An anonymous reader shared this report from PC World:

It won’t whip the llama’s ass, but Opera has added a Spotify visualizer to its latest iteration of its free Opera One browser. Known as Sonic, the visualizer will be part of Opera’s Dynamic Themes, which use the WebGPU standard to employ a dynamic theme that runs in the background of the browser. It’s essentially a shader, which uses your PC’s graphics engine to generate the moving background.

The browser also comes with a music player, which is set to Spotify by default. Users will have an opportunity to upgrade to Spotify Premium as part of the browser upgrade, Opera said. Opera’s Sonic theme… takes the Spotify input and transforms it into a dynamic background.

“As any old tech head knows, the original visualizer was found in Winamp, which would sync visualizations to the beat and flow of music being played,” the article points out.

And 27 years later, WinAmp arrived as an app in Apple’s App Store and Google Play and in April of 2024. (The latest version was apparently released this May — and you can also download it to your desktop…)

Somewhere along the way, Winamp also announced “Winamp for Creators,” which they’re describing as a dedicated platform for music artists with monetization and promotion tools, music management services, and other essential resources “to help creators take control of their careers” (including “a powerful social media publishing tool that lets users write a single post and push it to all their social media channels simultaneously.”)

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It’s been trying to measure the popularity of programming languages since 2000 using metrics like the number of engineers, courses, and third-party vendors. And “The November 2025 TIOBE Index brings another twist below Python’s familiar lead,” writes TechRepublic. “C solidifies its position as runner-up, C++ and Java lose some ground, and C# moves sharply upward, narrowing the gap with Java to less than a percentage point…”

TIO CEO Paul Jansen said this month that “Instead of Python, programming language C# is now the fastest rising language,”

How did C# achieve this? Java and C# are battling for a long time in the same areas. Right now it seems like C# has removed every reason why not to use C# instead of Java: it is cross platform nowadays, it is open source and it contains all new language features a developer wants. While the financial world is still dominated by Java, all other terrains show equal shares between Java and C#. Besides this, Microsoft is going strong and C# is still their most backed programming language.

Interesting note: C# has never been higher than Java in the TIOBE index. Currently the difference between the two rivals is less than 1%. There are exciting times ahead of us. Is C# going to surpass Java for the first time in the TIOBE index history?

“The fact that C# has been in the news for the successive betas and pre-release candidates prior to the release of C# 14 may have bumped up its percentage share in the last few months,” notes a post on the site i-Programmer. But they also point out that by TIOBE’s reckoning, Java — having been overtaken by Python in 2021 — “has been in decline ever since.”

TechRepublic summarizes the rest of the Top Ten:

JavaScript stays in sixth place at 3.42%, and Visual Basic edges up to seventh with 3.31%. Delphi/Object Pascal nudges upward to eighth at 2.06%, while Perl returns to the top 10 in ninth at 1.84% after a sharp year-over-year climb. SQL rounds out the list at tenth with 1.80%, maintaining a foothold that shows the enduring centrality of relational databases. Go, which held eighth place in October, slips out of the top 10 entirely.

Here’s how TIOBE’s methodology ranks programming language popularity in November:

Python
C
C++
Java
C#
JavaScript
Visual Basic
Delphi/Object Pascal
Perl
SQL

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Slashdot reader spatwei writes: It is now more common for data to leave companies through copying and pasting than through file transfers and uploads, LayerX revealed in its Browser Security Report 2025. This shift is largely due to generative AI (genAI), with 77% of employees pasting data into AI prompts, and 32% of all copy-pastes from corporate accounts to non-corporate accounts occurring within genAI tools. ‘Traditional governance built for email, file-sharing, and sanctioned SaaS didn’t anticipate that copy/paste into a browser prompt would become the dominant leak vector,’ LayerX CEO Or Eshed wrote in a blog post summarizing the report.

“GenAI now accounts for 11% of enterprise application usage,” notes this article from SC World, “with adoption rising faster than many data loss protection (DLP) controls can keep up. Overall, 45% of employees actively use AI tools, with 67% of these tools being accessed via personal accounts and ChatGPT making up 92% of all use…”

“With the rise of AI-driven browsers such as OpenAI’s Atlas and Perplexity’s Comet, governance of AI tools’ access to corporate data becomes even more urgent, the LayerX report notes.”

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“Google is going to court to help put an end to, or at least limit, the prevalence of phishing scams over text message,” reports BGR:

Google said it’s bringing suit against Lighthouse, an impressively large operation that allegedly provides tools customers can buy to set up their own specialized phishing scams. All told, Google estimates that Lighthouse-affiliated scams in the U.S. have stolen anywhere between 12.7 million and 115 million credit cards. “Bad actors built Lighthouse as a phishing-as-a-service kit to generate and deploy massive SMS phishing attacks,” Google notes. “These attacks exploit established brands like E-Z Pass to steal people’s financial information.”

Google’s legal action is comprehensive and is intent on completely dismantling Lighthouse’s operations. The search giant is bringing claims under RICO, the Lanham Act, and the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act (CFAA). RICO, which often comes up in movies and television shows, allows authorities to treat Lighthouse’s phishing operation as a broad criminal enterprise as opposed to isolated scams. By using RICO, Google also expands the list of individuals who can be found liable, whether it be the people who started Lighthouse, the people who run it, or even unaffiliated customers who used the company’s services. The Lanham Act, for those unaware, targets malicious actors who misappropriate well-known company trademarks in order to confuse consumers. This Lanham Act comes into play because many phishing scams masquerade as legitimate messages from companies like Amazon and FedEx. The Computer Fraud and Abuse Act, meanwhile, is relevant because scammers typically use stolen credentials to gain unauthorized access to financial systems, something the CFAA is designed to target…

The fact that Google is invoking all three of the acts above underscores how serious the company is about putting a stop to SMS-based scams. By using all three, Google’s legal attack is more potent and also expands the range of available remedies to include civil damages and criminal penalties. In short, Google isn’t merely trying to win a legal case; it’s aiming to emphatically and permanently stop Lighthouse in its tracks.

Getting even more aggressive, Google says it’s also working with the U.S. Congress to pass new anti-scammer legislation, and endorsed these three new bipartisan bills:

The Scam Compound Accountability and Mobilization (SCAM) Act “would develop a national strategy to counter scam compounds, enhance sanctions and support survivors of human trafficking within these compounds.”

The Foreign Robocall Elimination Act “would establish a taskforce focused on how to best block foreign-originated illegal robocalls before they ever reach American consumers.”

The Guarding Unprotected Aging Retirees from Deception (GUARD) Act “would empower state and local law enforcement by enabling them to utilize federal grant funding to investigate financial fraud and scams specifically targeting retirees. ”

Thanks to Slashdot reader anderzole for sharing the article.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

The dream of quantum computers has been hampered by the challenge of error correction, writes the Harvard Gazette, since qubits “are inherently susceptible to slipping out of their quantum states and losing their encoded information.”

But in a newly-published paper, a research team “combined various methods to create complex circuits with dozens of error correction layers” that “suppresses errors below a critical threshold — the point where adding qubits further reduces errors rather than increasing them.”

“For the first time, we combined all essential elements for a scalable, error-corrected quantum computation in an integrated architecture,” said Mikhail Lukin, co-director of the Quantum Science and Engineering Initiative, Joshua and Beth Friedman University Professor, and senior author of the new paper. “These experiments — by several measures the most advanced that have been done on any quantum platform to date — create the scientific foundation for practical large-scale quantum computation…”

“There are still a lot of technical challenges remaining to get to very large-scale computer with millions of qubits, but this is the first time we have an architecture that is conceptually scalable,” said lead author Dolev Bluvstein, Ph.D. ’25, who did the research during his graduate studies at Harvard and is now an assistant professor at Caltech. “It’s going to take a lot of effort and technical development, but it’s becoming clear that we can build fault-tolerant quantum computers….”

Hartmut Neven, vice president of engineering at the Google Quantum AI team, said the new paper came amid an “incredibly exciting” race between qubit platforms. “This work represents a significant advance toward our shared goal of building a large-scale, useful quantum computer,” he said… With recent advances, Lukin believes the core elements for building quantum computers are falling into place. “This big dream that many of us had for several decades, for the first time, is really in direct sight,” he said.

“In theory, a system of 300 quantum bits can store more information than the number of particles in the known universe…” the article points out.

“The new paper represents an important advance in a three-decade pursuit of quantum error correction.”

Thanks to long-time Slashdot reader schwit1 for sharing the article.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

A new “cold war” between America and China is “pushing leaders to sideline concerns about the dangers of powerful AI models,” reports the Wall Street Journal, “including the spread of disinformation and other harmful content, and the development of superintelligent AI systems misaligned with human values…”

“Both countries are driven as much by fear as by hope of progress. ”

In Washington and Silicon Valley, warnings abound that China’s
“authoritarian AI,” left unchecked, will erode American tech
supremacy. Beijing is gripped by the conviction that a failure to
keep
pace in AI will make it easier for the U.S. to cut short China’s
resurgence as a global power. Both countries believe market share
for their companies across the world is up for grabs — and with it,
the potential to influence large swaths of the global population.

The U.S. still has a clear lead, producing the most powerful AI
models. China can’t match it in advanced
chips and has no answer for the financial firepower of private
American investors, who funded AI startups to the tune of $104
billion in the first half of 2025, and are gearing
up for more. But it has a massive population of capable
engineers, lower costs and a state-led development model that often
moves faster than the U.S., all of which Beijing is working to
harness to tip the contest in its direction. A new “whole of
society” campaign looks to accelerate the construction of computing
clusters in areas like Inner Mongolia, where vast solar and wind
farms provide plentiful cheap energy, and connect hundreds of data
centers to create a shared compute pool — some describe it as a
“national cloud” — by 2028. China is also funneling hundreds of
billions of dollars into its power grid to support AI training and
adoption…

“Our lead is probably in the ‘months but not years’ realm,”
said Chris McGuire, who helped design U.S. export controls on AI
chips while serving on the National Security Council under the Biden
administration. Chinese AI models currently rank at or near the top
in every task from coding to video generation, with the exception of
search, according to Chatbot Arena, a popular crowdsourced ranking
platform. China’s manufacturing sector, meanwhile, is rocketing
past the U.S. in bringing
AI into the physical world through robotaxis, autonomous drones
and humanoid
robots. Given China’s progress, McGuire said, the U.S. is
“very lucky” to have its advantage in chips…

If AI surpasses human intelligence and acquires the ability to
improve itself, it could confer unshakable scientific, economic and
military superiority on the country that controls it. Short of that,
AI’s ability to automate tedious tasks and process vast amounts of
data quickly promises to supercharge everything from cancer diagnoses
to missile defense. With so much at stake, hacking and cyber
espionage are likely to get worse, as AI gives hackers more powerful
tools, while increasing incentives for state-backed groups to try to
steal AI-related intellectual property. As distrust grows, Washington
and Beijing will also find it hard, if not impossible, to cooperate
in areas like preventing extremist groups from using AI in
destructive ways, such as building bioweapons. “The costs of the
AI Cold War are already high and will go much higher,” said Paul
Triolo, a former U.S. government analyst and current technology
policy lead at business consulting firm DGA-Albright Stonebridge
Group. “A U.S.-China AI arms race becomes a self-fulfilling
prophecy, with neither side able to trust that the other would
observe any restrictions on advanced AI capability development….”

The article includes an interesting observation from Helen Toner, director of strategy for Georgetown’s Center for Security and Emerging Technology and a former OpenAI board member. Toner points out “We don’t actually know” if boosting computing power with better chips will continue producing more-powerful AI models.

So “If performance plateaus,” the Journal writes, “despite all the spending by OpenAI and others — a growing concern in Silicon Valley — China has a chance to compete.”

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Researchers at MIT have been working with the South Korean beauty company Amorepacific for the past few years to develop a wearable “electronic skin” platform that can provide real-time insights about skin aging and make personalized skincare recommendations, and it’s due to debut at CES 2026 as “Skinsight.” Skinsight, which was announced as one of the CES 2026 Innovation Award Honorees this week, is a Bluetooth-equipped sensor patch that sticks to the skin and works with a mobile app, tracking skin tightness, UV exposure, temperature and moisture.

Amorepacific

Based on the readings, the AI-powered app will approximate how the different factors might contribute to or speed up skin aging, and suggest the products best suited for the job so the user can incorporate them into their skincare routine. The patch is designed to be breathable and withstand sweat so it can stay on for long periods of time. The team hasn’t yet shared on Skinsight’s availability and cost. 

This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/wearables/mit-researchers-and-beauty-brand-amorepacific-made-a-wearable-patch-that-analyzes-skin-aging-225125621.html?src=rss

“Media headlines suggesting some slowdown in EV sales are simply incorrect,” writes the site Electrek, “and leave out the bigger picture that gas car sales actually are dropping…”

Over the course of
the last two years or so, sales of battery electric vehicles, while
continuing to grow, have posted lower year-over-year percentage
growth rates than they had in years prior. EV sales used to grow at
50%+ per year, but for the last couple years, they have grown closer
to ~25% per year. This alone is not particularly remarkable — it
is inevitable that any growing product or category will show slower
percentage growth rates as sales rise, particularly one that has been
growing at such a fast rate for so long. In some recent years, we
had even seen year-over-year
doublings in EV market share (though one of those was 2020->2021,
which was anomalous). To expect improvement at that level perpetually
would be close to impossible — after 3 years of doubling
market share from 2023’s 18% number, EVs would account for more
than 100% of the global automotive market, which cannot happen…

We have seen a global EV sales growth rate of 23% in the first 10
months of this year, according to a report just released by Rho
Motion (recently acquired by Benchmark Mineral Intelligence). That
includes a +32% bump in Europe, +22% bump in China, +4% in North
America, and a big +48% bump in the “rest of the world.” Notably,
this 23% global growth rate is higher than last year’s YTD growth
rate, which was 22%
at this time…

In covering these trends, some journalists have attempted to use
the less-wrong phrase “slower growth,” showing that EV sales are
still growing, but at a lower percentage change than previously seen.
But for the first ten months of this year, that isn’t true — EV
sales are up more in 2025 than in 2024 by a percentage basis. They
are also up in raw sales numbers — in 2024, EV
sales grew by a larger number than in 2023. And the same is true
so far in 2025. Going back to 2023, 10.7 million EVs were sold
globally in the first 10 months. Then in 2024, 13.3 million were
sold, a difference of 2.6 million. And so far in 2025, 16.5 million
EVs have sold, a difference of 3.2 million. Not only are the numbers
getting bigger, but the growth in unit sales is getting bigger as
well.

Even in America, the
EV market “has increased so far this year, with 11.7%
US EV sales growth YTD.”

In terms of US hybrid sales, much has been made of customers
“shifting from EVs to hybrids,” which is also not the case.
Conventional gas-hybrid sales are
indeed up and plug-in hybrids, which have grown more slowly
than gas-hybrids/BEVs, have also shown some growth lately. But
gas-hybrid sales have not come at the cost of EV sales, rather at the
cost of gas-only car sales.

Because that’s
just the thing: the number of gas-only vehicles
being sold worldwide is a number that actually is falling.
That number continues to go down year over year. Sales of new
gas-powered cars are down by about
a quarter from their peak in 2017, and show no signs of
recovering… And yet, somehow, virtually every headline you read is
about the “EV sales slump,” rather than the “gas-car sales
slump.” The one you keep hearing about isn’t happening,
but the one you rarely hear about is happening… No matter
what region of the world you’re in, EV sales were up in the first
10 months of this year.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

From the personal blog of interface expert Bruce Ediger:

Early in March 2025, I noticed that a web crawler with a user
agent string of

meta-externalagent/1.1 (+https://developers.facebook.com/docs/sharing/webmasters/crawler)

was hitting my blog’s machine at an unreasonable rate.

I followed the URL and discovered this is what Meta uses to gather premium,
human-generated content to train its LLMs. I found the rate of
requests to be annoying.

I already have a PHP program that creates the illusion of an infinite website. I decided to answer any HTTP request that had
“meta-externalagent” in its user agent string with the contents
of a bork.php generated file…

This worked
brilliantly. Meta ramped up to requesting 270,000 URLs on May 30 and
31, 2025…

After about 3 months, I got scared that Meta’s insatiable
consumption of Super Great Pages about condiments, underwear and
circa 2010 C-List celebs would start costing me money. So I switched
to giving “meta-externalagent” a 404 status code. I decided to
see how long it would take one of the highest valued companies in the
world to decide to go away.

The answer is 5 months.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

In a longstanding and complicated legal battle between Apple and Masimo, a recent ruling from a California jury may be the first step towards a certain conclusion. As reported by Reuters, a federal jury sided with Masimo, a medical tech company known for its patient monitoring devices, when it said that Apple infringed on the company’s patent for technology that tracks blood-oxygen levels.

The case revolves around whether Apple violated Masimo’s patent related to blood-oxygen sensors, which the jury claimed can be seen with the Apple Watch’s Workout and Heart Rate apps. According to Reuters, Apple disagreed with the verdict, adding that “the single patent in this case expired in 2022, and is specific to historic patient monitoring technology from decades ago.” The tech giant is reportedly planning to appeal the decision. 

While there may be some closure with this California lawsuit, Apple and Masimo are entangled in a web of related but separate lawsuits. Masimo first accused Apple of infringing on its pulse oximeter patents, leading to Apple temporarily halting sales of its Series 9 and Ultra 2 smartwatches. In August, Apple redesigned its blood-oxygen monitoring feature and rolled it out to the Series 9, Series 10 and Ultra 2. The redesign was approved by the US Customs and Border Protection, but Masimo filed a suit against the agency for overstepping its authority by allowing the sale of these updated Apple Watches without input from Masimo.

This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/wearables/a-federal-jury-ruled-that-apple-has-to-pay-634-million-for-infringing-smartwatch-patents-202846266.html?src=rss

An anonymous reader shared this post from the gaming news site Aftermath:

Concord, Sony Interactive Entertainment and Firewalk Studios’ Overwatch-like shooter, was live for just two weeks before it was pulled offline. Though Concord certainly had some dedicated players, it didn’t have many — which is why it may be surprising to hear that a group of players are reverse-engineering the game and its servers to bring it back to life.

Publisher Sony removed Concord from stores and digital marketplaces, automatically refunded some, and, later, shut down Firewalk Studios. Two hundred or so people were laid off, and any hopes of Concord’s return were dashed. Poor sales — estimated to be under 25,000 copies sold — and low player numbers marred the release. Firewalk Studios’ game director Ryan Ellis said in a blog post that pieces of the game “resonated with players,” but “other aspects of the game and [Concord’s] initial launch didn’t land the way [Firewalk Studios] intended.”

Concord wasn’t a bad game, but it just didn’t generate enough interest with enough players. Now, a group of three hobbyist reverse-engineers, who go by real, Red, and gwog online, are trying to make it playable again… “Sometimes there’s enough of the server left in the game, that we can ‘activate’ that code and make the game believe it’s a server,” Red said. “We do pretty much always need to fill in the gaps though…” Concord used an anti-tamper software to keep people from cheating, which also creates a problem for people reverse engineering. It’s “nearly impossible” to crack, Red said, so the group didn’t — they found an exploit to “forcefully decrypt the game’s code” to “restore the game and start working on servers….”

It’s not open to the public, but people can sign up for future tests. Even former Firewalk Studios employees have joined the server. They’re excited to see Concord come back to life, too, the developers said.

“Friday morning, a video of the playtest was posted to the Concord Reddit page,” according to the article. (Though ironically by Friday night YouTube had had removed the video “due to a copyright claim by MarkScan Enforcement.”

Read more of this story at Slashdot.