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New York To Require Social Media Platforms To Display Mental Health Warnings
Social media platforms with infinite scrolling, auto-play and algorithmic feeds will be required to display warning labels about their potential harm to young users' mental health under a new law, New York Governor Kathy Hochul announced on Friday. From a report: "Keeping New Yorkers safe has been my top priority since taking office, and that includes protecting our kids from the potential harms of social media features that encourage excessive use," Hochul said in a statement.
This month Australia imposed a social media ban for children under 16. New York joins states like California and Minnesota that have similar social media laws. The New York law includes platforms that offer "addictive feeds," auto play or infinite scroll, according to the legislation. The law applies to conduct occurring partly or wholly in New York but not when the platform is accessed by users physically outside the state.
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
3 ways to have more fun with a Linux PC this weekend (December 26 - 28) - How-To Geek
Categories: Linux
PorteuX 2.5 Is Out with Flatpak Support, Cinnamon 6.6, COSMIC 1.0, and Linux 6.18 - 9to5Linux
Categories: Linux
PorteuX 2.5 Is Out with Flatpak Support, Cinnamon 6.6, COSMIC 1.0, and Linux 6.18 - 9to5Linux
Categories: Linux
PorteuX 2.5 Is Out with Flatpak Support, Cinnamon 6.6, COSMIC 1.0, and Linux 6.18 - 9to5Linux
Categories: Linux
PorteuX 2.5 Is Out with Flatpak Support, Cinnamon 6.6, COSMIC 1.0, and Linux 6.18 - 9to5Linux
Categories: Linux
I've been dual-booting Windows 11 and Linux in harmony throughout 2025 - Windows Central
Categories: Linux
FFmpeg Developer Files DMCA Against Rockchip After Two-Year Wait for License Fix
GitHub has disabled Rockchip's Media Process Platform repository after an FFmpeg developer filed a DMCA takedown notice, nearly two years after the open-source project first publicly accused the Chinese chipmaker of license violations. The notice, filed December 18, claims Rockchip copied thousands of lines of code from FFmpeg's libavcodec library -- including decoders for H.265, AV1, and VP9 formats -- stripped the original copyright notices, falsely claimed authorship and redistributed the code under Apache's permissive license rather than the original LGPL.
FFmpeg first called out Rockchip in February 2024 for "blatantly copy and pasting FFmpeg code" into its driver, but the chipmaker's last response suggested no intention to resolve the matter. The DMCA notice requests either removal of the infringing files or restoration of proper attribution and an LGPL-compatible license.
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Indian IT Was Supposed To Die From AI. Instead It's Billing for the Cleanup.
Two years after generative AI was supposed to render India's $250 billion IT services industry obsolete, the sector is finding that enterprises still need someone to handle the unglamorous plumbing work that large-scale AI deployment demands. Less than 15% of organizations are meaningfully deploying the new technology, according to investment bank UBS, and Indian IT firms are positioning themselves to capture the preparatory work -- data cleanup, cloud migration, system integration -- that channel checks suggest could take two to three years before enterprise-wide AI becomes feasible.
The financials have held up better than the doomsday predictions suggested. Infosys now calls AI-led volume opportunities a bigger tailwind than the deflation threat, a reversal from 2024, and orderbooks held steady in the third quarter even as pricing pressure filtered through renewals. Infosys expects its orderbook to grow more than 50% this quarter, anchored by an NHS deal worth $1.6 billion over 15 years.
The companies have been restructuring accordingly. TCS cut headcount by 2% and invested in a 1GW data-centre network while acquiring Salesforce advisory firm Coastal Cloud. HCLTech reduced margins by 100 basis points and became one of the first large systems integrators to partner with OpenAI; this week it announced acquisitions of Jaspersoft for $240 million and Belgian firm Wobby to expand agentic AI capabilities.
The bear case for the Indian IT sector assumed that AI would work out of the box. Two years in, it does not.
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
As AI Companies Borrow Billions, Debt Investors Grow Wary
While stock investors have pushed AI-related shares to repeated highs this year, debt markets are telling a more cautious story as newer AI infrastructure companies find themselves paying significantly elevated interest rates to borrow money. Applied Digital, a data center builder, sold $2.35 billion of debt in November at a 9.25% coupon -- roughly 3.75% above similarly rated companies, or about 70% more in interest costs. The pattern has repeated across several deals.
Wulf Compute, a subsidiary of Bitcoin-miner-turned-data-center-operator Terawulf, raised $3.2 billion in mid-October at 7.75%, well above the 5.5% average yield for similarly rated issuers. Cipher Compute sold $1.7 billion in early November at just over 7%. CoreWeave, which rents data centers and installs computing systems for companies like OpenAI and Meta, raised $1.75 billion in July at 9%. The company's bonds have since fallen to around 90 cents on the dollar, pushing the effective yield above 12% -- nearly double the average for companies at its single-B rating level.
"We just have to be much more pessimistic and not buy into the hype," said Will Smith, a portfolio manager at AllianceBernstein. Construction delays and uncertain demand for AI computing power remain key concerns for lenders who, unlike equity investors, have no upside beyond getting their principal back.
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
AMD RDNA3/RDNA4 Go Down Hard On Linux 6.19, But Here's How The Older AMD GPUs End Out 2025 - Phoronix
Categories: Linux
The Economic Divide Between Big and Small Companies Is Growing
While America's largest corporations are riding a wave of surging profits and AI-fueled stock market enthusiasm to record highs, small businesses across the country are cutting staff and scaling back operations as years of high inflation, cautious consumers and tariff confusion take their toll.
Private firms with fewer than 50 workers have steadily shed jobs over the past six months, according to payroll processor ADP, cutting 120,000 positions in November alone. Midsize and large firms continued adding jobs during the same period. The divergence mirrors what's happening among American consumers.
The Federal Reserve's latest beige book noted that overall consumer spending declined further even as higher-end retail spending remained resilient. Workers at small businesses tend to earn less than those at large companies, and stock market gains from large public company shares flow mostly to wealthier Americans. Small businesses -- those with up to 500 workers -- employ nearly half the American workforce and represent more than 40% of GDP, according to the U.S. Chamber of Commerce. But their profits are slightly lower than a year ago, per a Bank of America Institute analysis. Net income at S&P 500 companies rose 12.9% from a year earlier in the third quarter.
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
