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It's "the curious case of... the Pokémon Go pro who celebrated too hard," reports the gaming news site Aftermath. It all started on the first weekend in April... Firestar73, a competitive Pokémon Go player who placed seventh at last year's world championships, managed to narrowly cinch a game-five finals win at the 2026 Pokémon Orlando Regional Championships after battling his way out of the dreaded losers' bracket. As stress and adrenaline gave way to relief, Firestar73 stood up from his chair…

The Conversation published this warning from privacy/tech law/electronic surveillance attorney Anne Toomey McKenna (also an affiliated faculty member at Penn State's Institute for Computational and Data Sciences). The U.S. government "is able to purchase Americans' sensitive data because the information it buys is not subject to the same restrictions as information it collects directly. The federal government is also ramping up its abilities to directly collect data through partnerships with pr…

An anonymous reader shared this report from the Associated Press: The 1986 Chernobyl disaster fueled global fears about nuclear power and slowed its development in Europe and elsewhere. Four decades later, however, there's a revival around the world, a trend that has been given a big boost by war in the Middle East. Over 400 nuclear reactors are operational in 31 countries, while about 70 more are under construction. Nuclear power accounts for producing about 10% of the world's electricity, equ…

The AI industry is largely failing to ask a key design question, argues theoretical neuroscientist/cognitive scientist Vivienne Ming. Are their AI products building human capacity or consuming it? In the Wall Street Journal Ming shares her experiment about which group performed best at predicting real-world events (compared to forecasters on prediction market Polymarket) — AI, human, or human-AI hybrid teams. The human groups performed poorly, relying on instinct or whatever information had com…

America's National Science Board (NSB) "was established in 1950 to guide the governance of the National Science Foundation," writes the Washington Post, "in an unusual structure within the federal government that echoes the setup of a company board in the private sector. It helps guide an agency that operates Antarctic research stations, telescopes, a fleet of research vessels and supports basic science research in laboratories across the United States." (NSF research has helped evolve the tech…

After Australia banned social media for users younger than 16, teenagers "immediately worked to circumvent the restrictions," reports Fortune: 14-year-old in New South Wales, told The Washington Post in December 2025, just before the implementation of the ban, she planned to use her mother's face ID to log in to Snapchat and . In a Reddit thread on ways to bypass the ban, one user suggested using a printed mesh face mask from Temu to outsmart apps' facial recognition tools. Others still have tr…

Colorado's "age-attestation" bill left the House committee with new exemptions for open-source operating systems, applications, code repositories, and containerized software distribution, reports the blog Linuxiac: [The bill] focuses on operating system providers and application stores. Its main requirement is that these providers supply an age-related signal via an interface, so applications can determine whether a user is a minor... System76 founder Carl Richell shared on Fosstodon that the u…

There's a glass roof — but no rear-view window. Instead the Polestar 4 replaces the rear-view mirror with a live feed from a wide-angle camera. Its high-resolution display (1480 x 320 pixels) promises "a panoramic view of the outside," according to Polestar's web site, showing more of what's behind you. "Visibility in the dark and in rainy conditions is also vastly improved." Besides the camera feed (and side mirrors), the Polestar 4 offers four short-range cameras (for 360-degree views), and e…

Microsoft released the "Windows Subsystem for Linux" in 2016, adding an optional Linux environment into every operating system since Windows 10. But now an open source developer has brought Linux to Windows 95, Windows 98, and Windows Me, reports the blog It's FOSS, "with Linux kernel 6.19 running alongside the Windows 9x kernel, letting both operate on the same machine at the same time." A virtual device driver handles initialization, loads the kernel off disk and manages the event loop for pa…

"Old code like amateur radio and NFC have long been a burden to core networking developers," reads the pull request. And so Thursday Linus Torvald merged the pull request "to rid the Linux kernel of the old Integrated Services Digital Network (ISDN) subsystem," reports Phoronix, "and various other old network drivers largely for PCMCIA era network adapters." This was the code suggested for removal given the recent influx of AI/LLM-generated bug reports against this dated code that likely has no…

It's the U.S. government's main link to the AI industry, reports The Washington Post, working to assess national security risks of new models like Anthropic's "Mythos". To run it they'd hired Collin Burns, who'd worked at OpenAI and then Anthropic. But Burns started work Monday at the Center for AI Standards and Innovation — and then "was pushed out Thursday by the White House, according to the people, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to describe private conversations." Officials were co…

The Free Software Foundation's Licensing and Compliance Manager published a blog post this week to explicitly state that"Responsible AI" Licenses (RAIL) are nonfree and unethical. The licenses restrict AI and ML software "from being used in a specific list of harmful applications," according to the license's web site, "e.g. in surveillance and crime prediction." (The license's steering committee is volunteers from multiple academic institutions.) But even though Responsible AI licenses are mark…

Intel's stock price soared 24% Friday. It's the stock's largest single-day spike since since October 1987, reports CNBC, "as investors cheered signs of renewed growth due to mounting artificial intelligence demand." The stock closed at $82.57 and is now up 124% this year after jumping 84% in 2025. Friday's rally topped a 23% gain for the stock on Sept. 18, when Nvidia agreed to invest $5 billion in the company... "INTC's new CEO fixed the balance sheet, and is executing on a strategy that appea…

Physicists have proposed a new kind of atomic clock based on a revived superradiant laser concept that could produce an extraordinarily stable signal with a linewidth around 100 microhertz, potentially the narrowest ever for an optical laser. "The implications of this result could stretch well beyond timekeeping," reports Phys.org. "A laser immune to environmental frequency shifts would be a powerful tool in optical interferometry -- using interference patterns in light to make ultra-precise me…

An anonymous reader quotes a report from NPR: The Food and Drug Administration approved the first gene therapy to restore hearing for people who were born deaf. The decision, while only immediately affecting people born with a very rare form of genetic deafness, is being hailed as a milestone in the quest to treat hearing loss. "It's the first time in history there's a new drug for hearing loss," says Zheng-Yi Chen, an associate scientist at Mass Eye and Ear in Boston who was not involved in th…