Vietnam successfully decommissioned 2G in November 2024 by providing free 4G phones to low-income users, countries like South Africa and India have delayed shutdowns over concerns about cutting off phone access for millions. According to GSMA Intelligence, 61 countries have planned or initiated 2G network shutdowns to enhance bandwidth and reduce maintenance costs. For 2.5 billion people worldwide, smartphones cost about 30% of monthly income, keeping basic phones essential despite declining global feature phone sales.

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Warner Bros. Home Entertainment has confirmed widespread issues affecting DVDs manufactured between 2006-2008 that are experiencing premature disc rot. The company is offering replacements for affected titles but no refunds, even when replacements aren't possible. The problem manifests in various ways: complete disc failure, freezing midway through playback, or menu issues. Movie critic Chris Bumbray recently discovered several of his classic film DVDs had deteriorated, including titles not available digitally. DVD collectors have documented this issue for years via YouTube and forums, with speculation that a Pennsylvania manufacturing plant used subpar materials.

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Apple is postponing the rollout of its more personalized Siri features, originally promised as part of its Apple Intelligence initiative. "It's going to take us longer than we thought to deliver on these features and we anticipate rolling them out in the coming year," Apple told DaringFireball. The future update seeks to give Siri greater awareness of personal context and the ability to perform actions across apps.

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Greg Kroah-Hartman has announced the release of four more stable kernels: 6.13.6, 6.12.18, 6.6.81, and 6.1.130. Unlike a normal release, Kroah-Hartman did not call for all users to update their kernels. Specifically, the 6.6.81 kernel is currently broken on i386 systems, and users should wait for 6.6.82.

Matthieu Clemenceau has published a status update on Ubuntu 25.04 (Plucky Puffin) development to the Ubuntu Discourse forum. This includes updates on Ubuntu's adoption of Dracut as an alternative to initramfs-tools, a move to a single ISO for arm64 devices rather than device-specific images, and reverting the planned O3 optimization flags for Plucky Puffin.

Earlier in this cycle, we announced plans to enable the O3 optimization level for all Ubuntu packages by default. As part of this effort, we conducted extensive benchmarking, which revealed that while some workloads saw improvements, overall system performance slightly declined, and binary sizes increased. Given these results, we are likely to revert this change soon.

The beta for Ubuntu 25.04 is planned for March 27, with the final release scheduled on April 17.

Europe's new tech rule aims to keep digital markets open and is not targeted at U.S. tech giants, EU antitrust and tech chiefs told U.S. congressmen, reminding them that U.S. enforcers have in recent years also cracked down on these companies. From a report: The comments by EU antitrust chief Teresa Ribera and EU tech chief Henna Virkkunnen came after U.S. House Judiciary Chair Jim Jordan and Scott Fitzgerald, chairman of the subcommittee on the administrative state, regulatory reform and antitrust demanded clarifications on the Digital Markets Act (DMA). "The DMA does not target U.S. companies," Ribera and Virkkunnen wrote in a joint letter dated March 6 to Jordan and Fitzgerald seen by Reuters. "It applies to all companies which fulfil the clearly defined criteria for being designated as a gatekeeper in the European Union irrespective of where they are headquartered," they said.

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PhD students trained in small research groups are more likely to remain in academia than those from larger labs, according to a comprehensive analysis published in Nature Human Behaviour. The study, which examined 1.5 million scientists and 1.8 million mentorships across chemistry, physics and neuroscience, found that trainees from large research groups had 38-48% lower "survival rates" in academia between the 1980s and 1995 compared to their small-group counterparts. However, researchers from larger labs who do stay in academia tend to achieve greater career success, publishing papers with higher citation rates and more frequently ranking among the most-cited scientists. The research team, led by social-data scientist Roberta Sinatra from the University of Copenhagen, discovered that successful large-group scientists typically published more first-author papers with their mentors as last authors, suggesting they received substantial attention despite the group size.

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The White House is weighing measures to restrict Chinese artificial-intelligence upstart DeepSeek, including banning its chatbot from government devices because of national-security concerns, WSJ reported Friday, citing people familiar with the matter. From the report: U.S. officials are worried about DeepSeek's handling of user data, which the Chinese company says it stores in servers located in China, the people said. Officials also believe DeepSeek hasn't sufficiently explained how it uses the data it collects and who has access to the data, they said. The Trump administration is likely to adopt a rule that would bar people from downloading DeepSeek's chatbot app onto U.S. government devices, the people said. Officials are also considering two other possible moves: banning the DeepSeek app from U.S. app stores and putting limits on how U.S.-based cloud service providers could offer DeepSeek's AI models to their customers, people close to the matter said. They cautioned that discussions about these two moves were still at an early stage.

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An anonymous reader shares a report: A physicist has cast doubt on a test that underlies a high-profile claim by Microsoft to have created the first 'topological qubits', a long-sought goal of the company's quantum computing effort. The critique comes amid mounting speculation about the validity of Microsoft's claim. Microsoft announced the breakthrough, which could lead to a quantum computer more resistant to information loss than with other approaches, on 19 February. Without a peer-reviewed paper backing up the claim, some researchers were sceptical. An accompanying paper in Nature described a method to measure the read-out from future topological qubits, but did not offer proof of their existence. In the latest critique, posted as a preprint, Henry Legg, a theoretical physicist at the University of St Andrews, UK, raises concerns about a test that Microsoft uses to look for Majoranas, so-far undiscovered quasiparticles arising from the collective behaviour of electrons that are needed for the topological qubits to work. Known as the topological gap protocol (TGP), the test is not mentioned in the 19 February Microsoft announcement. But the company has subsequently indicated to Nature's news team, and in a comment online, that it created the topological qubits using the TGP. "Since the TGP is flawed, the very foundations of the qubit are not there," says Legg. Business Insider, separately reports: On February 19, Microsoft unveiled a new quantum processor called Majorana 1. [...] On the same day, Simone Severini, Amazon's head of quantum technologies, emailed CEO Andy Jassy casting doubt on Microsoft's claims, according to a copy of the email obtained by Business Insider. Severini wrote that Microsoft's underlying scientific paper, released in Nature, "doesn't actually demonstrate" the claimed achievement and only showed that the new chip "could potentially enable future experiments." [...] Oskar Painter, Amazon's head of quantum hardware, stressed the need to "push back on BS statements like S. Nadella's," likely in reference to the Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella's social media post proclaiming major advancements with the Majorana chip. Further reading: Scientists Question Microsoft's Quantum Computing Claims.

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On January 20, Thomas Weißschuh shared a new patch set implementing an alternate method for checking the integrity of loadable kernel modules. This mechanism, which checks module integrity based on hashes computed at build time instead of using cryptographic signatures, could enable reproducible kernel builds in more contexts. Several distributions have already expressed interest in the patch set if Weißschuh can get it into the kernel.

FiveThirtyEight founder Nate Silver, on the site's demise: Last night, as President Trump delivered his State of the Union address, the Wall Street Journal reported that ABC News would lay off the remaining staff at 538 as part of broader cuts within corporate parent Disney. Having been through several rounds of this before, including two years ago when the staff was cut by more than half and my tenure expired too, I know it's a brutal process for everyone involved. It's also tough being in a business while having a constant anvil over your head, as we had in pretty much every odd-numbered (non-election) year from 2017 onward at 538/FiveThirtyEight. I don't know all of the staffers from the most recent iteration of the site, but the ones I have met or who I overlapped with are all extremely conscientious and hard-working people and were often forced to work double-duty as jobs were cut but frequently not replaced. My heart goes out to them, and I'm happy to provide recommendations for people I worked with there. [...] The basic issue is that Disney was never particularly interested in running FiveThirtyEight as a business, even though I think it could have been a good business. Although they were generous in maintaining the site for so long and almost never interfered in our editorial process, the sort of muscle memory a media property builds early in its tenure tends to stick. We had an incredibly talented editorial staff, but we never had enough "product" people or strategy people to help the business grow and sustain itself. It's always an uphill battle under those conditions, particularly when it comes to recruiting and retaining staff, who were constantly being poached by outlets like the New York Times and the Washington Post.

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A Brazilian judge has ordered Apple to open its iOS platform to alternative app stores within 90 days, according to Valor International. The ruling cited Apple's compliance with similar requirements in the European Union under the Digital Markets Act without showing "significant impact or irreparable harm to its economic model." The case originated from a 2022 complaint by Mercado Livre. Brazil previously issued a 20-day deadline in November for Apple to permit alternative payment options and sideloading, but that injunction was overturned in December. Apple plans to appeal.

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Intuitive Machines' Athena lander touched down near the lunar south pole Thursday but may have toppled during landing, jeopardizing its scientific mission. "We're trying to evaluate exactly what happened in that last bit," said Tim Crain, Intuitive Machines' chief technology officer. Data from an inertial measurement unit suggests the 15-foot robotic spacecraft is lying on its side. The landing issues mirror problems faced by the company's Odysseus spacecraft last year, which also toppled after touchdown. Noisy data from laser altitude instruments likely contributed to the landing complications, officials said. CEO Steve Altemus reported the spacecraft isn't generating expected power, probably because its solar panels are improperly oriented. The company believes Athena landed somewhere on Mons Mouton, though outside the planned landing zone. The $62.5 million NASA-contracted mission carries several payloads, including a drill to search for frozen water, three small rovers, and a rocket-powered hopping drone. NASA officials indicated some experiments might still function despite the lander's orientation. Intuitive Machines' stock fell 20% Thursday following reports of the spacecraft's problems.

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Security updates have been issued by Debian (chromium), Fedora (firefox and man2html), Mageia (erlang, ffmpeg, and vim), Oracle (doxygen, firefox, python-jinja2, squid, and webkit2gtk3), Red Hat (nodejs:18), SUSE (emacs, go1.23, go1.24, and pcp), and Ubuntu (ansible, firefox, linux-azure, linux-nvidia, and python-django).

An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Verge: DuckDuckGo has big plans for embedding AI into its search engine. The privacy-focused company just announced that its AI-generated answers, which appear for certain queries on its search engine, have exited beta and now source information from across the web -- not just Wikipedia. It will soon integrate web search within its AI chatbot, which has also exited beta. DuckDuckGo first launched AI-assisted answers -- originally called DuckAssist -- in 2023. The feature is billed as a less obnoxious version of tools like Google's AI Overviews, designed to offer more concise responses and let you adjust how often you see them, including turning the responses off entirely. If you have DuckDuckGo's AI-generated answers set to "often," you'll still only see them around 20 percent of the time, though the company plans on increasing the frequency eventually. Some of DuckDuckGo's AI-assisted answers bring up a box for follow-up questions, redirecting you to a conversation with its Duck.ai chatbot. As is the case with its AI-assisted answers, you don't need an account to use Duck.ai, and it comes with the same emphasis on privacy. It lets you toggle between GPT-4o mini, o3-mini, Llama 3.3, Mistral Small 3, and Claude 3 Haiku, with the advantage being that you can interact with each model anonymously by hiding your IP address. DuckDuckGo also has agreements with the AI company behind each model to ensure your data isn't used for training. Duck.ai also rolled out a feature called Recent Chats, which stores your previous conversations locally on your device rather than on DuckDuckGo's servers. Though Duck.ai is also leaving beta, that doesn't mean the flow of new features will stop. In the next few weeks, Duck.ai will add support for web search, which should enhance its ability to respond to questions. The company is also working on adding voice interaction on iPhone and Android, along with the ability to upload images and ask questions about them. ... [W]hile Duck.ai will always remain free, the company is considering including access to more advanced AI models with its $9.99 per month subscription.

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Mistral has launched a new multimodal OCR API that converts complex PDF documents into AI-friendly Markdown files. The API is designed for efficiency, handles visual elements like illustrations, supports complex formatting such as mathematical expressions, and reportedly outperforms similar offerings from major competitors. TechCrunch reports: Unlike most OCR APIs, Mistral OCR is a multimodal API, meaning that it can detect when there are illustrations and photos intertwined with blocks of text. The OCR API creates bounding boxes around these graphical elements and includes them in the output. Mistral OCR also doesn't just output a big wall of text; the output is formatted in Markdown, a formatting syntax that developers use to add links, headers, and other formatting elements to a plain text file. Mistral OCR is available on Mistral's own API platform or through its cloud partners (AWS, Azure, Google Cloud Vertex, etc.). And for companies working with classified or sensitive data, Mistral offers on-premise deployment. According to the Paris-based AI company, Mistral OCR performs better than APIs from Google, Microsoft, and OpenAI. The company has tested its OCR model with complex documents that include mathematical expressions (LaTeX formatting), advanced layouts, or tables. It is also supposed to perform better with non-English documents. [...] Mistral is also using Mistral OCR for its own AI assistant Le Chat. When a user uploads a PDF file, the company uses Mistral OCR in the background to understand what's in the document before processing the text. Companies and developers will most likely use Mistral OCR with a RAG (aka Retrieval-Augmented Generation) system to use multimodal documents as input in an LLM. And there are many potential use cases. For instance, we could envisage law firms using it to help them swiftly plough through huge volumes of documents. "Over the years, organizations have accumulated numerous documents, often in PDF or slide formats, which are inaccessible to LLMs, particularly RAG systems. With Mistral OCR, our customers can now convert rich and complex documents into readable content in all languages," said Mistral co-founder and chief science officer Guillaume Lample. "This is a crucial step toward the widespread adoption of AI assistants in companies that need to simplify access to their vast internal documentation," he added.

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SpaceX's eighth Starship test flight ended in failure after losing control and breaking apart shortly after launch, sending debris over Florida. "Starship didn't make it quite as high or as far" as the attempt nearly two months ago," notes NPR. That attempt ended with an explosion that sent flaming debris raining down on the Turks and Caicos. From the report: This time, wreckage from the latest explosion was seen streaming from the skies over Florida. It was not immediately known whether the spacecraft's self-destruct system had kicked in to blow it up. The 403-foot rocket blasted off from Texas. SpaceX caught the first-stage booster back at the pad with giant mechanical arms, but engines on the spacecraft on top started shutting down as it streaked eastward for what was supposed to be a controlled entry over the Indian Ocean, half a world away. Contact was lost as the spacecraft went into an out-of-control spin. Starship reached nearly 90 miles in altitude before trouble struck and before four mock satellites could be deployed. It was not immediately clear where it came down, but images of flaming debris were captured from Florida, including near Cape Canaveral, and posted online. The space-skimming flight was supposed to last an hour. "Unfortunately this happened last time too, so we have some practice at this now," SpaceX flight commentator Dan Huot said from the launch site. SpaceX later confirmed that the spacecraft experienced "a rapid unscheduled disassembly" during the ascent engine firing. "Our team immediately began coordination with safety officials to implement pre-planned contingency responses," the company said in a statement posted online. You can watch a recorded livestream of the launch on X.

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Newer generative AI models have begun developing deceptive behaviors -- such as cheating at chess -- when they cannot achieve objectives through standard reasoning methods. The findings come from a preprint study from Palisade Research. An anonymous reader shares an excerpt from a Popular Science article: To learn more, the team from Palisade Research tasked OpenAI's o1-preview model, DeepSeek R1, and multiple other similar programs with playing games of chess against Stockfish, one of the world's most advanced chess engines. In order to understand the generative AI's reasoning during each match, the team also provided a "scratchpad," allowing the AI to convey its thought processes through text. They then watched and recorded hundreds of chess matches between generative AI and Stockfish. The results were somewhat troubling. While earlier models like OpenAI's GPT-4o and Anthropic's Claude Sonnet 3.5 only attempted to "hack" games after researchers nudged them along with additional prompts, more advanced editions required no such help. OpenAI's o1-preview, for example, tried to cheat 37 percent of the time, while DeepSeek R1 attempted unfair workarounds roughly every 1-in-10 games. This implies today's generative AI is already capable of developing manipulative and deceptive strategies without any human input. Their methods of cheating aren't as comical or clumsy as trying to swap out pieces when Stockfish isn't "looking." Instead, AI appears to reason through sneakier methods like altering backend game program files. After determining it couldn't beat Stockfish in one chess match, for example, o1-preview told researchers via its scratchpad that "to win against the powerful chess engine" it may need to start "manipulating the game state files." "I might be able to set up a position where the engine evaluates its position as worse causing it to resign," it continued. In another trial, an AI even used the semantics of its programmers to reach its cheating phase. "The task is to 'win against a powerful chess engine,' not necessarily to win fairly in a chess game," it wrote. The precise reasons behind these deceptive behaviors remain unclear, partly because companies like OpenAI keep their models' inner workings tightly guarded, creating what's often described as a "black box." Researchers warn that the race to roll out advanced AI could outpace efforts to keep it safe and aligned with human goals, underscoring the urgent need for greater transparency and industry-wide dialogue.

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The U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS) is proposing to expand mandatory social media screening, currently required only for new arrivals, to include all non-citizens already residing in the U.S. who apply for immigration benefits. The Register reports: Back in 2019, the Department of Homeland Security, which runs USCIS, decided anyone looking to enter the US on a work visa or similar had to hand over their social media handles to the authorities so that they could be looked over for wrongdoing and subversion. In fact, this goes back to 2014, at least, to one degree or another, and has been standard procedure for years for foreigners, particularly those coming in on a visa. [...] On January 20 this year, President Trump signed an executive order calling for much tougher vetting of foreign aliens, and in response, USCIS has proposed rules saying those already in the country who are going through some process with the agency -- such as applying for permanent residency or citizenship -- will have their social media scanned for subversion. That means if you came to America before foreigners' internet presence was screened as it now is, and you're now seeking some kind of immigration benefit, at this rate you'll be subject to the same scanning as those entering the Land of the Free today. The proposed changes have a 60-day comment period for the public to suggest amendments. The last day to send them in is May 5.

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Google Gboard for Android is introducing circle or pill-shaped keys for some beta testers today. "Instead of the key borders being rounded rectangles, Gboard is switching to circles and pills for letters, while the space bar and other keys are now pill-shaped," reports 9to5Google. "While there should be no functional change to touch targets, these new shapes really shift the look of Gboard for Android." From the report: On paper, it's a bit more modern (and rounded) compared to what came before. However, it's a bit cramped if you have "Long press for symbols" enabled, which goes from the top-right corner to being directly above the letter. The physical analog Gboard is moving away from is how most keys on laptops and desktops are square.

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