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Regeneron Pharmaceuticals is acquiring most of 23andMe's assets for $256 million. The sale includes 23andMe's Personal Genome Service, Total Health and Research Services business lines. What's not included is 23andMe's telehealth unit, Lemonaid Health, which the company acquired for around $400 million in 2021. It'll be shut down, but all staffers will remain employed. CNBC reports: The deal is still subject to approval by the U.S. Bankruptcy Court for the Eastern District of Missouri. Pending approval, it's expected to close in the third quarter of this year, according to the release. In its bankruptcy proceedings, 23andMe required all bidders to comply with its privacy policies, and a court-appointed, independent "Consumer Privacy Ombudsman" will assess the deal, the companies said. Several lawmakers and officials, including the Federal Trade Commission, had expressed concerns about the safety of consumers' genetic data through 23andMe's sale process. The privacy ombudsman will present a report on the acquisition to the court by June 10. "We are pleased to have reached a transaction that maximizes the value of the business and enables the mission of 23andMe to live on, while maintaining critical protections around customer privacy, choice and consent with respect to their genetic data," Mark Jensen, 23andMe's board chair, said in a statement. "At its peak, 23andMe was valued at around $6 billion," notes the report.

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An anonymous reader quotes a report from TechCrunch: Microsoft on Monday became one of the first hyperscalers to provide managed access to Grok, the AI model developed by billionaire Elon Musk's AI startup, xAI. Available through Microsoft's Azure AI Foundry platform, Grok -- specifically Grok 3 and Grok 3 mini -- will "have all the service-level agreements Azure customers expect from any Microsoft product," says Microsoft. They'll also be billed directly by Microsoft, as is the case with the other models hosted in Azure AI Foundry. [...] The Grok 3 and Grok 3 mini models in Azure AI Foundry are decidedly more locked down than the Grok models on X. They also come with additional data integration, customization, and governance capabilities not necessarily offered by xAI through its API.

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Monitoring Windows and Linux Systems Using Open-Source Zabbix  Virtualization Review

Monitoring Windows and Linux Systems Using Open-Source Zabbix  Virtualization Review

Systemd Continues Raising Concerns for Linux Users  WebProNews

We’re launching the new NotebookLM app, designed to help people understand anything, anywhere.We’re launching the new NotebookLM app, designed to help people understand anything, anywhere.

Chatbots are more persuasive in online debates than people -- especially when they are able to personalize their arguments using information about their opponent. From a report: The finding, published in Nature Human Behaviour on 19 May, highlights how large language models (LLMs) could be used to influence people's opinions, for example in political campaigns or targeted advertising. "Obviously as soon as people see that you can persuade people more with LLMs, they're going to start using them," says study co-author Francesco Salvi, a computational scientist at the Swiss Federal Technology Institute of Lausanne (EPFL). "I find it both fascinating and terrifying." Research has already shown that artificial intelligence (AI) chatbots can make people change their minds, even about conspiracy theories, but it hasn't been clear how persuasive they are in comparison to humans. GPT-4 was 64.4% more persuasive than humans in one-to-one debates, the study found.

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An anonymous reader shares a report: European "green" funds holding more than $33 billion of investments in major oil and gas companies have been revealed by an investigation, despite fossil fuels being the root cause of the climate crisis. Some of these investment funds used branding such as Sustainable Global Stars and Europe Climate Pathway. Over $18 billion was invested in the five biggest polluters: TotalEnergies, Shell, ExxonMobil, Chevron and BP. These topped a 2023 Carbon Majors ranking for oil and gas production among shareholder-owned firms. Other investments by funds following EU sustainable finance disclosure regulations (SFDR) included those in US fracking company Devon Energy and Canadian tar sands company Suncor, the investigation by Voxeurop and the Guardian found. Investors claim that holding a stake in a company allows them to influence the firm's pursuit of climate goals. However, no major oil and gas producer has plans consistent with international climate targets and many companies have weakened their plans in the last year, according to a report from Carbon Tracker in April. The investment firms with the biggest stakes in fossil companies in their green funds were JP Morgan, BlackRock and DWS in Germany.

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Samsung Back To Working On Upstreaming Tesla FSD SoC Support In The Linux Kernel  Phoronix

Microsoft unveiled "Edit on Windows," a new command-line text editor, at its Build conference today. The open-source tool allows developers to edit files directly in the command line without switching to another app, similar to vim but designed to be more user-friendly. Accessible by typing "edit" in a command prompt, the lightweight editor (less than 250KB) includes features like multiple file support via ctrl + P shortcuts, find and replace functionality, and regular expression support. "What motivated us to build Edit was the need for a default CLI text editor in 64-bit versions of Windows," said Christopher Nguyen, product manager of Windows Terminal, noting that 32-bit Windows versions already ship with MS-DOS Edit. Microsoft also wanted to avoid the notorious "how do I exit vim?" problem by creating a modeless editor, The Verge writes. The tool will be available to Windows Insiders in the coming months.

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Linux Mint 22 vs LMDE 6 Revisited: Which Should You Choose in 2025?  WebProNews

AI is eroding entry-level positions across multiple industries, threatening the traditional career ladder for young professionals, LinkedIn's chief economic opportunity officer warned Monday. College graduate unemployment has risen 30% since September 2022, compared to 18% for workers overall, according to LinkedIn data. The company's research shows Generation Z workers expressing greater pessimism about their futures than any other age group. "Breaking first is the bottom rung of the career ladder," wrote Aneesh Raman in a New York Times column, citing examples across technology, law, and retail where AI is replacing tasks traditionally assigned to junior workers. A LinkedIn survey of 3,000 executives found 63% believe AI will eventually handle mundane entry-level tasks, with professionals holding advanced degrees likely facing greater disruption than those without. Some firms are adapting by redesigning roles. KPMG now assigns recent graduates tax work previously reserved for more experienced employees, while Macfarlanes has early-career lawyers interpreting complex contracts once handled by senior colleagues. Though economic uncertainty also impacts hiring, Raman warned that delayed career entry can cost young workers approximately $22,000 in earnings over a decade.

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Windows Subsystem for Linux (WSL) is now open source  GamingOnLinux

Microsoft closes 9-year-old feature request, open-sources Windows Subsystem for Linux  Ars Technica

Windows Subsystem for Linux is now open source (mostly)  Liliputing

Microsoft has announced NLWeb, an open protocol designed to democratize AI-powered search capabilities for websites and apps. Developed by Microsoft technical fellow Ramanathan V. Guha, who previously created RSS and Schema.org, NLWeb allows site owners to implement ChatGPT-style natural language search with minimal code. The protocol enables websites to process complex queries like "spicy and crunchy appetizers for Diwali" or "jackets warm enough for Quebec," requiring only an AI model, some code, and the site's own data. During his demonstration to news outlet The Verge, Guha showed how NLWeb remembers user preferences, such as dietary restrictions, for future interactions. "It's a protocol, and the protocol is a way of asking a natural-language question, and the answer comes back in structured form," explained Guha, who argues the approach is significantly cheaper than traditional search methods that require extensive web crawling and indexing. Microsoft is partnering with publishers and companies including TripAdvisor, Eventbrite, and Shopify to implement NLWeb, though Guha acknowledges the challenge of achieving widespread adoption in a web that historically tends toward centralization.

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Windows Subsystem for Linux (WSL) is now open source, Microsoft said Monday. The tool, which allows developers to run Linux distributions directly in Windows, is available for download, modification, and contribution. "We want Windows to be a great dev box," said Pavan Davuluri, corporate VP at Microsoft. "Having great WSL performance and capabilities" allows developers "to live in the Windows-native experience and take advantage of all they need in Linux." First launched in 2016 with an emulated Linux kernel, WSL switched to using the actual Linux kernel in 2019 with WSL 2, improving compatibility. The system has since gained support for GPUs, graphical applications, and systemd. Microsoft significantly refactored core Windows components to make WSL a standalone system before open sourcing it.

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Microsoft open-sources WSL to give developers control over Linux on Windows  BetaNews

Microsoft Makes "Edit" Command Line Editor Open-Source, WSL Going Open-Source Too  Phoronix

How To Add, Remove and Update Software in Debian and Ubuntu Using Apt  Tom's Hardware