Feed aggregator

Apple is forcing Patreon to move all remaining creators onto Apple's in-app purchase subscription system by November 2026 "or else Patreon would risk removal from the App Store," reports TechCrunch. "Apple made this decision because Patreon was managing the billing for some percentage of creators' subscriptions, and the tech giant saw that as skirting its App Store commission structure." The tech giant initially told Patreon that it must do so by November 2025, but the deadline was pushed back. From the report: "We strongly disagree with this decision," its blog post states. "Creators need consistency and clarity in order to build healthy, long-term businesses. Instead, creators using legacy billing will now have to endure the whiplash of another policy reversal -- the third such change from Apple in the past 18 months. Over the years, we have proposed multiple tools and features to Apple that we could've built to allow creators using legacy billing to transition on their own timelines, with more support added in. Unfortunately, Apple has continually declined them," it says. Creators can read more about the transition plan on Patreon's website. It has also built several tools to support these changes, including a benefit eligibility tool to see who has paid or is scheduled to pay, tier repricing tools, and gifting and discount tools to offer payment flexibility. An option for annual-only memberships will be introduced before November 2026 as well. The commission on in-app purchases and subscriptions is 30% on Apple's system, but "drops to 15% for a subscription that has been ongoing for more than a year," notes MacRumors. Patreon lets creators either raise prices only in its iOS app to cover Apple's fee or keep prices the same by absorbing the cost, while iPhone and iPad users can avoid the App Store commission entirely by paying through Patreon's website instead.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Google is rolling out an "auto browse" AI agent in Chrome that can navigate websites, fill out forms, compare prices, and handle tedious online tasks on a user's behalf. Bloomberg reports: The feature, called auto browse, will allow users to ask an assistant powered by Gemini to complete tasks such as shopping for them without leaving Chrome, said Charmaine D'Silva, a director of product. Chrome users will be able to plan a family trip by asking Gemini to open different airline and hotel websites to compare prices, for instance, D'Silva explained. "Our testers have used it for all sorts of things: scheduling appointments, filling out tedious online forms, collecting their tax documents, getting quotes for plumbers and electricians, checking if their bills are paid, filing expense reports, managing their subscriptions, and speeding up renewing their driving licenses -- a ton of time saved," said Parisa Tabriz, vice president of Chrome, in a blog post. [...] Chrome's auto browse will be available to US AI pro and AI Ultra subscribers and will use Google Password Manager to sign into websites on a user's behalf. As part of the launch, Google is also bringing its image generation tool, Nano Banana, directly into Chrome. The company said that safeguards have been placed to ensure the agentic AI will not be able to make final calls, such as placing an order, without the user's permission. "We're using AI as well as on-device models to protect people from what's really an ever-evolving landscape, whether it's AI-generated scams or just increasingly sophisticated attackers," Tabiz said during the call.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Politico: The interim head of the country's cyber defense agency uploaded sensitive contracting documents into a public version of ChatGPT last summer, triggering multiple automated security warnings that are meant to stop the theft or unintentional disclosure of government material from federal networks, according to four Department of Homeland Security officials with knowledge of the incident. The apparent misstep from Madhu Gottumukkala was especially noteworthy because the acting director of the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency had requested special permission from CISA's Office of the Chief Information Officer to use the popular AI tool soon after arriving at the agency this May, three of the officials said. The app was blocked for other DHS employees at the time. None of the files Gottumukkala plugged into ChatGPT were classified, according to the four officials, each of whom was granted anonymity for fear of retribution. But the material included CISA contracting documents (PDF) marked "for official use only," a government designation for information that is considered sensitive and not for public release. Cybersecurity sensors at CISA flagged the uploads this past August, said the four officials. One official specified there were multiple such warnings in the first week of August alone. Senior officials at DHS subsequently led an internal review to assess if there had been any harm to government security from the exposures, according to two of the four officials. It is not clear what the review concluded.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Amazon is discontinuing its Amazon One palm recognition ID system for stores later this year, the company informed users. From a report: The company will discontinue Amazon One services at retail businesses on June 3, 2026, according to a support page for the service and email messages to customers. "In response to limited customer adoption, we're discontinuing Amazon One, our authentication service for facility access and payment," an Amazon spokesperson said. "All customer data associated with Amazon One will be securely deleted after the service ends." The move coincides with a sweeping pullback from Amazon's physical retail experiments. Amazon announced Tuesday that it's closing all of its Amazon Go and Amazon Fresh locations, a total of 72 stores nationwide, concentrating its efforts instead on its Whole Foods Market locations and grocery delivery from Amazon.com. Amazon One launched in 2020 as a way to help speed up in-store entry and payments, identifying customers who opted-in and eliminating the need for them to present a credit card to pay. It often worked in conjunction with the company's Just Walk Out technology, which uses cameras and sensors to let customers avoid using a checkout line.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

The housing shortages plaguing Western cities today stem partly from the abandonment of a 19th century urban governance model that enabled cities like Berlin, New York and Chicago to expand rapidly while keeping real house prices flat and homes increasingly affordable. A new analysis by Works in Progress argues that Victorian-era urban management wasn't laissez-faire but rather a system carefully designed to align private profit with public benefit. Infrastructure monopolies -- whether privately franchised, operated as concessions or municipally owned -- funded themselves entirely through user fees rather than public subsidies, and were structured so that building more capacity was the path to greater returns. Landowners enjoyed a fundamental right to build when profitable, and height limits applied uniformly across entire cities rather than varying by neighborhood, meaning dense development remained legal everywhere. The system began collapsing after 1914, however. Inflation proved fatal to self-funding transport because governments found it politically impossible to raise controlled prices year after year. By the 1960s, trams had vanished from Britain, France and the U.S. Meanwhile, differential zoning gradually banned densification in established neighborhoods, and rent controls decimated private homebuilding in many countries. In Britain, average house prices fell from twelve times earnings in 1850 to four times by 1914. They have since climbed back to nine times earnings. The article argues roughly 80% of postwar price increases trace directly to restrictions on building.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

For decades, researchers have noted that cancer and Alzheimer's disease are rarely found in the same person, fuelling speculation that one condition might offer some degree of protection from the other. Nature: Now, a study in mice provides a possible molecular solution to the medical mystery: a protein produced by cancer cells seems to infiltrate the brain, where it helps to break apart clumps of misfolded proteins that are often associated with Alzheimer's disease. The study, which was 15 years in the making, was published on 22 January in Cell and could help researchers to design drugs to treat Alzheimer's disease. "They have a piece of the puzzle," says Donald Weaver, a neurologist and chemist at the Krembil Research Institute at the University of Toronto in Canada, who was not involved in the study. "It's not the full picture by any stretch of the imagination. But it's an interesting piece." [...] A 2020 meta-analysis of data from more than 9.6 million people found that cancer diagnosis was associated with an 11% decreased incidence of Alzheimer's disease. It has been a difficult relationship to unpick: researchers must control for a variety of external factors. For example, people might die of cancer before they are old enough to develop symptoms of Alzheimer's disease, and some cancer treatments can cause cognitive difficulties, which could obscure an Alzheimer's diagnosis.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

When asked directly whether people actually like Experian, Alex Lintner, the credit bureau's CEO of Software and Technology, offered an unusual defense in an interview: "First of all, we're not Palantir, so we don't do reputation scores." Speaking on The Verge's podcast, Lintner conceded that consumers who have poor credit scores through "life's circumstances" sometimes direct their frustration at Experian, though he argued the company enables vital access to credit for 247 million Americans. The 10-year company veteran said Experian has built its own large language model and about 200 AI agents for internal use, but consumer data remains entirely walled off from public AI systems. On security, Lintner said Experian hasn't experienced a data breach in a decade -- the last occurred two weeks into his tenure. When competitor Equifax suffered its massive breach, Equifax actually paid Experian to help protect affected consumers' identities.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

There are reports that a legitimate Microsoft email address -- which Microsoft explicitly says customers should add to their allow list -- is delivering scam spam. ArsTechnica: The emails originate from no-reply-powerbi@microsoft.com, an address tied to Power BI. The Microsoft platform provides analytics and business intelligence from various sources that can be integrated into a single dashboard. Microsoft documentation says that the address is used to send subscription emails to mail-enabled security groups. To prevent spam filters from blocking the address, the company advises users to add it to allow lists. According to an Ars reader, the address on Tuesday sent her an email claiming (falsely) that a $399 charge had been made to her. âoeIt provided a phone number to call to dispute the transaction. A man who answered a call asking to cancel the sale directed me to download and install a remote access application, presumably so he could then take control of my Mac or Windows machine (Linux wasn't allowed)," she said. Online searches returned a dozen or so accounts of other people reporting receiving the same email. Some of the spam was reported on Microsoft's own website. Sarah Sabotka, a threat researcher at security firm Proofpoint, said the scammers are abusing a Power Bi function that allows external email addresses to be added as subscribers for the Power Bi reports. The mention of the subscription is buried at the very bottom of the message, where it's easy to miss.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader shares a report: Apple is being sued by Reincubate, which makes the Camo smartphone webcam app. It has filed a lawsuit against Apple in a U.S. federal court in New Jersey, accusing the company of anticompetitive conduct and patent infringement. The suit alleges that Apple copied Camo's technology, integrated similar features into iOS, and used control over its software ecosystem to disadvantage Reincubate's Camo product. Reincubate's Camo and Camo Studio apps allow iOS or Android phones to function as webcams for Mac and PCs. The company launched Camo in 2020. In 2022, Apple introduced Continuity Camera, a feature that enables iPhones to serve as webcams for Macs but works only within Apple's device ecosystem. According to the lawsuit, Apple copied patented features from Camo and built them into iOS to "redirect user demand to Apple's own platform-tied offering."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Learn more about new agentic capabilities coming to Chrome, powered by Gemini 3.Learn more about new agentic capabilities coming to Chrome, powered by Gemini 3.

mspohr shares a report: When Sir Tim Berners-Lee invented the world wide web in 1989, his vision was clear: it would used by everyone, filled with everything and, crucially, it would be free. Today, the British computer scientist's creation is regularly used by 5.5 billion people -- and bears little resemblance to the democratic force for humanity he intended. Since Berners-Lee's disappointment a decade ago, he's thrown everything at a project that completely shifts the way data is held on the web, known as the Solid (social linked data) protocol. It's activism that is rooted in people power -- not unlike the first years of the web. This version of the internet would turbocharge personal sovereignty and give control back to users. Berners-Lee has long seen AI -- which exists only because of the web and its data -- as having the potential to transform society far beyond the boundaries of self-interested companies. But now is the time, he says, to put guardrails in place so that AI remains a force for good -- and he's afraid the chance may pass humankind by. Berners-Lee traces the web's corruption to the commercialization of the domain name system in the 1990s, when the .com space was "pounced on by charlatans." The 2016 US elections, he said, revealed to him just how toxic his creation could become. A corner of the web, he says, has been "optimised for nastiness" -- extractive, surveillance-heavy, and designed to maximize engagement at the cost of user wellbeing. His answer is Solid, a protocol that gives users control through personal data "pods" functioning as secure backpacks of information. The Flanders government in Belgium already uses Solid pods for its citizens. On AI, his optimism remains dim. "The horse is bolting," he says, calling for a "Cern for AI" where scientists could collaboratively develop superintelligence under contained, non-commercial oversight.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An analysis of film and music release patterns has found that summer and late fall are the optimal windows for movie premieres, while the music industry has no clear "best" month -- only a worst one, December, which the report's author dubbed "Dump-cember." For films, the calendar splits into distinct strategic zones. Summer months and holidays see elevated box office because audiences have more free time, and studios chase mega-billion-dollar hits during these windows. October and November see a surge of prestige releases as studios cluster their Oscar hopefuls to keep them fresh in voters' minds when awards season begins in January. The Silence of the Lambs, which swept the Academy Awards' Big Four categories in 1992, remains the only Best Picture winner in seven decades to have been released in January -- the industry's infamous "Dump-uary." The music industry operates differently. Most months are interchangeable for album releases, but December is uniquely bad. Artists avoid it because they would compete against Christmas classics from Bing Crosby and Andy Williams, both dead for decades. Albums released in December also receive weaker critical reception as measured by Pitchfork scores, and labels quietly slot their least promising projects into this low-attention window.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

KDE Plasma 6.6 is almost here, and this Linux distro gave me an early look - here's how  ZDNET

Early hominins in Europe were creating tools from raw materials hundreds of thousands of years before Homo sapiens arrived there, two new studies indicate, pushing back the established time for such activity. From a report: The evidence includes a 500,000-year-old hammer made of elephant or mammoth bone, excavated in southern England, and 430,000-year-old wooden tools found in southern Greece -- the earliest wooden tools on record. The findings suggest that early humans possessed sophisticated technological skills, the researchers said. Katerina Harvati, a paleoanthropologist at the University of Tubingen in Germany and a lead author of the wooden-tool paper, which was published on Monday in the journal PNAS, said the discoveries provided insight into the prehistoric origins of human intelligence. Silvia Bello, a paleoanthropologist at London's Natural History Museum and an author on the elephant-bone study, which was published last week in Science Advances, concurred. The artifacts in both studies, recovered from coal-mine sites, were probably produced by early Neanderthals or a preceding species, Homo heidelbergensis. Homo sapiens emerged in Africa more than 300,000 years ago, and the oldest evidence of them in Europe is a 210,000-year-old fossil unearthed in Greece. By the time Homo sapiens established themselves in Britain 40,000 years ago, other hominins had already lived there for nearly a million years.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Linux kernel community drafts contingency "plan for a plan" to replace Linus Torvalds  PC Guide

GParted Live 1.8 Released With Linux Kernel 6.18  Linuxiac

GPU Robotics Simulators  Trend Hunter

I found the perfect "portable" OS for remote work, and it’s not Windows  How-To Geek

Spectro Cloud Announces Hadron: A Lightweight, Security-First Linux Base for Modern Enterprise Edge Deployments  Business Wire

This incredibly weird 'astrological CPU scheduler' uses the signs of the zodiac and 'accurate geocentric planetary positions' to decide processor tasking  PC Gamer