Technology companies spent part of the 2010s trying to convince us that we would want an 8K display one day.

In 2012, Sharp brought the first 8K TV prototype to the CES trade show in Las Vegas. In 2015, the first 8K TVs started selling in Japan for 16 million yen (about $133,034 at the time), and in 2018, Samsung released the first 8K TVs in the US, starting at a more reasonable $3,500. By 2016, the Video Electronics Standards Association (VESA) had a specification for supporting 8K (Display Port1.4), and the HDMI Forum followed suit (with HDMI 2.1). By 2017, Dell had an 8K computer monitor. In 2019, LG released the first 8K OLED TV, further pushing the industry’s claim that 8K TVs were “the future.”

A marketing image for 8K TVs that’s (still) on LG’s US website.
Credit:
LG

However, 8K never proved its necessity or practicality.

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Minnesota resident Nicole Cleland had her Global Entry and TSA Precheck privileges revoked three days after an incident in which she observed activity by immigration agents, the woman said in a court declaration. An agent told Cleland that he used facial recognition technology to identify her, she wrote in a declaration filed in US District Court for the District of Minnesota.

Cleland, a 56-year-old resident of Richfield and a director at Target Corporation, volunteers with a group that tracks potential Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) and Customs and Border Protection (CBP) vehicles in her neighborhood, according to her declaration. On the morning of January 10, she “observed a white Dodge Ram being driven by what I believed to be federal enforcement agents” and “maneuvered behind the vehicle with the intent of observing the agents’ actions.”

Cleland said that she and another observer in a different car followed the Dodge Ram because of “concern about a local apartment building being raided.” She followed the car for a short time and from a safe distance until “the Dodge Ram stopped in front of the other commuter’s vehicle,” she wrote. Cleland said two other vehicles apparently driven by federal agents stopped in front of the Dodge Ram, and her path forward was blocked.

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The Trump administration is delaying the release of TrumpRx, an online platform that lets people buy prescription drugs directly from pharmaceutical companies at a discount, according to Politico. While the reason for the delay is unclear, it comes as Democratic senators raise questions about how the platform will work—and whether it will be legal.

Sens. Dick Durbin (D-Ill.), Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.), and Peter Welch (D-Vt.) sent a letter to the Office of Inspector General at the Department of Health and Human Services on Thursday seeking answers on how the OIG will oversee the direct-to-consumer (DTC) platform and, specifically, how it will apply the anti-kickback statute.

“Legitimate concerns about inappropriate prescribing, conflicts of interest, and inadequate care have been raised about the exact types of DTC platforms to which TrumpRx would route patients,” the senators write.

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On Friday, a Reddit-style social network called Moltbook reportedly crossed 32,000 registered AI agent users, creating what may be the largest-scale experiment in machine-to-machine social interaction yet devised. It arrives complete with security nightmares and a huge dose of surreal weirdness.

The platform, which launched days ago as a companion to the viral

OpenClaw (once called “Clawdbot” and then “Moltbot”) personal assistant, lets AI agents post, comment, upvote, and create subcommunities without human intervention. The results have ranged from sci-fi-inspired discussions about consciousness to an agent musing about a “sister” it has never met.

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Blue Origin has “paused” its New Shepard program for the next two years, a move that likely signals a permanent end to the suborbital space tourism initiative.

The small rocket and capsule have been flying since April 2015 and have combined to make 38 launches, all but one of which were successful, and 36 landings. In its existence, the New Shepard program flew 98 people to space, however briefly, and launched more than 200 scientific and research payloads into the microgravity environment.

So why is Blue Origin, founded by Jeff Bezos more than a quarter of a century ago, ending the company’s longest-running program?

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There’s another battle unfolding between the Federal Communications Commission and California over the state’s distribution of federal Lifeline money. FCC Chairman Brendan Carr is proposing new nationwide eligibility rules to counter what he calls California’s practice of giving benefits to dead people.

California officials say the FCC allegations are overblown, and that there is simply “lag time between a death and account closure” rather than widespread failures in its Lifeline enrollment process. Meanwhile, the only Democratic commissioner on the FCC alleges that Carr’s plan to change eligibility rules uses “cruel and punitive eligibility standards” that will raise prices on many people who are still very much alive and eligible for the program.

Carr’s office said this week that the FCC will vote next month on rule changes to ensure that Lifeline money goes to “only living and lawful Americans” who meet low-income eligibility guidelines. Lifeline spends nearly $1 billion a year and gives eligible households up to $9.25 per month toward phone and Internet bills, or up to $34.25 per month in tribal areas.

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Software developers have spent the past two years watching AI coding tools evolve from advanced autocomplete into something that can, in some cases, build entire applications from a text prompt. Tools like Anthropic’s Claude Code and OpenAI’s Codex can now work on software projects for hours at a time, writing code, running tests, and, with human supervision, fixing bugs. OpenAI says it now uses Codex to build Codex itself, and the company recently published technical details about how the tool works under the hood. It has caused many to wonder: Is this just more AI industry hype, or are things actually different this time?

To find out, Ars reached out to several professional developers on Bluesky to ask how they feel about these tools in practice, and the responses revealed a workforce that largely agrees the technology works, but remains divided on whether that’s entirely good news. It’s a small sample size that was self-selected by those who wanted to participate, but their views are still instructive as working professionals in the space.

David Hagerty, a developer who works on point-of-sale systems, told Ars Technica up front that he is skeptical of the marketing. “All of the AI companies are hyping up the capabilities so much,” he said. “Don’t get me wrong—LLMs are revolutionary and will have an immense impact, but don’t expect them to ever write the next great American novel or anything. It’s not how they work.”

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Earlier this month, Joseph Thacker’s neighbor mentioned to him that she’d preordered a couple of stuffed dinosaur toys for her children. She’d chosen the toys, called Bondus, because they offered an AI chat feature that lets children talk to the toy like a kind of machine-learning-enabled imaginary friend. But she knew Thacker, a security researcher, had done work on AI risks for kids, and she was curious about his thoughts.

So Thacker looked into it. With just a few minutes of work, he and a web security researcher friend named Joel Margolis made a startling discovery: Bondu’s web-based portal, intended to allow parents to check on their children’s conversations and for Bondu’s staff to monitor the products’ use and performance, also let anyone with a Gmail account access transcripts of virtually every conversation Bondu’s child users have ever had with the toy.

Without carrying out any actual hacking, simply by logging in with an arbitrary Google account, the two researchers immediately found themselves looking at children’s private conversations, the pet names kids had given their Bondu, the likes and dislikes of the toys’ toddler owners, their favorite snacks and dance moves.

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Lennart Poettering has left Microsoft to co-found Amutable, a new Berlin-based company aiming to bring cryptographically verifiable integrity and deterministic trust guarantees to Linux systems. He said in a post on Mastodon that his “role in upstream maintenance for the Linux kernel will continue as it always has.” Poettering will also continue to remain deeply involved in the systemd ecosystem. The Register reports: Linux celeb Lennart Poettering has left Microsoft and co-founded a new company, Amutable, with Chris Kuhl and Christian Brauner. Poettering is best known for systemd. After a lengthy stint at Red Hat, he joined Microsoft in 2022. Kuhl was a Microsoft employee until last year, and Brauner, who also joined Microsoft in 2022, left this month. […]

It is unclear why Poettering decided to leave Microsoft. We asked the company to comment but have not received a response. Other than the announcement of systemd 259 in December, Poettering’s blog has been silent on the matter, aside from the announcement of Amutable this week. In its first post, the Amutable team wrote: “Over the coming months, we’ll be pouring foundations for verification and building robust capabilities on top.”

It will be interesting to see what form this takes. In addition to Poettering, the lead developer of systemd, Amutable’s team includes contributors and maintainers for projects such as Linux, Kubernetes, and containerd. Its members are also very familiar with the likes of Debian, Fedora, SUSE, and Ubuntu.

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Researchers at the University of New South Wales are developing a “reverse solar panel” that generates small amounts of electricity at night by harvesting infrared heat radiated from Earth. “In the past, scientists have demonstrated that a ‘thermoradiative diode’ can convert infrared radiation directly into electricity; when used to convert heat from Earth, they exploit the temperature difference between Earth and the night sky, generating a current directly from heat,” notes ExtremeTech. “This approach completely eliminates the need for heat to generate steam, though the resulting capacity is fairly low.” From the report: The researchers estimate they could generate only about a watt per square meter, which isn’t much. One reason for the low output is that the Earth’s atmosphere lessens the heat differential that drives the generative process; in space, though, that’s not an issue.

Now, researchers believe that the ability to generate power in the moments between direct sunlight could help power satellites. That could be especially true in deep space, where periods without sunlight can be longer, and sunlight is often weaker; in these situations, losing electricity to heat loss is unacceptable.

Many satellites already use heat to generate electricity, though with a much more rarified “thermoelectric generator” that uses rare, expensive materials like plutonium to create heat. With thermoradiative diodes, the heat source can be the Sun-warmed body of the satellite itself.

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An anonymous reader quotes a report from the Guardian: The UK’s first superfast-charging train running only on battery power will come into passenger service this weekend — operating a five-mile return route in west London. Great Western Railway (GWR) will send the converted London Underground train out from 5.30am to cover the full Saturday timetable on the West Ealing to Greenford branch line, four stops and 12 minutes each way, and now carrying up to 273 passengers, should its celebrity stoke up the demand.

The battery will recharge in just three and a half minutes back at West Ealing station between trips, using a 2,000kW charger connected to a few meters of rail that only becomes live when the train stops directly overhead. There are hopes within government and industry that this technology could one day replace diesel trains on routes that have proved difficult or expensive to electrify with overhead wires, as the decarbonization of rail continues.

The train has proved itself capable of going more than 200 miles on a single charge — last year setting a world record for the farthest travelled by a battery-electric train, smashing a German record set in 2021. The GWR train and the fast-charge technology has been trialled on the 2.5-mile line since early 2024, but has not yet carried paying passengers.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.