Cloudflare says it blocked 416 billion AI scraping attempts in five months and warns that AI is reshaping the internet's economic model -- with Google's combined crawler creating a monopoly-style dilemma where opting out of AI means disappearing from search altogether. Tom's Hardware reports: "The business model of the internet has always been to generate content that drive traffic and then sell either things, subscriptions, or ads, [Cloudflare CEO Matthew Prince] told Wired. "What I think people don't realize, though, is that AI is a platform shift. The business model of the internet is about to change dramatically. I don't know what it's going to change to, but it's what I'm spending almost every waking hour thinking about."

While Cloudflare blocks almost all AI crawlers, there's one particular bot it cannot block without affecting its customers' online presence -- Google. The search giant combined its search and AI crawler into one, meaning users who opt out of Google's AI crawler won't be indexed in Google search results. "You can't opt out of one without opting out of both, which is a real challenge -- it's crazy," Prince continued. "It shouldn't be that you can use your monopoly position of yesterday in order to leverage and have a monopoly position in the market of tomorrow."

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: A Donald Trump-backed push has failed to wedge a federal measure that would block states from passing AI laws for a decade into the National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA). House Majority Leader Steve Scalise (R-La.) told reporters Tuesday that a sect of Republicans is now "looking at other places" to potentially pass the measure. Other Republicans opposed including the AI preemption in the defense bill, The Hill reported, joining critics who see value in allowing states to quickly regulate AI risks as they arise.

For months, Trump has pressured the Republican-led Congress to block state AI laws that the president claims could bog down innovation as AI firms waste time and resources complying with a patchwork of state laws. But Republicans have continually failed to unite behind Trump's command, first voting against including a similar measure in the "Big Beautiful" budget bill and then this week failing to negotiate a solution to pass the NDAA measure. [...]

"We MUST have one Federal Standard instead of a patchwork of 50 State Regulatory Regimes," Trump wrote on Truth Social last month. "If we don't, then China will easily catch us in the AI race. Put it in the NDAA, or pass a separate Bill, and nobody will ever be able to compete with America." If Congress bombs the assignment to find another way to pass the measure, Trump will likely release an executive order to enforce the policy. Republicans in Congress had dissuaded Trump from releasing a draft of that order, requesting time to find legislation where they believed an AI moratorium could pass. "The controversial proposal had faced backlash from a nationwide, bipartisan coalition of state lawmakers, parents, faith leaders, unions, whistleblowers, and other public advocates," the NDAA, a bipartisan group that lobbies for AI safety laws, said in a press release.

This "widespread and powerful" movement "clapped back" at Republicans' latest "rushed attempt to sneak preemption through Congress," Brad Carson, ARI's president, said, because "Americans want safeguards that protect kids, workers, and families, not a rules-free zone for Big Tech."

Ancient Slashdot user Alain Williams shares a report from Al Jazeera: The Irish Council for Civil Liberties (ICCL) has announced it filed a complaint against Microsoft, accusing the global tech giant of unlawfully processing data on behalf of the Israeli military and facilitating the killings of Palestinian civilians in Gaza. In the complaint, the council asked the Data Protection Commission -- the European Union's lead data regulator for the company -- to "urgently investigate" Microsoft Ireland's processing.

"Microsoft's technology has put millions of Palestinians in danger. These are not abstract data-protection failures -- they are violations that have enabled real-world violence," Joe O'Brien, ICCL's executive director, said in a statement. "When EU infrastructure is used to enable surveillance and targeting, the Irish Data Protection Commission must step in -- and it must use its full powers to hold Microsoft to account."

After months of complaints from rights groups and Microsoft whistleblowers, the company said in September it cancelled some services to the Israeli military over concerns that it was violating Microsoft's terms of service by using cloud computing software to spy on millions of Palestinians.

Russia has blocked Apple's FaceTime and the gaming platform Roblox as part of a broader crackdown on foreign tech platforms. CBC News reports: Both restrictions are part of an accelerating clampdown on foreign tech platforms: In the case of FaceTime, Russian authorities allege it is being used for criminal activity, while Roblox was accused of distributing extremist materials and "LGBT propaganda." The move follows restrictions against Google's YouTube, Meta's WhatsApp and the Telegram messaging service.

Critics say the curbs amount to censorship and a tightening of state control over private communications. Russia says they are legitimate law enforcement measures. Russian authorities have this year launched a state-backed rival app called Max, which critics say could be used for surveillance -- allegations that state media have dismissed as false.

Justifying its decision, the communications regulator, Roskomnadzor, said in an emailed statement: "According to law enforcement agencies, FaceTime is being used to organize and carry out terrorist attacks in the country, recruit perpetrators, and commit fraud and other crimes against Russian citizens." The watchdog did not cite evidence in support of the allegations.

Longtime Slashdot reader williamyf writes: The Italian company Bending Spoons seems to be on an acquisitions spree. Their recent acquisitions of AOL and Vimeo are not yet finalized, yet on Dec. 2 they announced they are buying Eventbrite, a company specializing in publicizing and organizing local events, for just half a milliard USD. Bending Spoons' portfolio also includes other companies like Evernote and WeTransfer. Further reading: Private Equity Hipsters Are Coming For Your Favorite Apps (2024)

An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Verge's Sean Hollister If you wrote off the Steam Frame as yet another VR headset few will want to wear, I guarantee you're not alone. But the Steam Frame isn't just a headset; it's a Trojan horse that contains the tech gamers need to play Steam games on the next Samsung Galaxy, the next Google Pixel, perhaps Arm gaming notebooks to come. I know, because I'm already using that tech on my Samsung Galaxy. There is no official Android version of Hollow Knight: Silksong, one of the best games of 2025, but that doesn't have to stop you anymore. Thanks to a stack of open-source technologies, including a compatibility layer called Proton and an emulator called Fex, games that were developed for x86-based Windows PCs can now run on Linux-based phones with the Arm processor architecture. With Proton, the Steam Deck could already do the Windows-to-Linux part; now, Fex is bridging x86 and Arm, too.

This stack is what powers the Steam Frame's own ability to play Windows games, of course, and it was widely reported that Valve is using the open-source Fex emulator to make it happen. What wasn't widely reported: Valve is behind Fex itself. In an interview, Valve's Pierre-Loup Griffais, one of the architects behind SteamOS and the Steam Deck, tells The Verge that Valve has been quietly funding almost all the open-source technologies required to play Windows games on Arm. And because they're open-source, Valve is effectively shepherding a future where Arm phones, laptops, and desktops could freely do the same. He says the company believes game developers shouldn't be wasting time porting games if there's a better way.

Remember when the Steam Deck handheld showed that a decade of investment in Linux could make Windows gaming portable? Valve paid open-source developers to follow their passions to help achieve that result. Valve has been guiding the effort to bring games to Arm in much the same way: In 2016 and 2017, Griffais tells me, the company began recruiting and funding open-source developers to bring Windows games to Arm chips. Fex lead developer Ryan Houdek tells The Verge he chatted with Griffais himself at conferences those years and whipped up the first prototype in 2018. He tells me Valve pays enough that Fex is his full-time job. "I want to thank the people from Valve for being here from the start and allowing me to kickstart this project," he recently wrote.

India has withdrawn its order requiring Apple and other smartphone makers to preinstall the government's Sanchar Saathi app after public backlash and privacy concerns. AppleInsider reports: On November 28, the India Ministry of Communication issued a secret directive to Apple and other smartphone manufacturers, requiring the preinstallation of a government-backed app. Less than a week later, the order has been rescinded. The withdrawal on Wednesday means Apple doesn't have to preload the Sanchar Saathi app onto iPhones sold in the country, in a way that couldn't be "disabled or restricted." [...]

In pulling back from the demand, the government insisted that the app had an "increasing acceptance" among citizens. There was a tenfold spike of new user registrations on Tuesday alone, with over 600,000 new users made aware of the app from the public debacle. India Minister of Communications Jyotiraditya Scindia took a moment to insist that concerns the app could be used for increased surveillance were unfounded. "Snooping is neither possible nor will it happen" with the app, Scindia claimed.

"This is a welcome development, but we are still awaiting the full text of the legal order that should accompany this announcement, including any revised directions under the Cyber Security Rules, 2024," said the Internet Freedom Foundation. It is treating the news with "cautious optimism, not closure," until formalities conclude. However, while promising, the backdown doesn't stop India from retrying something similar or another tactic in the future.

Despite Windows 10 losing free support, Statcounter shows Windows 11 holding only a modest lead of 53.7% market share compared to Windows 10's 42.7%. Analysts say the slow transition reflects both hardware limitations and a lack of must-have Windows 11 features compelling organizations to refresh their fleets. The Register reports: The Register spoke to Lansweeper principal technical evangelist Esben Dochy, who noted that consumers were more likely to have devices that couldn't be upgraded or follow the "if it ain't broke, don't fix it" rule when it comes to change. He also pointed out consumers in the EU get Microsoft Extended Security Updates (ESU) for free.

For businesses, though, it's different. Dochy told us: "The primary blocker is slow change management processes. These can be slow due to bad planning, lack of resources, difficulty in execution (in highly distributed organizations) etc. "The ESU are used to be secure while those change management processes take place, but organizations will have to pay to get those ESU making it more expensive for unprepared or inefficient organizations." [...]

The challenge facing Windows 11 is that, other than the end of free support for many versions, there is no must-have feature to make enterprises break a hardware refresh cycle, particularly in a difficult economic environment. Microsoft has not released official statistics on Windows 11 adoption. However, hardware vendors have noted the sluggish pace of transition. Dell COO Jeffrey Clarke commented during an analyst call: "If you were to look at it relative to the previous OS end of support, we are 10-12 points behind at that point with Windows 11 than we were with the previous generation."

OpenAI has reportedly issued a "code red" on Monday, pausing projects like ads, shopping agents, health tools, and its Pulse assistant to focus entirely on improving ChatGPT. "This includes core features like greater speed and reliability, better personalization, and the ability to answer more questions," reports The Verge, citing a memo reported by the Wall Street Journal and The Information. "There will be a daily call for those tasked with improving the chatbot, the memo said, and Altman encouraged temporary team transfers to speed up development." From the report: The newfound urgency illustrates an inflection point for OpenAI as it spends hundreds of billions of dollars to fund growth and figures out a path to future profitability. It is also something of a full-circle moment in the AI race. Google, which declared its own "code red" after the arrival of ChatGPT, is a particular concern. Google's AI user base is growing -- helped by the success of popular tools like the Nano Banana image model -- and its latest AI model, Gemini 3, blew past its competitors on many industry benchmarks and popular metrics.

Apple does not plan to comply with India's mandate to preload its smartphones with a state-owned cyber safety app that cannot be disabled. According to Reuters, the order "sparked surveillance concerns and a political uproar" after it was revealed on Monday. From the report: In the wake of the criticism, India's telecom minister Jyotiraditya M. Scindia on Tuesday said the app was a "voluntary and democratic system," adding that users can choose to activate it and can "easily delete it from their phone at any time." At present, the app can be deleted by users. Scindia did not comment on or clarify the November 28 confidential directive that ordered smartphone makers to start preloading it and ensure "its functionalities are not disabled or restricted."

Apple however does not plan to comply with the directive and will tell the government it does not follow such mandates anywhere in the world as they raise a host of privacy and security issues for the company's iOS ecosystem, said two of the industry sources who are familiar with Apple's concerns. They declined to be named publicly as the company's strategy is private. "Its not only like taking a sledgehammer, this is like a double-barrel gun," said the first source.

AWS is deepening its partnership with Nvidia by adopting "NVLink Fusion" in its upcoming Trainium4 AI chips. "The NVLink technology creates speedy connections between different kinds of chips and is one of Nvidia's crown jewels," notes Reuters. From the report: Nvidia has been pushing to sign up other chip firms to adopt its NVLink technology, with Intel, Qualcomm and now AWS on board. The technology will help AWS build bigger AI servers that can recognize and communicate with one another faster, a critical factor in training large AI models, in which thousands of machines must be strung together. As part of the Nvidia partnership, customers will have access to what AWS is calling AI Factories, exclusive AI infrastructure inside their own data centers for greater speed and readiness.

Separately, Amazon said it is rolling out new servers based on a chip called Trainium3. The new servers, available on Tuesday, each contain 144 chips and have more than four times the computing power of AWS's previous generation of AI, while using 40% less power, Dave Brown, vice president of AWS compute and machine learning services, told Reuters. Brown did not give absolute figures on power or performance, but said AWS aims to compete with rivals -- including Nvidia -- based on price. "Together, Nvidia and AWS are creating the compute fabric for the AI industrial revolution - bringing advanced AI to every company, in every country, and accelerating the world's path to intelligence," Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang said in a statement.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from the Wall Street Journal: The Trump administration has agreed to inject up to $150 million into a startup (source paywalled; alternative source) trying to develop more advanced semiconductor manufacturing techniques in the U.S., its latest bid to support strategically important domestic industries with government incentives. Under the arrangement, the Commerce Department would give the incentives to xLight, a startup trying to improve the critical chip-making process known as extreme ultraviolet lithography, the agency said in a Monday release. In return, the government would get an equity stake that would likely make it xLight's largest shareholder.

The Dutch firm ASML is currently the only global producer of EUV machines, which can cost hundreds of millions of dollars each. XLight is seeking to improve on just one component of the EUV process: the crucially important lasers that etch complex microscopic patterns onto chemical-treated silicon wafers. The startup is hoping to integrate its light sources into ASML's machines. XLight represents a second act for Pat Gelsinger, the former chief executive of Intel who was fired by the board late last year after the chip maker suffered from weak financial performance and a stalled manufacturing expansion. Gelsinger serves as executive chairman of xLight's board.

[...] The xLight deal uses funding from the 2022 Chips and Science Act allocated for earlier stage companies with promising technologies. It is the first Chips Act award in President Trump's second term and is a preliminary agreement, meaning it isn't finalized and could change. "This partnership would back a technology that can fundamentally rewrite the limits of chipmaking," Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick said in the release.

Pat Gelsinger, the former Intel CEO who was pushed out in late 2024 during a five-year turnaround effort, told the Financial Times that the "decay" he found when he returned to the company in 2021 was "deeper and harder than I'd realized." In the five years before his return, "not a single product was delivered on schedule," he said. "Basic disciplines" had been lost. "It's like, wow, we don't know how to engineer anymore!"

Gelsinger was also unsparing about the Biden administration's implementation of the 2022 Chips Act, legislation he spent more time lobbying for than any other CEO. "Two and a half years later [and] no money is dispensed? I thought it was hideous!" There's what Gelsinger carefully calls "a touch of irony" in how things played out.

Intel's board forced him out four years into a five-year plan, then picked successor Lip-Bu Tan -- who Gelsinger says is following the same broad strategy. Tan has kept Intel in the manufacturing game and delivered the 18A process node within the five years Gelsinger originally promised. Asked what went wrong, Gelsinger conceded he was "very focused on managing 'down'" and should have managed "up" more. He also would have pushed harder for more semiconductor expertise on the board, he said.

"The internet is being increasingly polluted by AI generated text, images and video," argues the site for a new browser extension called Slop Evader. It promises to use Google's search API "to only return content published before Nov 30th, 2022" — the day ChatGPT launched — "so you can be sure that it was written or produced by the human hand."

404 Media calls it "a scorched earth approach that virtually guarantees your searches will be slop-free." Slop Evader was created by artist and researcher Tega Brain, who says she was motivated by the growing dismay over the tech industry's unrelenting, aggressive rollout of so-called "generative AI" — despite widespread criticism and the wider public's distaste for it. "This sowing of mistrust in our relationship with media is a huge thing, a huge effect of this synthetic media moment we're in," Brain told 404 Media, describing how tools like Sora 2 have short-circuited our ability to determine reality within a sea of artificial online junk. "I've been thinking about ways to refuse it, and the simplest, dumbest way to do that is to only search before 2022...."

Currently, Slop Evader can be used to search pre-GPT archives of seven different sites where slop has become commonplace, including YouTube, Reddit, Stack Exchange, and the parenting site MumsNet. The obvious downside to this, from a user perspective, is that you won't be able to find anything time-sensitive or current — including this very website, which did not exist in 2022. The experience is simultaneously refreshing and harrowing, allowing you to browse freely without having to constantly question reality, but always knowing that this freedom will be forever locked in time — nostalgia for a human-centric world wide web that no longer exists.

Of course, the tool's limitations are part of its provocation. Brain says she has plans to add support for more sites, and release a new version that uses DuckDuckGo's search indexing instead of Google's. But the real goal, she says, is prompting people to question how they can collectively refuse the dystopian, inhuman version of the internet that Silicon Valley's AI-pushers have forced on us... With enough cultural pushback, Brain suggests, we could start to see alternative search engines like DuckDuckGo adding options to filter out search results suspected of having synthetic content (DuckDuckGo added the ability to filter out AI images in search earlier this year)... But no matter what form AI slop-refusal takes, it will need to be a group effort.

The Free Software Foundation describes how "After months of preparation and excitement, we finally came together on November 21 for a global online hackathon to support free software projects and "put a spotlight on the difficult and often thankless work that free software hackers carry out..."

Based on how many of you dropped in over the weekend and were incredibly engaged in the important work that is improving free software, either as a spectator or as a participant, this goal was accomplished. And it's all thanks to you!

Friday started a little rocky with a datacenter outage affecting most FSF services. Participants spread out to work on six different free software projects over forty-eight hours as our tech team worked to restore all FSF sites with the help and support of the community. Over three hundred folks were tuned in at a time, some to participate in the hackathon and others to follow the progress being made. As a community, we got a lot done over the weekend...

It was amazing to see so many of you take a little (or a lot of!) time out of your busy schedules to improve free software, and we're incredibly grateful for each and every one of you. It really energizes us and shows us how much we can accomplish when we work together over even just a couple days. Not only was this a fantastic sight to see because of the work we got done, but it was also a very fitting way to conclude our fortieth anniversary celebration events. Free software has been and always will be a community effort, one that continues to get better and better because of the dedicated developers, contributors, and users who ensure its existence. Thank you for celebrating forty years of the FSF and fighting for a freer future for us all.