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Mozilla is officially ending its partnership with Onerep after more than a year of controversy over the company's founder secretly running people-search and data-broker sites. Monitor Plus will be discontinued by December 2025, existing subscribers will receive prorated refunds, and Mozilla says it will focus on privacy tools it fully controls. KrebsOnSecurity reports: In a statement published Tuesday, Mozilla said it will soon discontinue Monitor Plus, which offered data broker site scans and automated personal data removal from Onerep. "We will continue to offer our free Monitor data breach service, which is integrated into Firefox's credential manager, and we are focused on integrating more of our privacy and security experiences in Firefox, including our VPN, for free," the advisory reads. Mozilla said current Monitor Plus subscribers will retain full access through the wind-down period, which ends on Dec. 17, 2025. After that, those subscribers will automatically receive a prorated refund for the unused portion of their subscription. "We explored several options to keep Monitor Plus going, but our high standards for vendors, and the realities of the data broker ecosystem made it challenging to consistently deliver the level of value and reliability we expect for our users," Mozilla statement reads.

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An anonymous reader quotes a report from Bloomberg: The world's largest music companies have licensed their works to a music startup called Klay, which is building a streaming service that will allow users to remake songs using artificial intelligence tools. Klay is the first music AI service to reach a deal with all three major record labels, Universal Music Group NV, Sony Music and Warner Music Group Corp., according to people familiar with the deals. Klay plans to announce its agreements in the coming days, said the people, who asked not to be identified discussing confidential plans. Klay is building a product that will offer the features of a streaming service like Spotify, amplified by AI technology that will let users remake songs in different styles. Klay has licensed the rights to thousands of hit songs so that it can train its large language model. The company has positioned itself as a friend of the industry, offering assurances that the artists and labels will have some control over how their work is used. Klay is led by music producer Ary Attie and also employs former executives from Sony Music and Google's DeepMind, an AI laboratory.

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Use AirPods Pro Features on Linux with LibrePods  OMG! Ubuntu

Roblox is rolling out mandatory facial age-verification for chat features to prevent children from communicating with adult strangers. The platform will restrict chat to verified age groups, expand parental controls, and become the first major gaming platform to require facial age checks for messaging. The BBC reports: Mandatory age checks will be introduced for accounts using chat features, starting in December for Australia, New Zealand and the Netherlands, then the rest of the globe from January. [...] Rani Govender, policy manager for child safety online at the NSPCC, said action had been needed because young people had been exposed to "unacceptable risks" on Roblox, "leaving many vulnerable to harm and online abuse." The charity welcomed the platform's latest announcement but called on Roblox to "ensure they deliver change for children in practice and prevent adult perpetrators from targeting and manipulating young users." The platform averaged more than 80 million daily players in 2024, about 40% of them under the age of 13. [...] Matt Kaufman, chief safety officer for Roblox, told a press briefing the age estimation technology is "pretty accurate." He claimed the system can make close estimates of "within one to two years" bracket for users aged between five and 25. Currently it can be used voluntarily by anyone in the world.

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alternative_right shares a report from Phys.org: New research from the Human Capital Development Lab at the Johns Hopkins Carey Business School analyzes the state of the American workforce in 2024 and shows an overall decline in employee well-being compared to years prior. [...] The latest research confirms a decline in general employee well-being since 2020. In 2024, employees reported the lowest well-being scores on record, as opposed to 2020, when employees reported the highest well-being scores. "In some cases, the lower scores represent a reduction in employee flexibility for either flexible hours or remote work," the latest research states. "In other cases, these scores could be related to challenges associated with greater economic shifts related to inflation or productivity needs." In prior years, well-being scores for managers and employees were comparable to one another, and during the pandemic, managers and top leaders often reported lower scores due to the extra burden of that time period. However, one of the most noteworthy shifts the current data shows is a rise in well-being scores for managers and senior leaders, while well-being for employees and individual contributors decreased in 2024. Rick Smith, director of the Human Capital Development Lab and author of the study, says that the increase in well-being scores for managers could reflect the return to regular operating conditions since the pandemic, which may be indicative of the distance between leadership and workers. "What we're seeing is a growing gap between how leaders and their teams experience the workplace," said Smith. "Managers may feel a return to normalcy, but that doesn't mean their employees do. Leaders must be cautious not to assume their own well-being reflects the broader workforce at their organization. The data shows a potential disconnect, and that's a signal for action."

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I wanted a lightweight OS… and this Linux distro went way beyond that  MakeUseOf

Dell Now Shipping Laptop With Qualcomm NPU On Linux Ahead Of Windows 11  Phoronix

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: Google's meme-friendly Nano Banana image-generation model is getting an upgrade. The new Nano Banana Pro is rolling out with improved reasoning and instruction following, giving users the ability to create more accurate images with legible text and make precise edits to existing images. It's available to everyone in the Gemini app, but free users will find themselves up against the usage limits pretty quickly. Nano Banana Pro is part of the newly launched Gemini 3 Pro -- it's actually called Gemini 3 Pro Image in the same way the original is Gemini 2.5 Flash Image, but Google is sticking with the meme-y name. You can access it by selecting Gemini 3 Pro and then turning on the "Create images" option. Google says the new model can follow complex prompts to create more accurate images. The model is apparently so capable that it can generate an entire usable infographic in a single shot with no weird AI squiggles in place of words. Nano Banana Pro is also better at maintaining consistency in images. You can blend up to 14 images with this tool, and it can maintain the appearance of up to five people in outputs. Google also promises better editing. You can refine your AI images or provide Nano Banana Pro with a photo and make localized edits without as many AI glitches. It can even change core elements of the image like camera angles, color grading, and lighting without altering other elements. Google is pushing the professional use angle with its new model, which has much-improved resolution options. Your creations in Nano Banana Pro can be rendered at up to 4K.

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Give Me Liberty or Linux, Badge Hacking Interview – Bryce Owen – PSW #901  SC Media

Wine 10.19 Released: Game Changing Support for Windows Reparse Points on Linux  Linux Journal

An anonymous reader shares a report: Epishine, a company that makes solar cells optimized for indoor lighting, has announced its technology is being used in a new remote control for Google TV devices, as spotted by 9to5Google. The remote will rely on rechargeable batteries instead of disposable ones, and thanks to the use of solar cells on both sides it may only run out of power when it gets buried and forgotten in the dark abyss of your couch cushions.

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Canonical Gets Flutter Up And Running On RISC-V For Ubuntu  Phoronix

Can a Linux laptop really replace my MacBook? This one is surprisingly close  ZDNET

5 reasons Kaspersky releasing a Linux antivirus product worries me  XDA

Microsoft has released the source code for Zork I, II, and III under the MIT License through a collaboration with Team Xbox and Activision that involved submitting pull requests to historical source repositories maintained by digital archivist Jason Scott. Each repository now includes the original source code and accompanying documentation. The games arrived on early home computers in the 1980s as text-based adventures built on the Z-Machine, a virtual machine that allowed the same story files to run across different platforms. Infocom created the Z-Machine after discovering the original mainframe version was too large for home computers. The team split the game into three titles that all ran on the same underlying system. The code release covers only the source files and does not include commercial packaging or trademark rights. The games remain available commercially through The Zork Anthology on Good Old Games and can be compiled locally using ZILF, a modern Z-Machine interpreter.

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Hammerspace Breaks IO500 Barriers: First Standards-Based Linux + NFS System To Achieve True HPC-Class Performance  FinancialContent

Hammerspace Breaks IO500 Barriers: First Standards-Based Linux + NFS System To Achieve True HPC-Class Performance  FinancialContent

Learning science consistently shows us that true learning requires active engagement. This is fundamental to how Gemini helps you learn. Going beyond simple text and sta…

Linux Creator Linus Torvalds Is Sort of Okay With Vibe Coding, Actually  Gizmodo

Nvidia and Google announced today a new cloud gaming plan called GeForce Now Fast Pass that is exclusive to Chromebooks. Anyone who purchases a new Chromebook will receive a year of the service included with their device at no additional charge. Fast Pass allows Chromebook owners to stream more than 2,000 games from their existing Steam, Epic or Xbox libraries. The service removes ads and lets users skip the queue that typically adds two minutes or more of wait time on GeForce Now's free tier. Users get 10 hours of cloud gaming each month. Up to five unused hours can roll over to the following month. Nvidia offers other paid plans starting at $9.99 per month that support higher resolutions, faster frame rates, RTX ray-tracing, and access to a larger game library that includes thousands of additional titles. The companies did not announce pricing for Fast Pass after the first year ends.

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