An experimental reusable rocket developed by the research and development arm of Honda Motor Company flew to an altitude of nearly 900 feet Tuesday, then landed with pinpoint precision at the carmaker’s test facility in northern Japan.
The accomplishment may not sound like much, but it’s important to put it into perspective. Honda’s hopper is the first prototype rocket outside of the United States and China to complete a flight of this kind, demonstrating vertical takeoff and vertical landing technology that could underpin development of a reusable launch vehicle.
While Tuesday’s announcement by Honda was unexpected, the company has talked about rockets before. In 2021, Honda officials revealed they had been working on a rocket engine for at least two years. At the time, officials said a small satellite launch vehicle was part of Honda’s roadmap.
One-time SMS codes are widely used as the second checkpoint in two-factor authentication (2FA) to sign into everything from banking apps to email accounts. As I’ve written before, though, SMS is one of the least secure 2FA methods, as it can be phished relatively easily.
It turns out these codes may also be visible to other parties besides the sender (the service generating the code) and the recipient (you), increasing the risk that your accounts can be compromised by bad actors. As reported by Bloomberg Businessweek, an obscure third-party telecom service had access to at least one million 2FA codes that passed through its network.
How more than one million SMS codes were compromised
An investigation led by Bloomberg and Lighthouse Reports—based on data received from an industry whistleblower—found that more than a million text messages containing 2FA codes were visible to Swiss company Fink Telecom Services during June 2023. As an intermediary between the companies that generate authentication codes and the users logging into their accounts, Fink handled the messages and had access to their content.
While this is a weakness in SMS—which is unencrypted and relatively easy to intercept—the Fink incident is particularly concerning due to the company’s involvement in the surveillance industry and alleged infiltration of user accounts.
According to the reporting, the messages came from senders like Google, Meta, Amazon, Tinder, Snapchat, Binance, Signal, WhatsApp, and several European banks and went to recipients in more than 100 countries.
Companies commonly use intermediaries to send text messages at cheaper rates, which are possible thanks to large contracts with multiple carriers and the ownership or lease of so-called “global titles”: network addresses that facilitate communication between carriers in different countries. Maintaining privacy and security standards when working with third parties is further complicated by the fact that Fink (and others like it) are often subcontractors not hired directly by the original companies.
Bottom line: If you use SMS as your authentication method, you aren’t guaranteed that no one else has access to your code or that they won’t use it to hack your private accounts.
More secure 2FA alternatives
Unfortunately, many companies continue to rely on SMS for 2FA, but wherever possible, you should opt for other multi-factor authentication (MFA) methods.
The most secure choices are based on WebAuthn credentials, like biometrics or passkeys, and stored on your device or a physical security key. These methods don’t pass unencrypted through a third party, and they are highly resistant to phishing attacks. Authenticator apps like Google Authenticator that generate codes on your device and refresh every 30 seconds are also stronger than SMS.
In general, the more authentication factors required for logging in, the greater the security, though these factors should be independent and not all accessible on the same device.
People in Iran have been having difficulties accessing internet services, mostly foreign websites and messaging apps like WhatsApp. According to The New York Times and NBC News, it was the government’s decision to restrict internet in the country to ward off cyberattacks by Israel as the conflict between the countries escalate. Fatemeh Mohajerani, Iran’s spokesperson, said the government was forced to throttle internet speeds in the country to maintain network stability “given the enemy’s cyber attacks.” Iran reportedly plans to reduce its internet bandwidth by 80 percent.
Kentinc and Netblocks, companies which track global internet connectivity, told NBC News that Iran’s connection plummeted at around 5:30PM Eastern time on June 17. Iranians have been having issues accessing online services for days, however, with their mobile data networks being completely down in parts of the country and the VPNs they were using to access foreign websites being blocked intermittently. In addition to blocking WhatsApp, the Iranian government urged citizens to delete it from their smartphones, accusing it of collecting information to send to Israel. WhatsApp told AP that it was “concerned these false reports will be an excuse for [its] services to be blocked at a time when people need them the most.”
While Iran’s spokesperson said that the government is blocking and slowing down the country’s internet connection as a way to prevent Israeli cyberattacks, it’s also making it harder for people to get warnings about incoming attacks and to contact loved ones in cases of emergency. And since maps like Google’s also aren’t working, people trying to evacuate are also reportedly getting lost. Iran is urging its citizens to use its national internet services or N.I.N., which remain available and allow messaging using government platforms, but people don’t think they’re secure.
It’s worth noting that Iran also seems to have launched its own cyber attacks on Israel. As The Verge notes, cybersecurity firm Radware reported a surge in cyberattacks on Israel since its strike on Iran. The firm believes they were carried out by Iranian state actors and pro-Iran hacker groups. Iran had been linked to several cyberattacks in the past, including an instance wherein hackers associated with the country stole US voter information and sent intimidating emails to Democrat voters.
This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/cybersecurity/iran-restricts-internet-access-to-ward-off-israeli-cyberattacks-120025170.html?src=rss
The at-home fitness space is more or less dominated by Peloton, which probably makes you think that whether you’re stretching with the company’s app or riding one of its machines, like the Bike, you’re working out alone. One of the major drawbacks of at-home workouts, honestly, is that you miss the collaborative, communal experience of heading to the gym—and in its absence, you can fall off your schedule or lose accountability or motivation altogether. Even though you might assume exercising with Peloton’s offerings is a solo experience—and of course, it can be—the brand makes it surprisingly easy to take classes and do exercises with friends. To add some variety and accountability to your fitness routine, you really should.
How to set up on-demand classes with friends
The Peloton app makes it easy to schedule a ride, stretch, walk, run, or more with a friend. (Note: This feature is technically called “Sessions,” so if you see that terminology, it just means “an on-demand class with friends.”) First, you have to make sure you and the person you want to work out with are following each other’s Peloton profiles. Navigate to any on-demand class in the app (and I do recommend doing this on the phone because it’s much simpler than trying to finagle on the touchscreen of one of Peloton’s proprietary devices, like the Tread or Row), and you will see a row of options. The first is the button to add the class to your Stack, which is like a playlist of classes you can make so all your routines, from stretching to riding to cooling down, flow into each other when you’re ready to work out. The second button is a Schedule, so if you want to, say, take a particular yoga class at noon in two days, you can schedule it so you can get calendar notifications. The third button is the one we want, Invite, while the fourth button is Preload and allows you to preload a class so it doesn’t buffer or suck up too much cell data while you’re taking it. The fifth button is the Bookmark button, which adds a class to a list of ones you want to save to review later.
Obviously, we’re targeting that third button, Invite. Tapping it first brings you to a list of members you follow. Select the one you’d like to work out with—or more; it’s unlimited!—and hit Continue. On the next page, select a date and time you’d like to take the class with your chosen friend(s) and hit Continue again. You can then choose a reason for the joint workout, like a celebration, a birthday, or “just because.” The final screen is a confirmation page that details the class, time, and invitees.
How to take live Peloton classes together
Any time you select a class, whether on your Bike, Tread, Row, phone, tablet, or Roku, you can find that Invite button. You don’t need to pre-schedule with the calendar feature, necessarily. If a friend is available, they can hop on and join you. This is nice because it means you can also do live classes pretty easily. As you enter the class, just look for that Invite button, select the name of the person you’d like to work out with, and proceed as normal.
Waiting for cycling Session to begin. Credit: Lindsey Ellefson
It goes without saying, but it’s a lot easier to coordinate all of this by text or call rather than just sending random invitations to people. Agreeing on workout type, music genre, and time of day are pretty key components of exercising together effectively, so flag to your friends if there’s a class you’re interested in taking and want them to join, then use the Peloton app to make it all official.
Taking Peloton classes with friends
Once your invitee confirms their attendance, it’s on both of you to show up at the specified time. It’s helpful to set a calendar reminder. From the home page of the app, look for the Calendar icon in the top right. That’s your schedule and you should see the class you pre-scheduled with your friend. Tap on it and hit Add to calendar, then select Google Calendar or iCal and set an alert notification.
Actually taking the class is as easy as opening the app, whether on your phone or a Peloton machine, a few minutes before the start time. From the Home screen, navigate to that Calendar button, then select My schedule in the top left. A countdown to the class you scheduled will appear along with a button that says Start class, which you can tap if you and your friend(s) are ready—or you can just wait for the countdown to finish and start right at the selected time.
I tested this out a few different ways. Once, I did a meditation class with a mutual follower and followed along on my phone. As the class went on, I could see their name under Here now and could send an in-app “high five,” the same as I could to any stranger who might be taking a class at the same time as me. Next, we moved on to the Bike after pre-scheduling a class using the mobile app. There, the same thing: I could see their name on the leaderboard with me, send a high five, and see their output reflected by their name.
To be clear, there isn’t much more to it than that. There’s no audio or video component, meaning you can’t hear or see your friend(s). At the completion of the class, there is no breakdown of your stats vs. theirs or anything like that (although you do get a “Dynamic Duo” achievement badge if it’s your first joint workout). You’re only doing this “together” in the sense that you’re both doing it at the same time, vaguely aware of each other while focusing on your own workout.
I like it, though, because it can introduce some accountability into what might otherwise risk becoming a structureless pursuit. Even just knowing someone is expecting you to hop on your Bike at a certain time can get you to do it. That’s why I love in-person classes so much and am a little weary—but still supportive of—virtual-only options.
Former Cloudflare executive John Graham-Cumming recently announced that he launched a website, lowbackgroundsteel.ai, that treats pre-AI, human-created content like a precious commodity—a time capsule of organic creative expression from a time before machines joined the conversation. “The idea is to point to sources of text, images and video that were created prior to the explosion of AI-generated content,” Graham-Cumming wrote on his blog last week. The reason? To preserve what made non-AI media uniquely human.
The archive name comes from a scientific phenomenon from the Cold War era. After nuclear weapons testing began in 1945, atmospheric radiation contaminated new steel production worldwide. For decades, scientists needing radiation-free metal for sensitive instruments had to salvage steel from pre-war shipwrecks. Scientists called this steel “low-background steel.” Graham-Cumming sees a parallel with today’s web, where AI-generated content increasingly mingles with human-created material and contaminates it.
With the advent of generative AI models like ChatGPT and Stable Diffusion in 2022, it has become far more difficult for researchers to ensure that media found on the Internet was created by humans without using AI tools. ChatGPT in particular triggered an avalanche of AI-generated text across the web, forcing at least one research project to shut down entirely.
OpenAI CEO Sam Altman accused Meta of attempting to poach his developers with $100 million sign-on bonuses and higher compensation packages as the social media giant races to catch up in AI race. Altman said Meta, which has a $1.8 trillion market capitalization, began making the offers to his team members after falling behind in AI efforts. “I’ve heard that Meta thinks of us as their biggest competitor,” Altman said on the Uncapped podcast
hosted by his brother.
None of his “best people” had accepted Zuckerberg’s offers, he said. Meta has been recruiting top researchers and engineers from rival companies to build a new “superintelligence” team focused on developing AGI. The Facebook parent company has struggled this year to match competitors, facing criticism over its Llama 4 language model and delaying its flagship “Behemoth” AI model.
Security researchers have revealed that the ASUS Armoury Crate software has a serious vulnerability (tracked as CVE-2025-3464) that could allow hackers to gain admin access to computers.
The ASUS Armoury Crate software was designed to help users control and customize system settings like RGB lighting, fan speeds, and system configurations
An anonymous reader shares a report: Microsoft has a long history of being criticized for coming up with clunky product names, and for changing them so often it’s hard for customers to keep up. The company’s own employees once joked in a viral video that the iPod would have been called the “Microsoft I-pod Pro 2005 XP Human Ear Professional Edition with Subscription” had it been created by Microsoft. The latest gripe among some employees and customers: The company’s tendency to slap “Copilot” on everything AI.
“There is a delusion on our marketing side where literally everything has been renamed to have Copilot it in,” one employee told Business Insider late last year. “Everything is Copilot. Nothing else matters. They want a Copilot tie-in for everything.” Now, an advertising watchdog is weighing in. The Better Business Bureau’s National Advertising Division reviewed Microsoft’s advertising for its Copilot AI tools. NAD called out Microsoft’s “universal use of the product description as ‘Copilot'” and said “consumers would not necessarily understand the difference,” according to a recent report from the watchdog.
“Microsoft is using ‘Copilot’ across all Microsoft Office applications and Business Chat, despite differences in functionality and the manual steps that are required for Business Chat to produce the same results as Copilot in a specific Microsoft Office app,” NAD further explained in an email to BI. NAD did not mention any specific recommendations on product names. But it did say Microsoft should modify claims that Copilot works “seamlessly across all your data” because all of the company’s tools with the Copilot moniker don’t work together continuously in a way consumers might expect.
Seal APK is a powerful and user-friendly Android application designed to simplify downloading and managing media content from popular streaming platforms. Built with privacy, transparency, and customization in mind, Seal APK offers users a seamless experience for downloading audio and video content directly to their devices all while respecting user control and open-source principles.
Unlike many other downloaders, Seal is fully open-source, allowing users and developers to inspect, customize, or contribute to the project. It supports a wide range of platforms by leveraging command-line tools like yt-dlp, which means users can download content from YouTube, Twitter, Instagram, TikTok, and many more with ease.
One of Seal APK’s standout features is its intuitive and modern user interface. Despite being a front-end for complex command-line tools, it is accessible even to beginners. Users can select quality, file format, and output preferences with just a few taps.
key Features of Seal APK
Open-Source and Privacy-Focused
Seal APK Download is completely open-source, meaning its source code is publicly available on platforms like GitHub. This transparency ensures there are no hidden trackers, malicious code, or intrusive ads. Developers and users alike can inspect or modify the code to suit their needs, which builds trust. Additionally, Seal doesn’t collect user data or send any information to third-party servers, making it ideal for privacy-conscious users.
GUI Front-End for yt-dlp/you-get/aria2
Seal acts as a graphical user interface (GUI) for powerful command-line tools such as yt-dlp, you-get, and aria2, which are known for handling media downloads efficiently. By combining these tools into an easy-to-use app, Seal allows users to benefit from advanced download capabilities without having to use command-line commands.
Batch Downloading
Seal APK 2025 supports batch downloads, enabling users to add multiple URLs at once and download several files in a single session. This is especially useful for downloading playlists or multiple items from a feed, saving time and effort.
Custom Download Presets
Seal lets users create and save custom presets for recurring downloads. For example, you can create a preset that always downloads in 720p MP4 with merged audio or a preset for audio-only MP3 files. This automation removes the need to manually configure settings for each download.
No Ads, No Bloatware
Unlike many free apps, Seal APK is completely ad-free and doesn’t include any unnecessary bloatware. The app is lightweight, fast, and focused entirely on its core purpose: downloading media efficiently and securely.
Modern and Intuitive User Interface
Seal offers a clean, Material Design-based interface that is responsive, smooth, and beginner-friendly. Despite integrating complex backend tools, the interface is designed to be simple enough for non-technical users while still providing advanced options for experienced users.
Built-in Terminal Access (Advanced Feature)
For advanced users, Seal provides access to the underlying command-line operations, showing the exact command it executes for each download. This is useful for troubleshooting, customization, or educational purposes — giving tech-savvy users full visibility and control.
Download Queue and History
Seal maintains a download queue and history, allowing users to track ongoing, completed, and failed downloads. You can pause, resume, or cancel downloads at any time. Having a full history helps you revisit previously downloaded content or retry failed downloads.
Multithreaded and Accelerated Downloads
With support for aria2, Seal enables multithreaded downloading, which splits files into segments and downloads them simultaneously. This can significantly increase download speed, especially for large files or slower connections.
Offline Access and Storage Management
Downloaded files are saved directly to your device’s storage, and Seal allows you to customize the output directory. Whether you’re building an offline video library or need audio for editing, Seal ensures that your content is always available without relying on internet access or cloud storage.
FAQS
What is Seal APK?
Seal APK is an open-source Android app that lets you download videos and audio from sites like YouTube, Instagram, and TikTok.
Is Seal APK safe to use?
Yes. It’s open-source, ad-free, and doesn’t track user data.
Which websites does Seal support?
Seal supports YouTube, Twitter, TikTok, Instagram, Reddit, Facebook, and many more.
Can I download audio-only files?
Yes, you can extract and download audio in formats like MP3, M4A, or Opus.
Does it support playlist downloads?
Yes, you can download entire playlists or batch multiple links at once.
Final Words
Seal APK stands out as a powerful, privacy-respecting, and user-friendly tool for downloading audio and video from a wide range of platforms. With its open-source nature, ad-free experience, and support for advanced features like custom presets, batch downloads, and format selection, it caters to both casual users and tech enthusiasts. Whether you’re looking to build an offline media library, extract audio for your projects, or simply save videos for later viewing, Seal APK offers a clean, efficient, and trustworthy solution. Its ongoing development and active community ensure that the app stays up-to-date with the latest platform changes and user needs.
Field Notes, the analog notebook company that began as designer Aaron Draplin’s side project 20 years ago, has sold over 10 million notebooks and operates in 2,000 stores worldwide, co-founder Jim Coudal told Fast Company. The Chicago-based company, which Coudal says just completed its best year for sales and revenue with 2025 tracking to exceed those numbers, has grown from selling 13 notebooks on its launch day to producing quarterly edition runs of 30,000 to 60,000 packs. The brand’s subscription model, launched in 2009 with 1,500-pack print runs, now encompasses 67 limited editions and provides both predictable cash flow and regular customer engagement opportunities for the company.
Try as I might, I can’t seem to quit scrolling on social media. Most of the time, it isn’t a huge problem—other than raising my anxiety or stress, as any good doomscroll will do. But what’s worse than doomscrolling through bad news? Spoilers, of course.
Spoilers for movies and TV shows are probably the main thing that makes me consider ditching these apps for good. For some reason, my social media feeds think I’ve seen any and all popular pieces of content that exist, and the second they air, I should see every discussion and meme possible—spoilers be damned.
Luckily, this way of digital life might be changing soon, at least on Threads. On Monday, Mark Zuckerberg made a short announcement on Meta’s social media site. If you view the post from Zuckerberg’s main Threads page, you’ll see: “Spoiler alert:” followed by a gray bar (desktop) or an animated blur effect (mobile) covering the rest of the post. Click or tap that censored space, and you’ll reveal the rest: “We’re testing a way for you to hide spoilers in your Threads posts.”
This feature is currently in testing, so only a limited pools of users will have access to it, but I welcome it. (Not that I particularly use Threads all that much.) As you can see in the images below (via TechCrunch), once the feature rolls out, you’ll be able to highlight a selection of text in a thread draft and choose a new “Mark spoiler” option that appears in the pop-up. Your selections will be hidden from others who come across your post, unless they choose to tap in and see what you wrote.
Threads, of course, isn’t the first platform to offer this type of spoiler mask. Other social media companies, like Discord, Reddit, and Mastodon, have offered ways for posters to mind spoilers for years. There’s no way to enforce the feature, but it’s just considerate: You never know who your post will reach, and if you care enough about a show or movie to post about it, you likely appreciate allowing people the opportunity to watch that content on their own before being spoiled.
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Time Magazine: While AI could offer transformative benefits, without proper safeguards it could facilitate nuclear and biological threats and cause “potentially irreversible harms,” a new report commissioned by California Governor Gavin Newsom has warned. “The opportunity to establish effective AI governance frameworks may not remain open indefinitely,” says the report, which was published on June 17 (PDF). Citing new evidence that AI can help users source nuclear-grade uranium and is on the cusp of letting novices create biological threats, it notes that the cost for inaction at this current moment could be “extremely high.” […]
“Foundation model capabilities have rapidly advanced since Governor Newsom vetoed SB 1047 last September,” the report states. The industry has shifted from large language AI models that merely predict the next word in a stream of text toward systems trained to solve complex problems and that benefit from “inference scaling,” which allows them more time to process information. These advances could accelerate scientific research, but also potentially amplify national security risks by making it easier for bad actors to conduct cyberattacks or acquire chemical and biological weapons. The report points to Anthropic’s Claude 4 models, released just last month, which the company said might be capable of helping would-be terrorists create bioweapons or engineer a pandemic. Similarly, OpenAI’s o3 model reportedly outperformed 94% of virologists on a key evaluation. In recent months, new evidence has emerged showing AI’s ability to strategically lie, appearing aligned with its creators’ goals during training but displaying other objectives once deployed, and exploit loopholes to achieve its goals, the report says. While “currently benign, these developments represent concrete empirical evidence for behaviors that could present significant challenges to measuring loss of control risks and possibly foreshadow future harm,” the report says.
While Republicans have proposed a 10 year ban on all state AI regulation over concerns that a fragmented policy environment could hamper national competitiveness, the report argues that targeted regulation in California could actually “reduce compliance burdens on developers and avoid a patchwork approach” by providing a blueprint for other states, while keeping the public safer. It stops short of advocating for any specific policy, instead outlining the key principles the working group believes California should adopt when crafting future legislation. It “steers clear” of some of the more divisive provisions of SB 1047, like the requirement for a “kill switch” or shutdown mechanism to quickly halt certain AI systems in case of potential harm, says Scott Singer, a visiting scholar in the Technology and International Affairs Program at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, and a lead-writer of the report.
Instead, the approach centers around enhancing transparency, for example through legally protecting whistleblowers and establishing incident reporting systems, so that lawmakers and the public have better visibility into AI’s progress. The goal is to “reap the benefits of innovation. Let’s not set artificial barriers, but at the same time, as we go, let’s think about what we’re learning about how it is that the technology is behaving,” says Cuellar, who co-led the report. The report emphasizes this visibility is crucial not only for public-facing AI applications, but for understanding how systems are tested and deployed inside AI companies, where concerning behaviors might first emerge. “The underlying approach here is one of ‘trust but verify,'” Singer says, a concept borrowed from Cold War-era arms control treaties that would involve designing mechanisms to independently check compliance. That’s a departure from existing efforts, which hinge on voluntary cooperation from companies, such as the deal between OpenAI and Center for AI Standards and Innovation (formerly the U.S. AI Safety Institute) to conduct pre-deployment tests. It’s an approach that acknowledges the “substantial expertise inside industry,” Singer says, but “also underscores the importance of methods of independently verifying safety claims.”
In response to escalating tensions with Israel, Iran has begun throttling internet access, with plans to disconnect from the global internet entirely to prevent Israeli cyberattacks. The Iranian government also urges citizens to delete WhatsApp — one of the country’s most popular messaging platforms — claiming without evidence that the Meta-owned app has been weaponed by Israel to spy on its users. (WhatsApp vehemently denied those claims in a statement to the Associated Press.) Telegram is also said to be blocked as well. The Verge reports: The announcements come amidst the escalating war between Iran and Israel, which broke out after Israel attacked the country on June 12th, and a rise in reported internet outages. Civilians have claimed that they’ve been unable to access basic but critical telecommunications services, such as messaging apps, maps, and sometimes the internet itself. Cloudflare reported that two major Iranian cellular carriers effectively went offline on Tuesday, and The New York Times reports that even VPNs, which Iranians frequently use to access banned sites like Facebook and Instagram, have become increasingly harder to access. […]
Israel’s role in the cyber outages has not been officially confirmed, but independent analysts at NetBlocks noticed a significant reduction of internet traffic originating from Iran on Tuesday, starting at 5:30 PM local time. According to Tasnim, a news network affiliated with the Iranian Revolutionary Guards, Iranians will still have access to the country’s state-operated national internet service, though two Iranian officials told the Times that the internal bandwidth could be reduced by up to 80 percent.
The U.S. Senate has approved the GENIUS Act with a 68-30 final vote that “saw a huge surge of Democrats joining their Republican counterparts,” reports CoinDesk. What the bill sets out to do is create the first federal regulatory framework for U.S. stablecoins, requiring issuers to maintain full 1:1 reserves in cash or Treasuries, adhere to regular audits and anti-money laundering rules, and gain regulatory approval — all while allowing foreign stablecoin access under strict oversight rules. From the report: As written, the bill would set up guardrails around the approval and supervision of U.S. issuers of stablecoins, the dollar-based tokens such as the ones backed by Circle, Ripple and Tether. Firms making these digital assets available to U.S. users would have to meet stringent reserve demands, transparency requirements, money-laundering compliance and regulatory supervision that’s also likely to include new capital rules. “This is a win for the U.S., a win for innovation and a monumental step towards appropriate regulation for digital assets in the United States,” said Amanda Tuminelli, executive director and chief legal officer of the DeFi Education Fund, in a similar statement. […]
While this is the first significant crypto bill to clear the Senate, it’s also the first time a stablecoin bill has passed either chamber, despite years of negotiation in the House Financial Services Committee that managed to produce other major crypto legislation in the previous congressional session. The destiny of the GENIUS Act is also tied closely to the House’s own Digital Asset Market Clarity Act, the more sweeping crypto bill that would establish the legal footing of the wider U.S. crypto markets. The stablecoin effort is slightly ahead of the bigger task of the market structure bill, but the industry and their lawmaker allies argue that they’re inextricably connected and need to become law together. So far, the Clarity Act has been cleared by the relevant House committees and awaits floor action.
President Trump will extend the deadline for ByteDance to divest TikTok’s U.S. operations by another 90 days, marking the third extension since taking office. The extension aims to prevent a TikTok ban while negotiations with potential buyers like Oracle and Project Liberty continue. CNBC reports: “President Trump will sign an additional Executive Order this week to keep TikTok up and running,” White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt said in a statement. “As he has said many times, President Trump does not want TikTok to go dark. This extension will last 90 days, which the Administration will spend working to ensure this deal is closed so that the American people can continue to use TikTok with the assurance that their data is safe and secure.”
ByteDance was nearing the deadline of June 19, to sell TikTok’s U.S. operations in order to satisfy a national security law that the Supreme Court upheld just a few days before Trump’s second presidential inauguration. Under the law, app store operators like Apple and Google and internet service providers would be penalized for supporting TikTok. ByteDance originally faced a Jan. 19 deadline to comply with the national security law, but Trump signed an executive order when he first took office that pushed the deadline to April 5. Trump extended the deadline for the second time a day before that April mark. Trump told NBC News in May that he would extend the TikTok deadline again if no deal was reached, and he reiterated his plans on Thursday.
An anonymous reader shares a report: […] the rise in China of open technology, which relies on transparency and decentralisation, is awkward for an authoritarian state. If the party’s patience with open-source fades, and it decides to exert control, that could hinder both the course of innovation at home, and developers’ ability to export their technology abroad.
China’s open-source movement first gained traction in the mid-2010s. Richard Lin, co-founder of Kaiyuanshe, a local open-source advocacy group, recalls that most of the early adopters were developers who simply wanted free software. That changed when they realised that contributing to open-source projects could improve their job prospects. Big firms soon followed, with companies like Huawei backing open-source work to attract talent and cut costs by sharing technology.
Momentum gathered in 2019 when Huawei was, in effect, barred by America from using Android. That gave new urgency to efforts to cut reliance on Western technology. Open-source offered a faster way for Chinese tech firms to take existing code and build their own programs with help from the country’s vast community of developers. In 2020 Huawei launched OpenHarmony, a family of open-source operating systems for smartphones and other devices. It also joined others, including Alibaba, Baidu and Tencent, to establish the OpenAtom Foundation, a body dedicated to open-source development. China quickly became not just a big contributor to open-source programs, but also an early adopter of software. JD.com, an e-commerce firm, was among the first to deploy Kubernetes.
AI has lately given China’s open-source movement a further boost. Chinese companies, and the government, see open models as the quickest way to narrow the gap with America. DeepSeek’s models have generated the most interest, but Qwen, developed by Alibaba, is also highly rated, and Baidu has said it will soon open up the model behind its Ernie chatbot.
Longtime Slashdot reader jrepin writes: Plasma is a popular desktop (and mobile) environment for GNU/Linux and other UNIX-like operating systems. Among other things, it also powers the desktop mode of the Steam Deck gaming handheld. The KDE community today announced the latest release: Plasma 6.4. This fresh new release improves on nearly every front, with progress being made in accessibility, color rendering, tablet support, window management, and more.
Plasma already offered virtual desktops and customizable tiles to help organize your windows and activities, and now it lets you choose a different configuration of tiles on each virtual desktop. The Wayland session brings some new accessibility features: you can now move the pointer using your keyboard’s number pad keys, or use a three-finger touchpad pinch gesture to zoom in or out.
Plasma file transfer notification now shows a speed graph, giving you a more visual idea of how fast the transfer is going and how long it will take to complete. When any applications are in full screen mode Plasma will now enter Do Not Disturb mode and only show urgent notifications. When you exit full-screen mode, you’ll see a summary of any notifications you missed.
Now, when an application tries to access the microphone and finds it muted, a notification will pop up. A new feature in the Application Launcher widget will place a green New! tag next to newly installed apps, so you can easily find where something you just installed lives in the menu.
The Display and Monitor page in System Settings comes with a brand new HDR calibration wizard. Support for Extended Dynamic Range (a different kind of HDR) and P010 video color format has also been added. System Monitor now supports usage monitoring for AMD and Intel graphic cards — it can even show the GPU usage on a per-process basis.
Spectacle, the built-in app for taking screenshots and screen recordings, has a much-improved design and more streamlined functionality. The background of the desktop or window now darkens when an authentication dialog shows up, helping you locate and focus on the window asking for your password.
There’s a brand-new Animations page in System Settings that groups all the settings for purely visual animated effects into one place, making them easier to find and configure. Aurorae, a newly added SVG vector graphics theme engine, enhances KWin window decorations.
You can read more about these and many other other features in the Plasma 6.4 announcement and complete changelog.
President Donald Trump will, once again, give TikTok a temporary reprieve as it faces another deadline to sell itself or face a ban in the United States. White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt confirmed Tuesday that Trump will sign another executive order to extend the deadline.
The latest extension — this time for 90 days — is now the third time Trump has punted on a looming TikTok ban since he took office in January. “As he has said many times, President Trump does not want TikTok to go dark,” Leavitt said in a statement reported by CNN. “This extension will last 90 days, which the Administration will spend working to ensure this deal is closed so that the American people can continue to use TikTok with the assurance that their data is safe and secure.”
US officials are presumably still negotiating terms of a potential deal that would allow TikTok to remain operational in the United States, though there’s been little news on that front since the last extension in April. A number of potential buyers are interested in acquiring TikTok’s US business, but officials in China would need to sign off on any agreement. In April, several reports suggested that a deal would likely involve the company’s existing US investors rolling over their stakes into a new entity. Those talks were derailed by Trump’s tariffs on Chinese imports.
This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/social-media/donald-trump-will-delay-a-looming-tiktok-ban-for-a-third-time-231757522.html?src=rss
Hades II announced its third update today. The sequel to 2020 indie game darling Hades is technically still in early access on PC and Mac, but has been getting some beefyupdates ahead of its expected official release later this year. The Unseen Update is a free, automatic update that mostly focuses on new combat development.
There’s a new Vow of Rivals that allows players to challenge more powerful Guardian foes. All of the main weapons have received hidden aspects that offer new forms and fighting styles. There’s also new hexes and blessings, some fresh artwork, and new story events to help grow your relationships with the many members of the ancient Greek pantheon.
When Hades II does exit early access with the launch of v1.0 — and developer Supergiant said that it doesn’t have a timeline for that yet — the game will follow its predecessor’s launch schedule. Switch 2 and Switch will be the first consoles to get the full release alongside PC and Mac, with PlayStation and Xbox players needing to wait before they’ll get a version of the rogue-like.
This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/gaming/hades-ii-adds-more-combat-options-in-its-third-major-early-access-update-225206452.html?src=rss
In a memo to employees on Tuesday, Amazon CEO Andy Jassy said that the company’s corporate workforce will shrink in the coming years as it adopts more generative AI tools and agents. “We will need fewer people doing some of the jobs that are being done today, and more people doing other types of jobs,” Jassy said. “It’s hard to know exactly where this nets out over time, but in the next few years, we expect that this will reduce our total corporate workforce.” CNBC reports: Jassy wrote that employees should learn how to use AI tools and experiment and figure out “how to get more done with scrappier teams.” The directive comes as Amazon has laid off more than 27,000 employees since 2022 and made several cuts this year. Amazon cut about 200 employees in its North America stores unit in January and a further 100 in its devices and services unit in May. Amazon had 1.56 million full-time and part-time employees in its global workforce as of the end of March, according to financial filings. The company also employs temporary workers in its warehouse operations, along with some contractors.
Amazon is using generative AI broadly across its internal operations, including in its fulfillment network where the technology is being deployed to assist with inventory placement, demand forecasting and the efficiency of warehouse robots, Jassy said. […] In his most recent letter to shareholders, Jassy called generative AI a “once-in-a-lifetime reinvention of everything we know.” He added that the technology is “saving companies lots of money,” and stands to shift the norms in coding, search, financial services, shopping and other areas. “It’s moving faster than almost anything technology has ever seen,” Jassy said.
