An anonymous reader quotes a report from PCWorld: Windows 7 came onto the market in 2009 and put Microsoft back on the road to success after Windows Vista’s annoying failures. But Windows 7 was not without its faults, as this curious story proves. Some users apparently encountered a vexing problem at the time: if they set a single-color image as the background, their Windows 7 PC always took 30 seconds to start the operating system and switch from the welcome screen to the desktop.

In a recent blog post, Microsoft veteran Raymond Chen explains the exact reason for this. According to him, a simple programming error meant that users had to wait longer for the system to boot. After logging in, Windows 7 first set up the desktop piece by piece, i.e. the taskbar, the desktop window, icons for applications, and even the background image. The system waited patiently for all components to finish loading and received feedback from each individual component. Or, it switched from the welcome screen to the desktop after 30 seconds if it didn’t receive any feedback.

The problem here: The code for the message that the background image is ready was located within the background image bitmap code, which means that the message never appeared if you did not have a real background image bitmap. And a single color is not such a bitmap. The result: the logon system waited in vain for the message that the background has finished loading, so Windows 7 never started until the 30 second fallback activated and sent users to the desktop. The problem could also occur if users had activated the “Hide desktop icons” group policy. This was due to the fact that such policies were only added after the main code had been written and called by an If statement. However, Windows 7 was also unable to recognize this at first and therefore took longer to load.

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NASA’s Psyche spacecraft, located nearly 150 million miles from Earth on the way to an unexplored metal asteroid, has stopped firing its engines after detecting a problem in its propulsion system.

NASA published an update Tuesday revealing that the robotic spacecraft shut off its plasma thrusters earlier this month. The news wasn’t widely shared until Wednesday, when NASA science chief Nicky Fox posted it on X.

“Engineers with NASA’s Psyche mission are working to determine what caused a recent decrease in fuel pressure in the spacecraft’s propulsion system,” the agency said. The spacecraft detected the drop in pressure April 1 inside the line that feeds xenon fuel to the spacecraft’s four plasma thrusters.

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Investigative journalist and cybersecurity expert Brian Krebs reports: A 23-year-old Scottish man thought to be a member of the prolific Scattered Spider cybercrime group was extradited last week from Spain to the United States, where he is facing charges of wire fraud, conspiracy and identity theft. U.S. prosecutors allege Tyler Robert Buchanan and co-conspirators hacked into dozens of companies in the United States and abroad, and that he personally controlled more than $26 million stolen from victims. Scattered Spider is a loosely affiliated criminal hacking group whose members have broken into and stolen data from some of the world’s largest technology companies. Buchanan was arrested in Spain last year on a warrant from the FBI, which wanted him in connection with a series of SMS-based phishing attacks in the summer of 2022 that led to intrusions at Twilio, LastPass, DoorDash, Mailchimp, and many other tech firms. The complain against Buchanan is available here (PDF).

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New submitter LDA6502 writes: The Republican chairman of the House Transportation and Infrastructure Committee is proposing a new annual federal vehicle registration fee of $200 for full EVs, $100 for hybrid EVs, and $20 for combustion vehicles. The tax would be tied to inflation, would be collected by the states, and would expire in 2035. Critics of the proposal note that it could result in low mileage EVs paying a far higher tax rate than heavy ICE trucks and SUVs. Ars Technica notes that the bill “exempts commercial vehicles, which should see a rush from tax avoiders to register their vehicles under their businesses […].” Farm vehicles will also be exempt from the tax.

“The Eno Center for Transportation calculates that this new tax will contribute an extra $110 billion to the highway Trust Fund by 2035 but that cuts to other taxes and more spending mean that the fund will still be $222 billion short of its commitments — assuming that this added fee doesn’t further dampen EV adoption in the U.S., that is.”

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Epic CEO and founder Tim Sweeney said in a Zoom call with press Wednesday night that the company is “going to do everything we can to bring Fortnite back to the iOS App Store next week.” That decision comes after a federal district court found late Wednesday that Apple was in “willful violation” of a 2021 injunction designed to allow iOS developers to steer customers to alternate payment processors for in-app purchases.

That 2021 injunction wound its way through years of appellate review until January 2024, when the Supreme Court declined to hear a final attempt by Apple to overturn it. Since then, the District Court for Northern California has been holding a series of evidentiary hearings examining the internal development of Apple’s so-called “compliance plan” for the injunction.

In a scathing Wednesday night order, District Court Judge Yvonne Gonzalez Rogers determined that Apple had engaged in a plan to “thwart the injunction’s goals,” and then engaged in an “obvious cover-up” to prevent that plan from being revealed.

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Color E Ink in its current state requires a whole lot of compromises, as we’ve found when reviewing devices like reMarkable’s Paper Pro or Amazon’s Kindle Colorsoft, including washed-out color, low refresh rates, and a grainy look that you don’t get with regular black-and-white E Ink. But that isn’t stopping device manufacturers from exploring the technology, and today, Onyx International has announced that it has a $1,900 color E Ink monitor that you can connect to your PC or Mac.

The Boox Mira Pro is a 25.3-inch monitor with a 3200×1800 resolution and a 16:9 aspect ratio, and it builds on the company’s previous black-and-white Mira Pro monitors. The Verge reports that the screen uses E Ink Kaleido 3 technology, which can display up to 4,096 colors. Both image quality and refresh rate will vary based on which of the monitor’s four presets you use (the site isn’t specific about the exact refresh rate, but does note that “E Ink monitors’ refresh speed is not as high as conventional monitors’, and increased speed will result in more ghosting.”)

The monitor’s ports include one full-size HDMI port, a mini HDMI port, a USB-C port, and a DisplayPort. Its default stand is more than a little reminiscent of Apple’s Studio Display, but it also supports VESA mounting.

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After 10 consecutive quarters of rising AI-related investment, Microsoft has put on the brakes, spending over $1 billion less than the previous quarter (source paywalled; alternative source). Despite the slight slowdown, Microsoft posted stronger-than-expected results with $70 billion in revenue and $25.8 billion in profit. The New York Times reports: In the first three months of 2025, Microsoft spent $21.4 billion on capital expenses, down more than $1 billion from the previous quarter. The company is still on track to spend more than $80 billion on capital expenses in the current fiscal year, which ends in June. But the pullback, though slight, is an indication that the tech industry’s appetite for spending on A.I. is not limitless.

Overall, Microsoft’s results showed unexpected strength in its business. Sales surpassed $70 billion, up 13 percent from the same period a year earlier. Profit rose to $25.8 billion, up 18 percent. The results far surpassed Wall Street’s expectations. “Cloud and A.I. are the essential inputs for every business to expand output, reduce costs, and accelerate growth,” Satya Nadella, Microsoft’s chief executive, said in a statement.

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An anonymous reader quotes a report from TechCrunch: Apple sent notifications this week to several people who the company believes were targeted with government spyware, according to two of the alleged targets. In the past, Apple has sent similar notifications to targets and victims of spyware, and directed them to contact a nonprofit that specializes in investigating such cyberattacks. Other tech companies, like Google and WhatsApp, have in recent years also periodically sent such notifications to their users. As of Wednesday, only two people appear to have come forward to reveal they were among those who received the notifications from Apple this week.

One is Ciro Pellegrino, an Italian journalist who works for online news outlet Fanpage. Pellegrino wrote in an article that he received an email and a text message from Apple on Tuesday notifying him that he was targeted with spyware. The message, according to Pellegrino, also said he wasn’t the only person targeted. “Today’s notification is being sent to affected users in 100 countries,” the message read, according to Pellegrino’s article. “Did this really happen? Yes, it is not a joke,” Pellegrino wrote.

The second person to receive an Apple notification is Eva Vlaardingerbroek, a Dutch right-wing activist, who posted on X on Wednesday. “Apple detected a targeted mercenary spyware attack against your iPhone,” the Apple alert said, according to a screenshot shown in a video that Vlaardingerbroek posted on X. “This attack is likely targeting you specifically because of who you are or what you do. Although it’s never possible to achieve absolute certainty when detecting such attacks, Apple has high confidence in this warning — please take it seriously.” Reacting to the notification, Vlaardingerbroek said that this was an “attempt to intimidate me, an attempt to silence me, obviously.”

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One day after Meta rolled out its standalone AI app, Mark Zuckerberg has shared more about how the company plans to eventually monetize its generative AI assistant. During the company’s first quarter earnings call, Zuckerberg said Meta AI could one day show ads and product recommendations. He also hinted at plans for a subscription component for those who want a more “premium” version of the assistant.

“I think that there will be a large opportunity to show product recommendations or ads, as well as a premium service for people who want to unlock more compute for additional functionality or intelligence,” Zuckerberg said.

He added that for now the company is more focused on growing Meta AI’s usage. (He announced yesterday that Meta Ai had reached “almost” 1 billion monthly users.) “I expect that we’re going to be largely focused on scaling and deepening engagement for at least the next year before we’ll really be ready to start building out the business here,” he said.

Zuckerberg’s comments — just one day after Meta introduced its standalone AI app — underscores how important the assistant is to the company. The Facebook founder has repeatedly said he wants Meta AI to be the most used AI assistant in the world, and he said on Wednesday’s call that a standalone app would be particularly important for attracting US users.

Meta’s strategy for monetizing the assistant in many ways mirrors its approach to Threads, which only just began expanding its early experiments with ads this month long after it reached hundreds of millions of users. Speaking of Threads, Zuckerberg also shared some new milestones for Threads, saying that text-based app now has 350 million monthly active users and that time spent on the platform has increased 35 percent over the last six months thanks to improvements to the company’s recommendations systems.

Later in the call, Meta’s CFO Susan Li shared that the company has also been testing its Llama model to power Threads’ recommendations and that the addition of the large language model has led to a 4 percent increase in time spent. “It remains early here, but a big focus this year will be on exploring how we can deploy this for other content types, including photos and videos,” she said.

This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/social-media/meta-is-a-mulling-ads-and-a-premium-version-of-its-ai-assistant-mark-zuckerberg-says-225202560.html?src=rss

A newly revealed set of vulnerabilities dubbed AirBorne in Apple’s AirPlay SDK could allow attackers on the same Wi-Fi network to hijack tens of millions of third-party devices like smart TVs and speakers. While Apple has patched its own products, many third-party devices remain at risk, with the most severe (though unproven) threat being potential microphone access. 9to5Mac reports: Wired reports that a vulnerability in Apple’s software development kit (SDK) means that tens of millions of those devices could be compromised by an attacker: “On Tuesday, researchers from the cybersecurity firm Oligo revealed what they’re calling AirBorne, a collection of vulnerabilities affecting AirPlay, Apple’s proprietary radio-based protocol for local wireless communication. Bugs in Apple’s AirPlay software development kit (SDK) for third-party devices would allow hackers to hijack gadgets like speakers, receivers, set-top boxes, or smart TVs if they’re on the same Wi-Fi network as the hacker’s machine […]

Oligo’s chief technology officer and cofounder, Gal Elbaz, estimates that potentially vulnerable third-party AirPlay-enabled devices number in the tens of millions. ‘Because AirPlay is supported in such a wide variety of devices, there are a lot that will take years to patch — or they will never be patched,’ Elbaz says. ‘And it’s all because of vulnerabilities in one piece of software that affects everything.'”

For consumers, an attacker would first need to gain access to your home Wi-Fi network. The risk of this depends on the security of your router: millions of wireless routers also have serious security flaws, but access would be limited to the range of your Wi-Fi. AirPlay devices on public networks, like those used everywhere from coffee shops to airports, would allow direct access. The researchers say the worst-case scenario would be an attacker gaining access to the microphones in an AirPlay device, such as those in smart speakers. However, they have not demonstrated this capability, meaning it remains theoretical for now.

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Google has announced that it’s helping to financially support the electrical training ALLIANCe (etA), an organization formed by the National Electrical Contractors Association and the International Brotherhood of Electricians. The goal is to train “100,000 electrical workers and 30,000 new apprentices in the United States” to meet the growing power demands of AI.

Using AI will unlock unspecified, but positive economic opportunities, Google’s new white paper, “Powering a New Era of American Innovation,” claims. In order to take advantage of them, though, the US power grid needs to become more capable and efficient. That’s largely because the data centers used to run and train AI models require vast amounts of energy. The white paper claims that new data centers could demand an additional “15-90 GW” of energy by 2030, something that more efficient chips and model training can’t account for. For a sense of the scale, the US Department of Energy says 1 Gigawatt is the equivalent to 103 offshore wind turbines. 

Google’s paper calls for investments in alternative energy sources like nuclear power, but also notes that expanding the electrical workforce is necessary. “McKinsey estimates that 130,000 additional electricians will be needed by 2030 to build out data centers and manufacturing facilities,” the company writes. Currently, though, retiring electricians outnumber newly trained ones. “Nearly 10,000 American electricians either retire or change careers each year, while only about 7,000 new entrants join the field.”

Investing in electrical training is Google’s attempt to help change that. It would be nice if it was paired with a clearer explanation around what that AI will be doing with all that extra power — Google notes that there’s a “causal relationship between energy consumption and economic growth” — but skilled job training isn’t a bad thing.

This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/big-tech/google-is-funding-electrician-training-to-help-meet-the-power-demands-of-ai-221320678.html?src=rss

Google is investing in training over 100,000 new U.S. electricians through a $10 million grant, aiming to address a critical labor shortage driven by AI-fueled data center growth and rising electricity demands. Reuters reports: A lack of access to power supplies has become the biggest problem for giant technology companies racing to develop artificial intelligence in energy-intensive data centers, which are driving up U.S. electricity demand after nearly 20 years of stagnation. The situation has led President Donald Trump to declare a national energy emergency aimed at speeding up permitting for generation and transmission projects.

Google’s funding, which includes a $10 million grant for electrical worker nonprofits, is the latest in a series of recent moves by giant technology companies to alleviate power project backlogs and electricity shortfalls across the United States. […] The Google grant will be used for electrician apprenticeship programs and the training of existing workforce through organizations, including the Electrical Training Alliance, International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers and the National Electrical Contractors Association. It could increase the pipeline of electrical workers by 70% by the end of the decade, the company said. “This initiative with Google and our partners at NECA and the Electrical Training Alliance will bring more than 100,000 sorely needed electricians into the trade to meet the demands of an AI-driven surge in data centers and power generation,” said Kenneth Cooper, international president of the IBEW labor union.

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