Amazon plans to release its first TV streaming device powered by Vega OS later this year while courting major publishers to bring their apps to the platform, according to Lowpass, which cites sources familiar with the company’s plans and multiple leaks.

Vega, a Linux-based operating system, may eventually replace Amazon’s Android-based Fire OS across its device ecosystem. The company has already implemented Vega in three products: the Echo Show 5 and Echo Hub smart displays, as well as the Echo Spot smart clock/speaker. The tech giant has moved more cautiously in transitioning its TV hardware to Vega, having previously delayed a Vega-powered streaming stick originally slated for release in late 2024.

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Last week, the first operational satellites for Amazon’s Project Kuiper broadband network were minutes from launch at Cape Canaveral Space Force Station, Florida.

These spacecraft, buttoned up on top of a United Launch Alliance Atlas V rocket, are the first of more than 3,200 mass-produced satellites Amazon plans to launch over the rest of the decade to deploy the first direct US competitor to SpaceX’s Starlink internet network.

However, as is often the case on Florida’s Space Coast, bad weather prevented the satellites from launching April 9. No big deal, right? Anyone who pays close attention to the launch industry knows delays are part of the business. A broken component on the rocket, a summertime thunderstorm, or high winds can thwart a launch attempt. Launch companies know this, and the answer is usually to try again the next day.

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databasecowgirl writes: [Liz Truss will launch an “uncensorable” social media platform this summer.] The shortest-serving prime minister, who was quickly shown the door after crashing the UK economy, claims the platform is needed to take on the Deep State. Truss has worked diligently to earn comparisons to Trump with appearances at American political rallies sporting a red MAGA cap. The effort has paid off with Trump’s recent tariff announcement and resulting market meltdown, resulting in the two brands combined in the neologism Liz Trump to mark the unprecedented economic policy disasters of the two politicians.

Truss’ continuing in Trump’s footsteps is creating her own uncensored social media platform for the UK to talk about important matters, which apparently is unable to be achieved without censorship on Musk’s X or Trump’s Truth Social. While a name has yet to be announced, Lettuce Talk has been suggested as appropriate for a platform run by a prime minister whose term was famously outlasted by a head of lettuce.

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HP has agreed to a $4 million settlement over allegations of deceptive pricing practices on its website, including falsely inflating original prices for computers and accessories to create the illusion of steep discounts. Ars Technica reports: Earlier this month, Judge P. Casey Pitts for the US District Court of the San Jose Division of the Northern District of California granted preliminary approval [PDF] of a settlement agreement regarding a class-action complaint first filed against HP on October 13, 2021. The complaint accused HP’s website of showing “misleading” original pricing for various computers, mice, and keyboards that was higher than how the products were recently and typically priced.

Per the settlement agreement [PDF], HP will contribute $4 million to a “non-reversionary common fund, which shall be used to pay the (i) Settlement Class members’ claims; (ii) court-approved Notice and Settlement Administration Costs; (iii) court-approved Settlement Class Representatives’ Service Award; and (iv) court-approved Settlement Class Counsel Attorneys’ Fees and Costs Award. All residual funds will be distributed pro rata to Settlement Class members who submitted valid claims and cashed checks.”

The two plaintiffs who filed the initial complaint may also file a motion to receive a settlement class representative service award for up to $5,000 each, which would come out of the $4 million pool. People who purchased a discounted HP desktop, laptop, mouse, or keyboard that was on sale for “more than 75 percent of the time the products were offered for sale” from June 5, 2021, to October 28, 2024, are eligible for compensation. The full list of eligible products is available here [PDF] and includes HP Spectre, Chromebook Envy, and Pavilion laptops, HP Envy and Omen desktops, and some mechanical keyboards and wireless mice. Depending on the product, class members can receive $10 to $100 per eligible product purchased.

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The wholesale American cannibalism of one of its own crucial appendages—the world-famous university system—has begun in earnest. The campaign is predictably Trumpian, built on a flagrantly pretextual basis and executed with the sort of vicious but chaotic idiocy that has always been a hallmark of the authoritarian mind.

At a moment when the administration is systematically waging war on diversity initiatives of every kind, it has simultaneously discovered that it is really concerned about both “viewpoint diversity” and “antisemitism” on college campuses—and it is using the two issues as a club to beat on the US university system until it either dies or conforms to MAGA ideology.

Reaching this conclusion does not require reading any tea leaves or consulting any oracles; one need only listen to people like Vice President JD Vance, who in 2021 gave a speech called “The Universities are the Enemy” to signal that, like every authoritarian revolutionary, he intended to go after the educated.

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Microsoft has introduced BitNet b1.58 2B4T, the largest-scale 1-bit AI model to date with 2 billion parameters and the ability to run efficiently on CPUs. It’s openly available under an MIT license. TechCrunch reports: The Microsoft researchers say that BitNet b1.58 2B4T is the first bitnet with 2 billion parameters, “parameters” being largely synonymous with “weights.” Trained on a dataset of 4 trillion tokens — equivalent to about 33 million books, by one estimate — BitNet b1.58 2B4T outperforms traditional models of similar sizes, the researchers claim.

BitNet b1.58 2B4T doesn’t sweep the floor with rival 2 billion-parameter models, to be clear, but it seemingly holds its own. According to the researchers’ testing, the model surpasses Meta’s Llama 3.2 1B, Google’s Gemma 3 1B, and Alibaba’s Qwen 2.5 1.5B on benchmarks including GSM8K (a collection of grade-school-level math problems) and PIQA (which tests physical commonsense reasoning skills). Perhaps more impressively, BitNet b1.58 2B4T is speedier than other models of its size — in some cases, twice the speed — while using a fraction of the memory.

There is a catch, however. Achieving that performance requires using Microsoft’s custom framework, bitnet.cpp, which only works with certain hardware at the moment. Absent from the list of supported chips are GPUs, which dominate the AI infrastructure landscape.

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The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau has been reduced to a skeleton crew. The department, which was created to oversee banks and financial institutions, has cut about 1,500 jobs, leaving about 200 employees and reducing the agency by about 90 percent.

In addition to cutting most of the staff, Chief Legal Officer Mark Paoletta sent a memo detailing the changed priorities for the CFPB. The bureau has been ordered to deprioritize subjects including consumer data, digital payments, medical debt and student loans. Mortgages will now be the leading topic for remaining employees.

SInce it was created in 2010, this department has pursued actions against financial and tech institutions accused of deceptive or abusive practices, with cases involving firms such as PayPal and Block, which created Cash App. It was also slated to provide oversight of the providers of digital wallets and payment apps.

However, since the start of 2025, the CFPB has abandoned multiple cases it had launched under President Joe Biden’s administration. The Office of Management and Budget’s Acting Director Russell Vought had signaled that the bureau’s days may be numbered when he ordered all of its “supervision and examination activity” to stop in February.

This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/big-tech/the-consumer-financial-protection-bureau-has-cut-90-percent-of-its-employees-225239056.html?src=rss

On Monday, a developer using the popular AI-powered code editor Cursor noticed something strange: Switching between machines instantly logged them out, breaking a common workflow for programmers who use multiple devices. When the user contacted Cursor support, an agent named “Sam” told them it was expected behavior under a new policy. But no such policy existed, and Sam was a bot. The AI model made the policy up, sparking a wave of complaints and cancellation threats documented on Hacker News and Reddit.

This marks the latest instance of AI confabulations (also called “hallucinations”) causing potential business damage. Confabulations are a type of “creative gap-filling” response where AI models invent plausible-sounding but false information. Instead of admitting uncertainty, AI models often prioritize creating plausible, confident responses, even when that means manufacturing information from scratch.

For companies deploying these systems in customer-facing roles without human oversight, the consequences can be immediate and costly: frustrated customers, damaged trust, and, in Cursor’s case, potentially canceled subscriptions.

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An anonymous reader quotes a report from Electrek: In its most aggressive attack against offshore wind yet, the Trump administration halted the $5 billion Empire Wind 1, already under construction off New York’s coast. Norwegian developer Equinor announced yesterday that it received notice from the Bureau of Ocean Energy Management (BOEM) ordering Empire Wind 1 to halt all activities on the outer continental shelf until BOEM has completed its review. Interior Secretary Doug Burgum posted this tweet yesterday: “.@Interior, in consultation with @HowardLutnick, is directing @BOEM to immediately halt all construction activities on the Empire Wind Project until further review of information that suggests the Biden administration rushed through its approval without sufficient analysis.”

Burgum gave no indication of what insufficiencies there were in the approval process for the fully permitted offshore wind project, despite Trump’s recent declaration of a national energy emergency that speeds up permitting processes. The commercial lease for the 810-megawatt (MW) Empire Wind 1’s federal offshore wind area was signed in March 2017 during the first Trump administration. It was approved by the Biden administration in November 2023 and began construction in 2024. The project is being developed under contract with the New York State Energy Research and Development Authority (NYSERDA). Empire Wind 1, which was due to come online in 2027, has the potential to power 500,000 New York homes. Equinor says it’s considering appealing the order.
New York Governor Kathy Hochul issued a statement: “Every single day, I’m working to make energy more affordable, reliable and abundant in New York and the federal government should be supporting those efforts rather than undermining them. Empire Wind 1 is already employing hundreds of New Yorkers, including 1,000 good-paying union jobs as part of a growing sector that has already spurred significant economic development and private investment throughout the state and beyond. As Governor, I will not allow this federal overreach to stand. I will fight this every step of the way to protect union jobs, affordable energy and New York’s economic future.”

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Kevin Hall, a prominent nutrition expert who led influential studies on ultra-processed foods, has resigned from his long-held position at the National Institutes of Health, alleging censorship of his research by top aides of health secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr.

In a post on LinkedIn, Hall claimed that he “experienced censorship in the reporting of our research because of agency concerns that it did not appear to fully support preconceived narratives of my agency’s leadership about ultra-processed food addiction.”

In comments to CBS News, Hall said the censorship was over a study he and his colleagues recently published in the journal Cell Metabolism, which showed that ultra-processed foods did not produce the same large dopamine responses in the brain that are seen with use of addictive drugs. The finding suggests that the mechanism leading people to overconsume ultra-processed foods may be more complex than the studied mechanisms in addiction. This appears to slightly conflict with the beliefs of Kennedy Jr., who has claimed that food companies use additives to make ultra-processed foods addictive.

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Windows doesn’t come with a weather application the way macOS and mobile operating systems do. Sure, the widget area shows the weather, but it also summons news headlines from the very bowels of internet hell and requires that you open a web browser page full of ads to get more details.

If you want a clean, ad-free, and beautiful way to check the weather on Windows I recommend Lively Weather. This is a free and open source native-to-Windows application (by developer Dani John) with complete weather forecasts. It also features beautifully rendered background animations that reflect the current weather conditions.

You can search for any city on Earth to see the weather: Tthe main summary shows up at the top of the screen, and below that sits a seven-day overview alongside a timeline of conditions. There are also boxes for the UV index, sunrise and sunset, humidity, wind, air quality, pressure, visibility, cloud coverage, and total precipitation. Click any day in the seven-day overview and all of these boxes will populate with forecasted conditions. You can also click any box to see more details.

Credit: Justin Pot

This is, for me, more than enough information about the weather to make choices about my wardrobe and transportation. The only obvious thing missing is radar, which is admittedly a feature some people rely on.

You can choose between imperial and metric in the settings. You can also choose a weather provider: Open-Meteo, OpenWeatherMap, and Qweather (China) are all supported.

Finally, you can choose the quality of the visuals. It’s recommended that you stick with lower if you don’t have a dedicated GPU, which is an absurd sentence to type about a weather application. When you see the backgrounds, though, it makes sense. These are dynamic animations for conditions ranging from sun to rain to snow to lightning, all rendered behind the transparent boxes that offer the actual weather information.

It’s pretty, is what I’m saying, and there are even ambient sounds reflecting the weather condition (though I might suggest opening your window instead).

The Meta monopoly trial has raised a question that Meta hopes the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) can’t effectively answer: How important is it to use social media to connect with friends and family today?

Connecting with friends was, of course, Facebook’s primary use case as it became the rare social network to hit 1 billion users—not by being acquired by a Big Tech company but based on the strength of its clean interface and the network effects that kept users locked in simply because all the important people in their life chose to be there.

According to the FTC, Meta took advantage of Facebook’s early popularity, and it has since bought out rivals and otherwise cornered the market on personal social networks. Only Snapchat and MeWe (a privacy-focused Facebook alternative) are competitors to Meta platforms, the FTC argues, and social networks like TikTok or YouTube aren’t interchangeable, because those aren’t destinations focused on connecting friends and family.

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A live-action Pacific Rim TV series is in-development at Amazon, according to Variety. News of the project was first shared in 2024, when Variety reported that Arrival screenwriter Eric Heisserer was attached to develop and write the show.

The new series will apparently be a prequel to Guillermo Del Toro’s original Pacific Rim, a movie about Kaiju-fighting giant mechs and the humans that pilot them. Legendary, which produced Pacific Rim, is also backing the series alongside Amazon MGM. The studio appears to be using the same strategy with Pacific Rim that worked with its Godzilla-and-King-Kong-starring “MonsterVerse” franchise. Monarch: Legacy of Monsters streamed on Apple TV+ in 2023, and acted as both a prequel and sequel to the “MonsterVerse” films.

Heisserer has plenty of experience adapting existing material. His Arrival script converted an experimental second-person short story into a (relatively) thoughtful blockbuster, and his work on Netflix’s Shadow and Bone found a clever way to interweave the first book in Leigh Bardugo’s series with characters from a later duology. Pacific Rim seems a lot more straightforward in comparison.

There’s yet to be an official announcement from Amazon, or any dates for when we can expect the series to be available, but there has been quite a bit of new Pacific Rim material since the first film came out in 2013. The live-action sequel Pacific Rim Uprising was released in 2018 and Netflix put out its anime sequel, Pacific Rim: The Black, in 2021.

This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/entertainment/tv-movies/the-pacific-rim-prequel-series-has-reportedly-found-a-home-at-amazon-213245776.html?src=rss

If you receive an email from Google that appears to be a legitimate security alert, do not proceed. Scammers are taking advantage of vulnerabilities in Google’s authentication protocols to send phishing messages that appear convincing enough to steal unsuspecting users’ account credentials. Here’s how to protect yourself.

How this new Google phishing scam works

As Android Authority reports, a developer named Nick Johnson was recently targeted by a phishing email with the subject line “Security alert.” The message was sent from no-reply[at]accounts.google.com and signed by accounts.google.com, making it seem like a legitimate email directly from Google. However, the message led to a fake Google support page hosted at sites.google.com, which directed visitors to “upload additional documents” or “view case.” This ultimately led to a fake sign-in page that asked for account credentials, where scammers would then collect the target’s Google login credentials.

There are a couple vulnerabilities that make this scam possible, according to Johnson. Google allows users to host sites on a google.com subdomain via Google Sites, which makes the website look legitimate. The attackers registered a domain and linked it with a Google Account, then created a Google OAuth app with the phishing email as the app name. Once OAuth had access to the Google Account, it was signed by Google and forwarded to victims. Note that while the email was signed by accounts.google.com, it was mailed by an email originating from privateemail.com.

This isn’t the first phishing scheme to come from a seemingly legitimate email address, making it trickier for users to spot as a fake. Earlier this year, scammers exploited PayPal settings to send fraudulent purchase notifications from service[at]paypal.com.

How to identify and avoid phishing email scams

Phishing emails can be more difficult to catch when they originate from a real or recognizable email address—at least on the surface—as fake addresses with misspellings are the first giveaway of a scam. Generally speaking, you should think twice before engaging with any message that has a tone of urgency or evokes an emotional response even if it looks real.

If you get an email like this from a company you know and whose services you use and the message appears legit, don’t click any links or download any attachments. Go directly to the company’s website by typing in the URL, and check official social media accounts or customer service channels for any alerts related to the message you received—especially if the email has to do with account security or recovery or your personal information.

HP Inc. has agreed to pay a $4 million settlement to customers after being accused of “false advertising” of computers and peripherals on its website.

Earlier this month, Judge P. Casey Pitts for the US District Court of the San Jose Division of the Northern District of California granted preliminary approval [PDF] of a settlement agreement regarding a class-action complaint first filed against HP on October 13, 2021. The complaint accused HP’s website of showing “misleading” original pricing for various computers, mice, and keyboards that was higher than how the products were recently and typically priced.

Per the settlement agreement [PDF], HP will contribute $4 million to a “non-reversionary common fund, which shall be used to pay the (i) Settlement Class members’ claims; (ii) court-approved Notice and Settlement Administration Costs; (iii) court-approved Settlement Class Representatives’ Service Award; and (iv) court-approved Settlement Class Counsel Attorneys’ Fees and Costs Award. All residual funds will be distributed pro rata to Settlement Class members who submitted valid claims and cashed checks.”

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