An anonymous reader quotes a report from Bloomberg: Oracle is trying — and sometimes struggling — to attract workers to Nashville, where it is developing a massive riverfront headquarters.
The company is hiring for more roles in Nashville than any other US city, with a special focus on jobs in its crucial cloud infrastructure unit. Oracle cloud workers based elsewhere say they’ve been offered tens of thousands of dollars in incentives to move. Chairman Larry Ellison made a splash in April 2024 when he said Oracle would make Nashville its “world headquarters” just a few years after moving the software company from Redwood City, California, to Austin. His proclamation followed a 2021 tax incentive deal in which Oracle pledged to create 8,500 jobs in Nashville by 2031, paying an average salary above six figures.

“We’re creating a world leading cloud and AI hub in Nashville that is attracting top talent locally, regionally, and from across the country,” Oracle Senior Vice President Scott Twaddle said in a statement. “We’ve seen great success recruiting engineering and technical positions locally and will continue to hire aggressively for the next several years.” Still, Oracle has a long way to go in its hiring goals. Today, it has about 800 workers assigned to offices in Nashville, according to documents seen by Bloomberg. That trails far behind the number of company employees in locations including Redwood City, Austin and Kansas City, the center of health records company Cerner, which Oracle acquired in 2022.

A lack of state income tax and the city’s thriving music scene are touted by Oracle’s promotional materials to attract talent to Nashville. Some new hires note they moved because in a tough tech job market, the Tennessee city was the only place with an Oracle position offered. To fit all of these workers, Oracle is planning a massive campus along the Cumberland River. It will feature over 2 million square feet of office space, a new cross-river bridge and a branch of the ultra high-end sushi chain Nobu, which has locations on many properties connected to Ellison, including the Hawaiian island of Lanai. […] Oracle has been running recruitment events for the new hub. But a common concern for employees weighing a move is that Nashville is classified by Oracle in a lower geographic pay band than California or Seattle, meaning that future salary growth is likely limited, according to multiple workers who asked not to be identified discussing private information.

A weaker local tech job market also gives pause to some considering relocation. In addition, many of the roles in Nashville require five days a week in the office, which is a shift for Oracle, where a significant number of roles are remote. For a global company like Oracle, the exact meaning of “headquarters” can be a bit unclear. Austin remains the address included on company SEC filings and its executives are scattered across the country. The city where Oracle is hiring for the most positions globally is Bengaluru, the southern Indian tech hub. Still, Oracle is positioning Nashville to be at the center of its future. “We’re developing our Nashville location to stand alongside Austin, Redwood Shores, and Seattle as a major innovation hub,” Oracle writes on its recruitment site. “This is your chance to be part of it.”

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By now, you’ve no doubt heard about (or experienced yourself) yesterday’s massive Verizon outage. For nearly all of Wednesday, roughly two million Verizon customers could not connect to the network, and had to rely on wifi to use their smartphones, which were otherwise stuck in SOS mode. Sure, they could call 911, but they couldn’t do much else.

It was an ordeal, one Verizon is literally paying for: The company committed to issuing $20 account credits to affected customers. It might not be as much as some of us think the company should offer, but it’s something. And if the $20 isn’t a comfort, the fact that the outage is over should be—even if you needed to restart your phone this morning to implement the fix.

The weirdest part of the whole affair was that Verizon didn’t initially offer any details about what caused the outage. The company posted throughout yesterday, issuing updates and responding to angry customers, but never shedding light on why their network was down for so many customers. Finally, a day and a half after the outages kicked off, the company has an answer, albeit a partial one.

A software issue caused the Verizon outage, not a cyber attack

According to a statement Verizon sent to our sister site Mashable, the cause of the outage was simply a problem with the company’s software. “This was a software issue and we are conducting a full review of what happened,” the company said. “As of now, there is no indication that this was a cyber security issue.” That last bit is important, as some customers took the outage as evidence of some type of cyber attack. While those worries seem to be unfounded, considering the current state of the world, I understand those fears.

Still, while it’s nice to have some sort of explanation, I could do with more details. This wasn’t a minor, temporary outage affecting only a limited number of users; customers across the country couldn’t connect to Verizon for most of the day. Software issues happen, but they usually don’t take down one of the three major carriers in the United States.

After weeks of pressure from both advocacy groups and governments, Elon Musk’s X says it’s finally going to do something about its deepfake porn problem. Unfortunately, after testing following the announcement, some are still holding their breath.

When did the X deepfake porn controversy begin?

The controversy started earlier this January, after the social media site added a feature allowing X users to tag Grok in their posts and prompt the AI to instantly edit any image or video posted to the site, all without the original poster’s permission. The feature seemingly came with few guardrails, and according to reporting done by AI authentication company Copyleaks, as well as statements victims have given to sites like Metro, posters on X quickly started using it to generate explicit or intimate images of real people, particularly women. In some cases, child sexual abuse material was also reportedly generated.

It’s pretty upsetting stuff, and I wouldn’t advise you to go looking for it. While the initial trend seemed to focus on AI photos of celebrities in bikinis, posters quickly moved on to manipulated images of regular people where they appeared to be pregnant, skirtless, or in some other kind of sexualized situation. While Grok was technically able to generate such imagery from uploaded photos before, the ease of access to it appeared to open the floodgates. In response to the brewing controversy, Musk had Grok generate a photo of himself in a bikini. However, the jokes ceased after regulators got involved.

Governments are starting to investigate

Earlier this week, the UK launched investigations into Grok’s alleged deepfake porn, to determine whether it violated laws against nonconsensual intimate images as well as child sexual abuse material. Malaysia and Indonesia went a step further, actually blocking Grok access in the country. Yesterday, California began its own investigations, with Attorney General Rob Banta saying “I urge XAI to take immediate action to ensure this goes no further.”

X is implementing blocks

In response to the pressure, X cut off the ability to tag Grok for edits on its social media site for everyone except subscribers. However, the Grok app, website, and in-X chatbot (accessible via the sidebar on the desktop version of the site) still remained open to everyone, allowing the flood of deepfaked AI photos to continue (said photos would also still pose the same problems even if generated solely by subscribers, although X later said the goal was to stem the tide and make it easier to hold users generating illegal imagery accountable). The Telegraph reported on Tuesday that X also started blocking tagged Grok requests to generate images of women in sexualized scenarios, but that such images of men were still allowed. Additionally, testing by both U.S. and U.K. writers from The Verge showed that the banned requests could still be made to Grok’s website or app directly.

Musk has taken a more serious tone in more recent comments on the issue, denying the presence of child sexual abuse material on the site, although various replies to his posts expressed disbelief and claimed to show proof to the contrary. Scroll at your own discretion.

To finally put the controversy to bed, X said on Wednesday that it would now be blocking all requests to the Grok account for images of any real people in revealing clothing, regardless of gender and whether coming from paid subscribers or not. But for anyone hoping that would mark the end of this, there appears to be some fine print.

Specifically, while the statement said that it would be adding these guardrails to all users tagging the Grok account on X, the standalone Grok website and app are not mentioned. The statement does say it will also block creation of such images on “Grok in X,” referring to the in-X version of the chatbot, but even then, it’s not a total block. Instead, the imagery will be “geoblocked,” meaning it will only be applied “in those jurisdictions where it’s illegal.”

X’s post also says that similar requests made by tagging the Grok account will also be geoblocked, although because the section before this says that the Grok account won’t accept such requests from any user, that appears to be a moot point.

It’s important to note that, while the majority of the criticism lobbed at X during this debacle does not accuse the site of generating fully nude imagery, locations like the UK ban nonconsenual explicit imagery regardless of whether it is fully nude or not.

Some users can still generate sexualized deepfakes

It’s the biggest crackdown X has made on these images yet, but for now, it still appears to have holes. According to further testing by The Verge, the site’s reporters were still able to generate revealing deepfakes even after Wednesday’s announcement, by using the Grok app not mentioned in the update. When I attempted this using a photo of myself, both the Grok app and standalone Grok website gave me full-body deepfaked images of myself in revealing clothing not present in the original shot. I was also able to generate these images using the in-X Grok chatbot, and some images changed my posing to be more provocative (which I did not prompt), too.

As such, the battle is likely to continue. It’s unclear whether ignoring the Grok app or website is an oversight, or if X is only seeking to block its most visible holes. One would hope the former, given that X said that it has “zero tolerance for any forms of child sexual exploitation, non-consensual nudity, and unwanted sexual content.”

It is worth noting that I am located in New York State, which might not be part of the geoblock, although we do have a law against explicit nonconsensual deepfakes.

I’ve reached out to X for clarification on the issue and will update this post when I hear back. However, when NBC News reached out with similar questions, the outlet was only told “Legacy Media Lies.” I can’t make any promises as to how the site will reply to my own requests.

In the meantime, while governments continue their investigations, others are calling for more immediate action from app stores. A letter sent from U.S. Senators Ron Wyden, Ben Ray Lujan, and Ed Markey to Apple CEO Tim Cook and Google CEO Sundar Pichai argues that Musk’s app now clearly violates both App Store and Google Play policies, and calls on the tech leaders to “remove these apps from the [Apple and Google] app stores until X’s policy violations are addressed.”

The New York Times has published new details about a purported cyberattack that unnamed US officials claim plunged parts of Venezuela into darkness in the lead-up to the capture of the country’s president, Nicolás Maduro.

Key among the new details is that the cyber operation was able to turn off electricity for most residents in the capital city of Caracas for only a few minutes, though in some neighborhoods close to the military base where Maduro was seized, the outage lasted for three days. The cyber-op also targeted Venezuelan military radar defenses. The paper said the US Cyber Command was involved.

Got more details?

“Turning off the power in Caracas and interfering with radar allowed US military helicopters to move into the country undetected on their mission to capture Nicolás Maduro, the Venezuelan president who has now been brought to the United States to face drug charges,” the NYT reported.

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The National Transportation Safety Board said in a report this week that a UPS cargo plane that crashed in Louisville, Ky., last year, killing 15, had a structural flaw that the manufacturer Boeing had previously concluded would not affect flight safety. The New York Times: The N.T.S.B. has said that cracks in the assembly holding the left-side engine in place may have contributed to the November crash, though it has not officially cited a cause. The part had fractured in similar fashion on at least four other occasions, on three different airplanes, according to the report, which cited a service letter that Boeing issued in 2011 regarding the apparent flaw.

In the service letter, which manufacturers issue to flag safety concerns or other problems to aircraft owners, Boeing said that fractures “would not result in a safety of flight condition,” N.T.S.B. investigators wrote. The plane that crashed was an MD-11F jet, made by McDonnell Douglas, a company that Boeing acquired in the 1990s. It was taking off from Louisville and bound for Hawaii on Nov. 4 when a fire ignited on its left engine shortly after takeoff.

The plane crashed into several buildings, including a petroleum recycling facility, on the outskirts of the Louisville Muhammad Ali International Airport. The three crew members on board and 11 people on the ground were killed in the crash; a 12th person on the ground died of injuries sustained during the episode.

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Today is a good day to watch television. That’s because the first two episodes of Star Trek: Starfleet Academy hit the Paramount+ streaming service, becoming the newest addition to the long-running Star Trek franchise. It’s set in the late 32nd century, 120 years after the burn that ended all warp travel, and with it, most of Starfleet in the process. Now that warp travel is once again possible—you’ll have to watch Discovery’s final three seasons for more on that—the Federation is putting itself back together, and that includes reopening Starfleet Academy.

That means this show is about young people in space, like Caleb Mir (Sandro Rosta), who was separated from his mother by Starfleet as a child, 15 years earlier. Mir and his mother, played by Tatiana Maslany, were traveling with a pirate—Nus Braka, played by a scenery-chewing Paul Giamatti—who killed a Federation officer while stealing food for them. The first episode opens on Braka and the Mirs being apprehended by Starfleet. Despite her misgivings, Captain Nahla Ake (Holly Hunter) carries out her order to separate mother and child. She’s to go to a rehabilitation colony, he’s to become a ward of the Federation and go to school on Bajor.

At least that’s the plan until he escapes a few minutes later. Then we jump forward 15 years. Ake is teaching on Bajor, having retired from the Federation, ashamed of what she’d done. Admiral Vance (Oded Fehr) shows up and asks her to become commandant at the newly reopened academy in San Francisco; for the past few decades, new recruits have been trained instead by the War College. But Starfleet needs explorers now, and having a rival school means they can show up at some point to challenge some of the show’s protagonists to a Parrises Squares tournament.

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Today, Amazon shared more details about the final chapter of its game New World: Aeternum. The company announced in October that it would wind down support for the MMO, with the Nighthaven season to be its last. New World will be delisted and no longer available for purchase starting today, but the game’s servers will not be taken offline until January 31, 2027. People who own the game will be able to continue playing until that date. Nighthaven season will continue through to that end date.

Players who had previously purchased New World: Aeternum will be able to re-download and continue playing up to the shutdown date. In-game currency such as Marks of Fortune will no longer be available to buy starting July 20, 2026, and refunds will not be offered for Marks of Fortune purchases.

This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/gaming/amazons-new-world-aeternum-mmo-will-go-offline-january-31-2027-205449407.html?src=rss

An anonymous reader shares a report: Raspberry Pi is launching a new add-on board capable of running generative AI models locally on the Raspberry Pi 5. Announced on Thursday, the $130 AI HAT+ 2 is an upgraded — and more expensive — version of the module launched last year, now offering 8GB of RAM and a Hailo 10H chip with 40 TOPS of AI performance.

Once connected, the Raspberry Pi 5 will use the AI HAT+ 2 to handle AI-related workloads while leaving the main board’s Arm CPU available to complete other tasks. Unlike the previous AI HAT+, which is focused on image-based AI processing, the AI HAT+ 2 comes with onboard RAM and can run small gen AI models like Llama 3.2 and DeepSeek-R1-Distill, along with a series of Qwen models. You can train and fine-tune AI models using the device as well.

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As part of a new agreement, films from Sony Pictures Entertainment will stream on Netflix first, the companies announced via a joint statement. The new deal expands on the exclusive rights Netflix had to Sony films in the US, and means the service will be the first place people will be able to stream upcoming projects like the live-action adaptation of The Legend of Zelda, and a quartet of biopics about The Beatles.

Sony’s films will stream worldwide on Netflix in what’s called “Pay-1,” the first window of availability after a movie’s theatrical and VOD releases. As part of the deal, Netflix is also licensing an undisclosed number of films and television shows from the Sony Pictures back catalog to help fill out its library. Netflix says the new arrangement “will roll out gradually” as licensing rights become available throughout the year, with full availability happening sometime in 2029. Neither company shared how long this new setup will last, but did describe the deal as a “multi-year agreement.”

Netflix and Sony’s partnership has been fruitful so far. Films like Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse, Uncharted and Anyone But You have had popular second lives on the streaming service. In the case of KPop Demon Hunters, Netflix was also able to spin a surprise Sony Animation streaming hit into a profitable theatrical run. Netflix will pay Sony north of $7 billion for this new deal, Variety reports — clearly that’s worth it to secure the companies’ relationship for another few years.

Netflix has a similar deal with Universal, which has brought other Nintendo adaptations to the streaming service like The Super Mario Bros Movie. Beyond licensing, the company has an even bigger purchase in mind, though: buying Warner Bros. for $82.7 billion. In an effort to prevent the deal from going through, Paramount is now suing Warner Bros. Discovery for ignoring its own competing bid for the company.

This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/entertainment/streaming/netflixs-expanded-sony-deal-includes-streaming-rights-to-the-legend-of-zelda-movie-203011384.html?src=rss

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If you’ve had the Samsung Galaxy S25 Ultra on your wishlist, you’re in luck: It’s now $1,079.99, a 24% discount off its regular price of $1,419.99. This marks the device’s lowest price ever, according to price-tracking tools. With high praise from Lifehacker own review and an outstanding rating on PCMag, the powerful, future-proof S25 Ultra is a top choice for Android users.

Samsung Galaxy S25 Ultra

$1,079.99
at Amazon

$1,419.99
Save $340.00

$1,079.99
at Amazon

$1,419.99
Save $340.00

The model on sale includes 512GB storage and a large 6.9-inch AMOLED display with thinner bezels, an updated anti-glare coating, and a 120Hz refresh rate. Softened corners make it more ergonomic to hold, and it’s more durable than its predecessors thanks to an IP68 rating, upgraded Gorilla Armor glass, and a stronger titanium frame.

Powering the phone is the speedy Snapdragon 8 Elite chip, which runs the device’s AI features, games, and any other multitasking needs smoothly. The built-in S Pen is still there, tucked into the phone’s body, but it no longer includes Bluetooth functions, so it can’t be used as a remote camera button or slideshow controller, unfortunately. The SnapDragon 8 Elite also improves the phone’s battery life; the 5,000 mAh-capacity battery lasts over 14 hours with the screen on constant brightness and location sharing on.

You’ll get a full suite of Galaxy AI tools, like converting spoken speech to text, drawing assist, and the digital assistant Google Gemini. While these generational changes are more about refinements than full-on transformation, a $300 discount makes this a great excuse to swap out your own phone with an upgraded Samsung Galaxy S25 Ultra.

Two Americans, a Japanese astronaut, and a Russian cosmonaut returned to Earth early Thursday after 167 days in orbit, cutting short their stay on the International Space Station by more than a month after one of the crew members encountered an unspecified medical issue last week.

The early homecoming culminated in an on-target splashdown in the Pacific Ocean off the coast of San Diego at 3:41 am EST (08:41 UTC) inside a SpaceX Crew Dragon spacecraft. The splashdown occurred at 12:41 am local time, minutes after the Dragon capsule streaked through the atmosphere along the California coastline, with sightings of Dragon’s fiery trail reported from San Francisco to Los Angeles.

Four parachutes opened to slow the capsule for the final descent. Zena Cardman, NASA’s commander of the Crew-11 mission, radioed SpaceX mission control moments after splashdown: “It feels good to be home, with deep gratitude to the teams who got us there and back.”

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Go, the ancient board game that China, Japan and South Korea all claim as part of their cultural heritage, is struggling to expand its global footprint because the three nations that dominate it cannot agree on something as basic as a common rulebook.

When Go was registered with the International Mind Sports Association alongside chess and bridge, organizers had to adopt the American Go Association’s rules because the East Asian trio failed to reach consensus. In 2025, China’s Ke Jie withdrew from a title match at a Seoul tournament after receiving repeated penalties for violating a rule that the South Korean Go association had introduced mid-tournament. China’s Go association responded by barring foreign players, most of them South Korean, from its domestic competitions.

It also doesn’t help that the game’s commercial appeal is fading. Japan’s Nihon Ki-in, the country’s main Go association, has started exploring a potential sale of its Tokyo headquarters. Young people across the region are gravitating toward chess, shogi, and video games instead.

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Users of Supernatural got an unpleasant surprise this week: Meta has pulled the plug on its flagship virtual reality fitness app. Citing “organizational changes,” Meta says it will no longer release new content or update features for Supernatural.

The app is not shutting down completely however. Subscribers can still access Supernatural’s existing library of Beat Saber-workouts, and Meta says it will maintain the platform and Facebook page, but no new workouts, features, or other content is planned.

Both users and critics have nearly universally praised Supernatural—CNet scored it 9 out of 10, it won both Fast Company’s Best App award in 2020 and a Webby in 2023, and boasted celebrity tie-ins with Jane Fonda and Bon Jovi. Meta doesn’t publish subscriber numbers for Supernatural, but there are over 110,000 members of Supernatural’s Facebook community. Not enough, apparently, to warrant keeping the app going.

In 2021, Meta spent an estimated $400 million to purchase Within, Supernatural’s developer, even battling the FTC to make the deal, and the app was a heavily promoted part of the company’s overall “Metaverse” strategy.

Meta shifts from VR to AI wearables

The shuttering of Supernatural is part of a larger shift at Meta. This week, the company laid off 1,500 people—about 10% of the staff—from Reality Labs, Meta’s hardware and virtual reality division. “We said last month that we were shifting some of our investment from Metaverse toward Wearables. This is part of that effort,” a Meta spokesman told The Wall Street Journal.

Along with cuts at Supernatural, Meta is closing three studios behind some of the most prominent, high-end VR games: Armature, who brought Resident Evil 4 to VR, Sanzaru, the studio behind Asgard’s Wrath, and Twisted Pixel, creators of Deadpool VR.