Apple Sued by App Developer Over its Continuity Camera | | An anonymous reader shares a report: Apple is being sued by Reincubate, which makes the Camo smartphone webcam app. It has filed a lawsuit against Apple in a U.S. federal court in New Jersey, accusing the company of anticompetitive conduct and patent infringement. The suit alleges that Apple copied Camo's technology, integrated similar features into iOS, and used control over its software ecosystem to disadvantage Reincubate's Camo product.
Reincubate's Camo and Camo Studio apps allow iOS or Android phones to function as webcams for Mac and PCs. The company launched Camo in 2020. In 2022, Apple introduced Continuity Camera, a feature that enables iPhones to serve as webcams for Macs but works only within Apple's device ecosystem. According to the lawsuit, Apple copied patented features from Camo and built them into iOS to "redirect user demand to Apple's own platform-tied offering." Read more of this story at Slashdot. |
Tim Berners-Lee Wants Us To Take Back the Internet | | mspohr shares a report: When Sir Tim Berners-Lee invented the world wide web in 1989, his vision was clear: it would used by everyone, filled with everything and, crucially, it would be free. Today, the British computer scientist's creation is regularly used by 5.5 billion people -- and bears little resemblance to the democratic force for humanity he intended.
Since Berners-Lee's disappointment a decade ago, he's thrown everything at a project that completely shifts the way data is held on the web, known as the Solid (social linked data) protocol. It's activism that is rooted in people power -- not unlike the first years of the web.
This version of the internet would turbocharge personal sovereignty and give control back to users. Berners-Lee has long seen AI -- which exists only because of the web and its data -- as having the potential to transform society far beyond the boundaries of self-interested companies. But now is the time, he says, to put guardrails in place so that AI remains a force for good -- and he's afraid the chance may pass humankind by. Berners-Lee traces the web's corruption to the commercialization of the domain name system in the 1990s, when the .com space was "pounced on by charlatans." The 2016 US elections, he said, revealed to him just how toxic his creation could become. A corner of the web, he says, has been "optimised for nastiness" -- extractive, surveillance-heavy, and designed to maximize engagement at the cost of user wellbeing.
His answer is Solid, a protocol that gives users control through personal data "pods" functioning as secure backpacks of information. The Flanders government in Belgium already uses Solid pods for its citizens. On AI, his optimism remains dim. "The horse is bolting," he says, calling for a "Cern for AI" where scientists could collaboratively develop superintelligence under contained, non-commercial oversight. Read more of this story at Slashdot. |
What's the 'Best' Month for New Movies and Music? A Statistical Analysis | | An analysis of film and music release patterns has found that summer and late fall are the optimal windows for movie premieres, while the music industry has no clear "best" month -- only a worst one, December, which the report's author dubbed "Dump-cember."
For films, the calendar splits into distinct strategic zones. Summer months and holidays see elevated box office because audiences have more free time, and studios chase mega-billion-dollar hits during these windows. October and November see a surge of prestige releases as studios cluster their Oscar hopefuls to keep them fresh in voters' minds when awards season begins in January.
The Silence of the Lambs, which swept the Academy Awards' Big Four categories in 1992, remains the only Best Picture winner in seven decades to have been released in January -- the industry's infamous "Dump-uary." The music industry operates differently. Most months are interchangeable for album releases, but December is uniquely bad. Artists avoid it because they would compete against Christmas classics from Bing Crosby and Andy Williams, both dead for decades. Albums released in December also receive weaker critical reception as measured by Pitchfork scores, and labels quietly slot their least promising projects into this low-attention window. Read more of this story at Slashdot. |
430,000-Year-Old Wooden Tools Are the Oldest Ever Found | | Early hominins in Europe were creating tools from raw materials hundreds of thousands of years before Homo sapiens arrived there, two new studies indicate, pushing back the established time for such activity. From a report: The evidence includes a 500,000-year-old hammer made of elephant or mammoth bone, excavated in southern England, and 430,000-year-old wooden tools found in southern Greece -- the earliest wooden tools on record.
The findings suggest that early humans possessed sophisticated technological skills, the researchers said. Katerina Harvati, a paleoanthropologist at the University of Tubingen in Germany and a lead author of the wooden-tool paper, which was published on Monday in the journal PNAS, said the discoveries provided insight into the prehistoric origins of human intelligence. Silvia Bello, a paleoanthropologist at London's Natural History Museum and an author on the elephant-bone study, which was published last week in Science Advances, concurred.
The artifacts in both studies, recovered from coal-mine sites, were probably produced by early Neanderthals or a preceding species, Homo heidelbergensis. Homo sapiens emerged in Africa more than 300,000 years ago, and the oldest evidence of them in Europe is a 210,000-year-old fossil unearthed in Greece. By the time Homo sapiens established themselves in Britain 40,000 years ago, other hominins had already lived there for nearly a million years. Read more of this story at Slashdot. |
30,000 More UPS Jobs On the Chopping Block as Amazon Era Ends | | UPS said today it plans to eliminate an additional 30,000 operational jobs this year as the shipping giant continues to wind down its partnership with Amazon -- previously its largest customer -- and push forward a broader turnaround strategy under CEO Carol Tome.
CFO Brian Dykes said on an earnings call that the cuts will be accomplished through attrition and a voluntary separation program for full-time drivers. The company also plans to further deploy automation across its network. UPS has identified 24 buildings for closure in the first half of 2026 and expects to reduce operational hours by approximately 25 million as the Amazon relationship unwinds.
Last year, UPS eliminated 48,000 jobs -- 34,000 operational and 14,000 management -- and closed 93 buildings. The company expects $3 billion in total savings from the Amazon unwind. Read more of this story at Slashdot. |
Android's Full Desktop Mode Surfaces in Accidental Chromium Leak | | A bug report filed on the Chromium Issue Tracker inadvertently exposed Google's desktop Android interface for the first time, revealing a system codenamed "Aluminum OS" running on existing Chromebook hardware. The report, ostensibly about Chrome Incognito tabs, included screen captures from an HP Elite Dragonfly 13.5 Chromebook running Android 16.
The status bar has been redesigned for large screens -- taller than the tablet version, displaying time with seconds, date, battery, Wi-Fi, a notification bell, keyboard language indicator and a Gemini icon. The taskbar remains identical to the current implementation, though the mouse cursor now features a subtle tail. Chrome's interface includes an Extensions button, a feature currently exclusive to the desktop browser. Window controls mirror ChromeOS, placing minimize, fullscreen, and close buttons at the top-right. Read more of this story at Slashdot. |
Amazon Cuts Another 16,000 Jobs | | Amazon announced on Wednesday that it is eliminating approximately 16,000 roles across the company as part of organizational changes that began in October 2025 and are only now being finalized by certain teams. Senior Vice President Beth Galetti shared the news in a memo to employees, framing the reductions as an effort to reduce layers, increase ownership, and remove bureaucracy. The memo follows another memo that the company accidentally sent to employees. Read more of this story at Slashdot. |
'Clawdbot' Has AI Techies Buying Mac Minis | | An open-source AI agent originally called Clawdbot (now renamed Moltbot) is gaining cult popularity among developers for running locally, 24/7, and wiring itself into calendars, messages, and other personal workflows. The hype has gone so far that some users are buying Mac Minis just to host the agent full-time, even as its creator warns that's unnecessary. Business Insider reports: Founded by [creator Peter Steinberger], it's an AI agent that manages "digital life," from emails to home automation. Steinberger previously founded PSPDFKit. In a key distinction from ChatGPT and many other popular AI products, the agent is open source and runs locally on your computer. Users then connect the agent to a messaging app like WhatsApp or Telegram, where they can give it instructions via text.
The AI agent was initially named after the "little monster" that appears when you restart Claude Code, Steinberger said on the "Insecure Agents" podcast. He formed the tool around the question: "Why don't I have an agent that can look over my agents?" [...] It runs locally on your computer 24/7. That's led some people to brush off their old laptops. "Installed it experimentally on my old dusty Intel MacBook Pro," one product designer wrote. "That machine finally has a purpose again."
Others are buying up Mac Minis, Apple's 5"-by-5" computer, to run the AI. Logan Kilpatrick, a product manager for Google DeepMind, posted: "Mac mini ordered." It could give a sales boost to Apple, some X users have pointed out -- and online searches for "Mac Mini" jumped in the last 4 days in the US, per Google Trends. But Steinberger said buying a new computer just to run the AI isn't necessary. "Please don't buy a Mac Mini," he wrote. "You can deploy this on Amazon's Free Tier." Read more of this story at Slashdot. |
Asteroid 2024 YR4 Has a 4% Chance of Hitting the Moon | | An anonymous reader quotes a report from Universe Today: There's a bright side to every situation. In 2032, the Moon itself might have a particularly bright side if it is blasted by a 60-meter-wide asteroid. The chances of such an event are still relatively small (only around 4%), but non-negligible. And scientists are starting to prepare both for the bad (massive risks to satellites and huge meteors raining down on a large portion of the planet) and the good (a once in a lifetime chance to study the geology, seismology, and chemical makeup of our nearest neighbor). A new paper from Yifan He of Tsinghua University and co-authors, released in pre-print form on arXiv, looks at the bright side of all of the potential interesting science we can do if a collision does, indeed, happen. If Asteroid 2024 YR4 were to hit the Moon, researchers would be able to watch a large lunar impact unfold in real time and collect data on extreme collisions that usually exist only in computer models. Telescopes could follow how a newly formed crater and its pool of molten rock cool and solidify, while the resulting moonquake would offer a clearer picture of its internal structure via the seismic waves it sends through the Moon.
Furthermore, researchers could compare the fresh crater to older ones to improve our understanding of the Moon's long history of impacts. Debris blasted off the surface could even deliver small lunar samples to Earth.
Altogether, it would be a once-in-a-generation chance to learn more about how the Moon/rocky worlds respond to powerful impacts. Read more of this story at Slashdot. |
Ancient Martian Beach Discovered, Providing New Clues To Planet's Habitability | | alternative_right shares a report from Phys.org: New findings from NASA's Perseverance rover have revealed evidence of wave-formed beaches and rocks altered by subsurface water in a Martian crater that once held a vast lake -- considerably expanding the timeline for potential habitability at this ancient site. In an international study led by Imperial College London, researchers uncovered that the so-called 'Margin unit' in Mars's Jezero crater preserves evidence of extensive underground interactions between rock and water, as well as the first definitive traces of an ancient shoreline.
These are compelling indicators that habitable, surface water conditions persisted in the crater (home to a large lake around 3.5 billion years ago) further back in time than previously thought. "Shorelines are habitable environments on Earth, and the carbonate minerals that form here can naturally seal in and preserve information about the ancient environment," said lead author Alex Jones, a Ph.D. researcher in the Department of Earth Science and Engineering (ESE) at Imperial. The findings have been published in the Journal of Geophysical Research: Planets. Read more of this story at Slashdot. |
Amazon Inadvertently Announces Cloud Unit Layoffs In Email To Employees | | Amazon appears to have prematurely acknowledged layoffs inside AWS after an internal email referencing "organizational changes" and "impacted colleagues" was mistakenly sent to cloud employees. CNBC reports: "Changes like this are hard on everyone," Colleen Aubrey, senior vice president of applied AI solutions at Amazon Web Services, wrote in an email viewed by CNBC. "These decisions are difficult and are made thoughtfully as we position our organization and AWS for future success." The note also references a post from Amazon's HR boss Beth Galetti and said the company notified "impacted colleagues in our organization." The subject of the email mentions "Project Dawn," and the email says it was "canceled," possibly indicating it was recalled by the sender after the fact. It's unclear what Project Dawn refers to.
The job cuts come after Amazon announced in October that it would lay off 14,000 corporate employees. At the time, the company indicated the cuts would continue in 2026 as it found "additional places we can remove layers." Amazon CEO Andy Jassy said the layoffs were meant to reduce management layers and bureaucracy inside the company. He also predicted last June that efficiency gains from AI would shrink Amazon's corporate staff in the coming years. Read more of this story at Slashdot. |
US Government Lost More Than 10,000 STEM PhDs Last Year | | An anonymous reader quotes a report from Science.org: Some 10,109 doctoral-trained experts in science and related fields left their jobs last year as President Donald Trump dramatically shrank the overall federal workforce. That exodus was only 3% of the 335,192 federal workers who exited last year but represents 14% of the total number of Ph.D.s in science, technology, engineering, and math (STEM) or health fields employed at the end of 2024 as then-President Joe Biden prepared to leave office. The numbers come from employment data posted earlier this month by the White House Office of Personnel Management (OPM). At 14 research agencies Science examined in detail, departures outnumbered new hires last year by a ratio of 11 to one, resulting in a net loss of 4224 STEM Ph.D.s. The graphs that follow show the impact is particularly striking at such scientist-rich agencies as the National Science Foundation (NSF). But across the government, these departing Ph.D.s took with them a wealth of subject matter expertise and knowledge about how the agencies operate.
[...] Science's analysis found that reductions in force, or RIFs, accounted for relatively few departures in 2025. Only at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, where 16% of the 519 STEM Ph.D.s who left last year got pink RIF slips, did the percentage exceed 6%, and some agencies reported no STEM Ph.D. RIFs in 2025. At most agencies, the most common reasons for departures were retirements and quitting. Although OPM classifies many of these as voluntary, outside forces including the fear of being fired, the lure of buyout offers, or a profound disagreement with Trump policies, likely influenced many decisions to leave. Many Ph.D.s departed because their position was terminated. Read more of this story at Slashdot. |
Apple Updates iOS 12 For the First Time Since 2023 | | Apple quietly released its first update to iOS 12 since 2023 to keep iMessage, FaceTime, and device activation working on older hardware through January 2027. The update applies to legacy devices like the iPhone 5S, iPhone 6/6 Plus, and 2013-era iPads. Macworld reports: The update appears to be related to a specific issue. According to Apple's "About iOS 12 Updates" page, iOS 12.5.78 "extends the certificate required by features such as iMessage, FaceTime, and device activation to continue working after January 2027." Meanwhile, the iOS 16 update says it "provides important bug fixes and is recommended for all users."
When iOS 13 arrived, it dropped compatibility for the iPhone 5S, iPhone 6, and iPhone 6 Plus, as well as the 2013 iPad Air and iPad Mini 3, so users of those phones should specifically take note. To update to the latest version, head over to the Settings app, then General and Software Update, and follow the instructions. Further reading: Apple Launches AirTag 2 With Improved Range, Louder Speaker Read more of this story at Slashdot. |
Scientists Launch AI DinoTracker App That Identifies Dinosaur Footprints | | Scientists have released DinoTracker, a free AI-powered app that identifies dinosaur footprints by analyzing shape patterns rather than relying on potentially flawed historical labels. "When we find a dinosaur footprint, we try to do the Cinderella thing and find the foot that matches the slipper," said Prof Steve Brusatte, a co-author of the work. "But it's not so simple, because the shape of a dinosaur footprint depends not only on the shape of the dinosaur's foot but also the type of sand or mud it was walking through, and the motion of its foot." The Guardian reports: [...] Brusatte, [Dr Gregor Hartmann, the first author of the new research from Helmholtz-Zentrum in Germany] and colleagues fed their AI system with 2,000 unlabelled footprint silhouettes. The system then determined how similar or different the imprints were from each other by analysing a range of features it identified as meaningful. The researchers discovered these eight features reflected variations in the imprints' shapes, such as the spread of the toes, amount of ground contact and heel position. The team have turned the system into a free app called DinoTracker that allows users to upload the silhouette of a footprint, explore the seven other footprints most similar to it and manipulate the footprint to see how varying the eight features can affect which other footprints are deemed most similar. Hartmann said that at present experts had to double check if factors such as the material the footprints were made in, and their age, matched the scientific hypothesis, but the system clustered prints with those expected from classifications made by human experts about 90% of the time. The findings have been published in the journal PNAS. Read more of this story at Slashdot. |
SoundCloud Data Breach Impacts 29.8 Million Accounts | | A data breach at SoundCloud exposed information tied to 29.8 million user accounts, according to Have I Been Pwned. While SoundCloud says no passwords or financial data were accessed, attackers mapped email addresses to public profile data and later attempted extortion. BleepingComputer reports: The company confirmed the breach on December 15, following widespread reports from users who were unable to access SoundCloud and saw 403 "Forbidden" errors when connecting via VPN. SoundCloud told BleepingComputer at the time that it had activated its incident response procedures after detecting unauthorized activity involving an ancillary service dashboard. "We understand that a purported threat actor group accessed certain limited data that we hold," SoundCloud said. "We have completed an investigation into the data that was impacted, and no sensitive data (such as financial or password data) has been accessed. The data involved consisted only of email addresses and information already visible on public SoundCloud profiles."
While SoundCloud didn't provide further details regarding the incident, BleepingComputer learned that the breach affected 20% of all SoundCloud users, roughly 28 million accounts based on publicly reported user figures (SoundCloud later published a security notice confirming the information provided by BleepingComputer's sources). After the breach, BleepingComputer also learned that the ShinyHunters extortion gang was responsible for the attack, with sources saying that the threat group was also attempting to extort SoundCloud. This was confirmed by SoundCloud in a January 15 update, which said the threat actors had "made demands and deployed email flooding tactics to harass users, employees, and partners." Read more of this story at Slashdot. |
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