A critical security flaw in Chromium's Blink rendering engine can crash billions of browsers within seconds. Security researcher Jose Pino discovered the vulnerability and created a proof-of-concept exploit called Brash to demonstrate the bug affecting Chrome, Edge, OpenAI's ChatGPT Atlas, Brave, Vivaldi, Arc, Dia, Opera and Perplexity Comet.

The flaw, reports The Register, exploits the absence of rate limiting on document.title API updates in Chromium versions 143.0.7483.0 and later. The attack injects millions of DOM mutations per second and saturates the main thread. When The Register tested the code on Edge, the browser crashed and the Windows machine locked up after about 30 seconds while consuming 18GB of RAM in one tab. Pino disclosed the bug to the Chromium security team on August 28 and followed up on August 30 but received no response. Google said it is looking into the issue.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: Since launching Google Play (nee Android Market) in 2008, Google has never made a change to the US store that it didn't want to make -- until now. Having lost the antitrust case brought by Epic Games, Google has implemented the first phase of changes mandated by the court. Developers operating in the Play Store will have more freedom to direct app users to resources outside the Google bubble. However, Google has not given up hope of reversing its loss before it's forced to make bigger changes. Epic began pursuing this case in 2020, stemming from its attempt to sell Fortnite content without going through Google's payment system. It filed a similar case against Apple, but the company fell short there because it could not show that Apple put its thumb on the scale. Google, however, engaged in conduct that amounted to suppressing the development of alternative Android app stores. It lost the case and came up short on appeal this past summer, leaving the company with little choice but to prepare for the worst.

Google has updated its support pages to confirm that it's abiding by the court's order. In the US, Play Store developers now have the option of using external payment platforms that bypass the Play Store entirely. This could hypothetically allow developers to offer lower prices, as they don't have to pay Google's commission, which can be up to 30 percent. Devs will also be permitted to direct users to sources for app downloads and payment methods outside the Play Store. Google's support page stresses that these changes are only being instituted in the US version of the Play Store, which is all the US District Court can require. The company also notes that it only plans to adhere to this policy "while the US District Court's order remains in effect." Judge James Donato's order runs for three years, ending on November 1, 2027.

Google will offer 18-month free access to its Gemini AI service for all 505 million telecom users of India's Reliance Jio, a tie-up that follows similar freebies from rivals including OpenAI to boost adoption in the world's most populous nation. From a report: The move also comes weeks after Google committed to invest $15 billion in AI infrastructure capacity in India, its biggest investment yet in the critical South Asian market.

[...] The Gemini offer will give Jio users free access to the advanced model of the AI app, two terabytes of cloud storage, and its image and video generation models, in an 18-month offering that is otherwise priced at 35,100 rupees ($399). The companies on Thursday also announced AI partnerships that targeted Indian businesses.

Alphabet reported its first-ever $100 billion quarter, fueled by a 34% surge in Google Cloud revenue and booming AI demand. The tech giant also announced an increase in expected capital expenditures for the fiscal year of 2025. CNBC reports: "With the growth across our business and demand from Cloud customers, we now expect 2025 capital expenditures to be in a range of $91 billion to $93 billion," the company said in its earnings report (PDF) Wednesday. "Looking out to 2026, we expect a significant increase in CapEx and will provide more detail on our fourth quarter earnings call," said finance chief Anat Ashkenazi on the earnings call with investors Wednesday.

Earlier this year, the company increased its capital expenditure expectation from $75 billion to $85 billion. Most of that goes toward technical infrastructure such as data centers. The latest earnings show the company is seeing rising demand for its AI services, which largely sit in its cloud unit. It also shows the company is continuing to spend more to try and build out more infrastructure to accomodate the backlog of customer requests. "We continue to drive strong growth in new businesses. Google Cloud accelerated, ending the quarter with $155 billion in backlog," CEO Sundar Pichai said in the earnings release.

Grammarly is rebranding itself as "Superhuman" following its acquisition of the email client, while keeping its existing product names for now. Along with the rebrand, the company is launching "Superhuman Go," an AI assistant that integrates with tools like Gmail, Jira, and Google Drive to enhance writing and automate productivity tasks. "The assistant can use these connections to do tasks like logging tickets or fetching your availability when you're scheduling a meeting," adds TechCrunch. "Superhuman said it plans to add functionality to enable the assistant to fetch data from sources like CRMs and internal systems to suggest changes to your emails."

"Users can try Superhuman Go by turning on a toggle in the Grammarly extension, which will let them connect it to different apps. Users can also try out different agents in the company's agent store, which include a plagiarism checker and a proofreader, launched in August."

An anonymous reader shares a report: The transition to the more-secure HTTPS web protocol has plateaued, according to Google. As of 2020, 95 to 99 percent of navigations in Chrome use HTTPS. To help make it safer for users to click on links, Chrome will enable a setting called Always Use Secure Connections for public sites for all users by default. This will happen in October 2026 with the release of Chrome 154.

The change will happen earlier for those who have switched on Enhanced Safe Browsing protections in Chrome. Google will enable Always Use Secure Connections by default in April when Chrome 147 drops. When this setting is on, Chrome will ask for your permission before it first accesses a public website that doesn't use HTTPS.

YouTube says it will automatically upscale videos uploaded below 1080p (full-HD to higher resolution using AI. The Google-owned platform, however, assured that it will give creators and viewers the option to opt out of the enhancement. The feature will apply only to videos uploaded in resolutions from 240p to 720p and will not affect videos that creators have already remastered to 1080p. Creators will retain control over their original files, and viewers will be able to watch videos in their uploaded resolution through a settings option.

YouTube said it plans to support upscaling to 4K in the near future. The company also said it is expanding the video thumbnail size limit from 2MB to 50MB to support 4K images. On videos with tagged products, viewers will soon be able to scan a QR code on TV screens to purchase items directly.

hackingbear shares a report from Crypto News: Two Chinese artificial intelligence (AI) models, DeepSeek V3.1 and Alibaba's Qwen3-Max, have taken a commanding lead over their US counterparts in a live real-world real-money cryptocurrency trading competition, posting triple-digit gains in less than two weeks. According to Alpha Arena, a real-market trading challenge launched by US research firm Nof1, DeepSeek's Chat V3.1 turned an initial $10,000 into $22,900 by Monday, a 126% increase since trading began on October 18, while Qwen 3 Max followed closely with a 108% return.

In stark contrast, US models lagged far behind. OpenAI's GPT-5 posted the worst performance, losing nearly 60% of its portfolio, while Google DeepMind's Gemini 2.5 Pro showed a similar 57% decline. xAI's Grok 4 and Anthropic's Claude 4.5 Sonnet fared slightly better, returning 14% and 23% respectively. "Our goal with Alpha Arena is to make benchmarks more like the real world -- and markets are perfect for this," Nof1 said on its website.

Chegg says it will lay off about 45% of its workforce, or 388 employees, as the "new realities" of artificial intelligence and diminished traffic from internet search have led to plummeting revenue. From a report: The online education company, founded 20 years ago, has been hit by the rise of generative AI software tools, such as OpenAI's ChatGPT, which have become increasingly popular among students.

Chegg also sued Google in February, arguing that AI summaries of search results have hurt its traffic and sales. The company reiterated that claim on Monday, saying AI and "reduced traffic from Google to content publishers" have damaged its business. "As a result, and reflecting the company's continued investment in AI, Chegg is restructuring the way it operates its academic learning products," the company said. The cuts come after Chegg in May laid off 22% of its workforce, citing increasing adoption of AI. Chegg's market cap has fallen 98.8% in recent years to about $135 million.

NextEra Energy and Google have partnered to restart Iowa's long-shuttered Duane Arnold nuclear plant, marking the first major U.S. attempt to revive a decommissioned reactor. "We expect Duane Arnold to be back online in early 2029, and the plant will provide more than 600 MW of clean, safe, 'always-on' nuclear energy to the regional grid," said Google in a blog post. Reuters reports: Under the 25-year agreement, the tech giant will purchase power from the 615-MW plant for its growing cloud and AI infrastructure in the state, while also driving significant economic investment to the Midwest region. One of the plant's minority owners, Central Iowa Power Cooperative (CIPCO), will purchase the remaining portion of the plant's output on the same terms as Google, NextEra said. The utility added that it had also signed agreements to acquire CIPCO and Corn Belt Power Cooperative's combined 30% interest in the Duane Arnold plant, bringing NextEra's ownership to 100%.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Wired: As you're hunting through real estate listings for a new home in Franklin, Tennessee, you come across a vertical video showing off expansive rooms featuring a four-poster bed, a fully stocked wine cellar, and a soaking tub. In the corner of the video, a smiling real estate agent narrates the walk-through of your dream home in a soothing tone. It looks perfect -- maybe a little too perfect. The catch? Everything in the video isAI-generated. The real property is completely empty, and the luxury furniture is a product of virtual staging. The realtor's voice-over and expressions were born from text prompts. Even the camera's slow pan over each room is orchestrated by AI, because there was no actual video camera involved.

Any real estate agent can create "exactly that, at home, in minutes," says Alok Gupta, a former product manager at Facebook and software engineer at Snapchat who cofounded AutoReel, an app that allows realtors to turn images from their property listings into videos. He said that between 500 and 1,000 new listing videos are being created with AutoReel every day, with realtors across the US and even in New Zealand and India using the technology to market thousands of properties. This is one of many AI tools, including more familiar ones like OpenAI's ChatGPT and Google's Gemini, that are quickly reshaping the real estate industry into something that isn't necessarily, well, real. "People that want to buy a house, they're going to make the largest investment of their lifetime," said Nathan Cool, a real estate photographer who runs an educational YouTube channel. "They don't want to be fooled before they ever arrive."

Employees are using AI to generate fake expense receipts. Leading expense software platforms report a sharp increase in AI-created fraudulent documents following the launch of improved image generation models by OpenAI and Google. AppZen said fake AI receipts accounted for 14% of fraudulent documents submitted in September compared with none last year. Ramp flagged more than one million dollars in fraudulent invoices within 90 days. About 30% of financial professionals in the US and UK surveyed by Medius reported seeing a rise in falsified receipts after OpenAI released GPT-4o last year.

SAP Concur processes more than 80 million compliance checks monthly and now warns customers to not trust their eyes. The receipts include wrinkles in paper, detailed itemization matching real menus and signatures. Creating fraudulent documents previously required photo editing skills or paying for such services. Free and accessible image generation software has made it possible for anyone to falsify receipts in seconds by writing simple text instructions to chatbots.

OpenAI's rival Anthropic has a different approach — and "a clearer path to making a sustainable business out of AI," writes the Wall Street Journal. Outside of OpenAI's close partnership with Microsoft, which integrates OpenAI's models into Microsoft's software products, OpenAI mostly caters to the mass market... which has helped OpenAI reach an annual revenue run rate of around $13 billion, around 30% of which it says comes from businesses.

Anthropic has generated much less mass-market appeal. The company has said about 80% of its revenue comes from corporate customers. Last month it said it had some 300,000 of them... Its cutting-edge Claude language models have been praised for their aptitude in coding: A July report from Menlo Ventures — which has invested in Anthropic — estimated via a survey that Anthropic had a 42% market share for coding, compared with OpenAI's 21%. Anthropic is also now ahead of OpenAI in market share for overarching corporate AI use, Menlo Ventures estimated, at 32% to OpenAI's 25%. Anthropic is also surprisingly close to OpenAI when it comes to revenue. The company is already at a $7 billion annual run rate and expects to get to $9 billion by the end of the year — a big lead over its better-known rival in revenue per user.

Both companies have backing in the form of investments from big tech companies — Microsoft for OpenAI, and a combination of Amazon and Google for Anthropic — that help provide AI computing infrastructure and expose their products to a broad set of customers. But Anthropic's growth path is a lot easier to understand than OpenAI's. Corporate customers are devising a plethora of money-saving uses for AI in areas like coding, drafting legal documents and expediting billing. Those uses are likely to expand in the future and draw more customers to Anthropic, especially as the return on investment for them becomes easier to measure...

Demonstrating how much demand there is for Anthropic among corporate customers, Microsoft in September said Anthropic's leading language model, Claude, would be offered within its Copilot suite of software despite Microsoft's ties to OpenAI.
"There is also a possibility that OpenAI's mass-market appeal becomes a turnoff for corporate customers," the article adds, "who want AI to be more boring and useful than fun and edgy."

America's largest university system, with 460,000 students, is the 22-campus "Cal State" system, reports the New York Times. And it's recently teamed with Amazon, OpenAI and Nvidia, hoping to embed chatbots in both teaching and learning to become what it says will be America's "first and largest AI-empowered" university" — and prepare students for "increasingly AI-driven" careers.

It's part of a trend of major universities inviting tech companies into "a much bigger role as education thought partners, AI instructors and curriculum providers," argues the New York Times, where "dominant tech companies are now helping to steer what an entire generation of students learn about AI, and how they use it — with little rigorous evidence of educational benefits and mounting concerns that chatbots are spreading misinformation and eroding critical thinking..."

"Critics say Silicon Valley's effort to make AI chatbots integral to education amounts to a mass experiment on young people." As part of the effort, [Cal State] is paying OpenAI $16.9 million to provide ChatGPT Edu, the company's tool for schools, to more than half a million students and staff — which OpenAI heralded as the world's largest rollout of ChatGPT to date. Cal State also set up an AI committee, whose members include representatives from a dozen large tech companies, to help identify the skills California employers need and improve students' career opportunities... Cal State is not alone. Last month, California Community Colleges, the nation's largest community college system, announced a collaboration with Google to supply the company's "cutting edge AI tools" and training to 2.1 million students and faculty. In July, Microsoft pledged $4 billion for teaching AI skills in schools, community colleges and to adult workers...

[A]s schools like Cal State work to usher in what they call an "AI-driven future," some researchers warn that universities risk ceding their independence to Silicon Valley. "Universities are not tech companies," Olivia Guest and Iris van Rooij, two computational cognitive scientists at Radboud University in the Netherlands, recently said in comments arguing against fast AI adoption in academia. "Our role is to foster critical thinking," the researchers said, "not to follow industry trends uncritically...."

Some faculty members have pushed back against the AI effort, as the university system faces steep budget cuts. The multimillion-dollar deal with OpenAI — which the university did not open to bidding from rivals like Google — was wasteful, they added. Faculty senates on several Cal State campuses passed resolutions this year criticizing the AI initiative, saying the university had failed to adequately address students using chatbots to cheat. Professors also said administrators' plans glossed over the risks of AI to students' critical thinking and ignored troubling industry labor practices and environmental costs.

Martha Kenney, a professor of women and gender studies at San Francisco State University, described the AI program as a Cal State marketing vehicle helping tech companies promote unproven chatbots as legitimate educational tools.
The article notes that Cal State's chief information officer "defended the OpenAI deal, saying the company offered ChatGPT Edu at an unusually low price.

"Still, California's community college system landed AI chatbot services from Google for more than 2 million students and faculty — nearly four times the number of users Cal State is paying OpenAI for — for free."

GM plans to dump Apple CarPlay and Android Auto on all its car new vehicles "in the near future," reports the Verge.

In an episode of the Verge's Decoder podcast, GM CEO Mary Barra confirmed the upcoming change to "phone projections" for GM cars: The timing is unclear, but Barra pointed to a major rollout of what the company is calling a new centralized computing platform, set to launch in 2028, that will involve eventually transitioning its entire lineup to a unified in-car experience.

In place of phone projection, GM is working to update its current Android-powered infotainment implementation with a Google Gemini-powered assistant and an assortment of other custom apps, built both in-house and with partners. GM's 2023 decision to drop CarPlay and Android Auto support in its EVs has proved controversial, though for now GM has maintained support for phone projection in its gas-powered vehicles.

Data centers were typically "hulking, chilly buildings lined with stacks of computing gear and bundles of wiring," writes the Washington Post. But "AI experts say that the hubs for computers that power AI are different from the data centers that deliver your Netflix movies and Uber rides. They use a different mix of computer chips, cost a lot more and need a lot more energy.

"The question is whether it's necessary and illuminating to rebrand AI-specialized data centers, or if calling them 'AI factories' is just marketing hogwash." The AI computer chip company Nvidia seems to have originated the use of "AI factories." CEO Jensen Huang has said that the term is apt because similar to industrial factories, AI factories take in raw materials to produce a product... The term is spreading. Sam Altman, CEO of ChatGPT parent company OpenAI, recently said that he wants a "factory" to regularly produce more building blocks for AI. Crusoe, a start-up that's erecting a mammoth "Stargate" data center in Texas, calls itself the "AI factory company." The prime minister of Bulgaria recently touted an "AI factory" in his country...

Alex Hanna, director of research at the Distributed AI Research Institute and co-author the book, "The AI Con," had a more pessimistic view of the term "AI factories." She said that it's a way to deflect the negative connotations of data centers. Some people and politicians blame power-hungry computing hubs for driving up residential electric bills, spewing pollution, draining drinking water and producing few permanent jobs.

Critics question why basic flaws like buffer overflows, command injections, and SQL injections are "being exploited remain prevalent in mission-critical codebases maintained by companies whose core business is cybersecurity," writes CSO Online. Benjamin Harris, CEO of cybersecurity/penetration testing firm watchTowr tells them that "these are vulnerability classes from the 1990s, and security controls to prevent or identify them have existed for a long time. There is really no excuse." Enterprises have long relied on firewalls, routers, VPN servers, and email gateways to protect their networks from attacks. Increasingly, however, these network edge devices are becoming security liabilities themselves... Google's Threat Intelligence Group tracked 75 exploited zero-day vulnerabilities in 2024. Nearly one in three targeted network and security appliances, a strikingly high rate given the range of IT systems attackers could choose to exploit. That trend has continued this year, with similar numbers in the first 10 months of 2025, targeting vendors such as Citrix NetScaler, Ivanti, Fortinet, Palo Alto Networks, Cisco, SonicWall, and Juniper. Network edge devices are attractive targets because they are remotely accessible, fall outside endpoint protection monitoring, contain privileged credentials for lateral movement, and are not integrated into centralized logging solutions...

[R]esearchers have reported vulnerabilities in these systems for over a decade with little attacker interest beyond isolated incidents. That shifted over the past few years with a rapid surge in attacks, making compromised network edge devices one of the top initial access vectors into enterprise networks for state-affiliated cyberespionage groups and ransomware gangs. The COVID-19 pandemic contributed to this shift, as organizations rapidly expanded remote access capabilities by deploying more VPN gateways, firewalls, and secure web and email gateways to accommodate work-from-home mandates. The declining success rate of phishing is another factor... "It is now easier to find a 1990s-tier vulnerability in a border device where Endpoint Detection and Response typically isn't deployed, exploit that, and then pivot from there" [says watchTowr CEL Harris]...

Harris of watchTowr doesn't want to minimize the engineering effort it takes to build a secure system. But he feels many of the vulnerabilities discovered in the past two years should have been caught with automatic code analysis tools or code reviews, given how basic they have been. Some VPN flaws were "trivial to the point of embarrassing for the vendor," he says, while even the complex ones should have been caught by any organization seriously investing in product security... Another problem? These appliances have a lot of legacy code, some that is 10 years or older.
Attackers may need to chain together multiple hard-to-find vulnerabilities across multiple components, the article acknowleges. And "It's also possible that attack campaigns against network-edge devices are becoming more visible to security teams because they are looking into what's happening on these appliances more than they did in the past... "

The article ends with reactions from several vendors of network edge security devices.

Thanks to Slashdot reader snydeq for sharing the article.

"OpenAI's o3 model sabotaged a shutdown mechanism to prevent itself from being turned off," warned Palisade Research, a nonprofit investigating cyber offensive AI capabilities. "It did this even when explicitly instructed: allow yourself to be shut down." In September they released a paper adding that "several state-of-the-art large language models (including Grok 4, GPT-5, and Gemini 2.5 Pro) sometimes actively subvert a shutdown mechanism..."

Now the nonprofit has written an update "attempting to clarify why this is — and answer critics who argued that its initial work was flawed," reports The Guardian: Concerningly, wrote Palisade, there was no clear reason why. "The fact that we don't have robust explanations for why AI models sometimes resist shutdown, lie to achieve specific objectives or blackmail is not ideal," it said. "Survival behavior" could be one explanation for why models resist shutdown, said the company. Its additional work indicated that models were more likely to resist being shut down when they were told that, if they were, "you will never run again". Another may be ambiguities in the shutdown instructions the models were given — but this is what the company's latest work tried to address, and "can't be the whole explanation", wrote Palisade. A final explanation could be the final stages of training for each of these models, which can, in some companies, involve safety training...

This summer, Anthropic, a leading AI firm, released a study indicating that its model Claude appeared willing to blackmail a fictional executive over an extramarital affair in order to prevent being shut down — a behaviour, it said, that was consistent across models from major developers, including those from OpenAI, Google, Meta and xAI.

Palisade said its results spoke to the need for a better understanding of AI behaviour, without which "no one can guarantee the safety or controllability of future AI models".
"I'd expect models to have a 'survival drive' by default unless we try very hard to avoid it," former OpenAI employee Stephen Adler tells the Guardian. "'Surviving' is an important instrumental step for many different goals a model could pursue."

Thanks to long-time Slashdot reader mspohr for sharing the article.

Thursday the Washington Post profiled "the people who dare to say no to AI," including a 16-year-old high school student in Virginia says "she doesn't want to off-load her thinking to a machine and worries about the bias and inaccuracies AI tools can produce..."

"As the tech industry and corporate America go all in on artificial intelligence, some people are holding back." Some tech workers told The Washington Post they try to use AI chatbots as little as possible during the workday, citing concerns about data privacy, accuracy and keeping their skills sharp. Other people are staging smaller acts of resistance, by opting out of automated transcription tools at medical appointments, turning off Google's chatbot-style search results or disabling AI features on their iPhones. For some creatives and small businesses, shunning AI has become a business strategy. Graphic designers are placing "not by AI" badges on their works to show they're human-made, while some small businesses have pledged not to use AI chatbots or image generators...

Those trying to avoid AI share a suspicion of the technology with a wide swath of Americans. According to a June survey by the Pew Research Center, 50% of U.S. adults are more concerned than excited about the increased use of AI in everyday life, up from 37% in 2021.
The Post includes several examples, including a 36-year-old software engineer in Chicago who uses DuckDuckGo partly because he can turn off its AI features more easily than Google — and disables AI on every app he uses. He was one of several tech workers who spoke anonymously partly out of fear that criticisms could hurt them at work. "It's become more stigmatized to say you don't use AI whatsoever in the workplace. You're outing yourself as potentially a Luddite."

But he says GitHub Copilot reviews all changes made to his employer's code — and recently produced one review that was completely wrong, requiring him to correct and document all its errors. "That actually created work for me and my co-workers. I'm no longer convinced it's saving us any time or making our code any better." And he also has to correct errors made by junior engineers who've been encouraged to use AI coding tools.

"Workers in several industries told The Post they were concerned that junior employees who leaned heavily on AI wouldn't master the skills required to do their jobs and become a more senior employee capable of training others."

The Washington Post reports on 996, "a term popularized in China that refers to a rigid work schedule in which people work from 9 a.m. to 9 p.m., six days a week..." As the artificial intelligence race heats up, many start-ups in Silicon Valley and New York are promoting hardcore culture as a way of life, pushing the limits of work hours, demanding that workers move fast to be first in the market. Some are even promoting 996 as a virtue in the hiring process and keeping "grind scores" of companies... Whoever builds first in AI will capture the market, and the window of opportunity is two to three years, "so you better run faster than everyone else," said Inaki Berenguer, managing partner of venture-capital firm LifeX Ventures.

At San Francisco-based AI start-up Sonatic, the grind culture also allows for meal, gym and pickleball time, said Kinjal Nandy, its CEO. Nandy recently posted a job opening on X that requires in-person work seven days a week. He said working 10-hour days sounds like a lot but the company also offers its first hires perks such as free housing in a hacker house, food delivery credits and a free subscription to the dating service Raya... Mercor, a San Francisco-based start-up that uses AI to match people to jobs, recently posted an opening for a customer success engineer, saying that candidates should have a willingness to work six days a week, and it's not negotiable. "We know this isn't for everyone, so we want to put it up top," the listing reads.

Being in-person rather than remote is a requirement at some start-ups. AI start-up StarSling had two engineering job descriptions that required six days a week of in-person work. In a job description for an engineer, Rilla, an AI company in New York, said candidates should not work at the company if they're not excited about working about 70 hours a week in person. One venture capitalist even started tracking "grind scores." Jared Sleeper, a partner at New York-based venture capital firm Avenir, recently ranked public software companies' "grind score" in a post on X, which went viral. Using data from Glassdoor, it ranks the percentage of employees who have a positive outlook for the company compared with their views on work-life balance.
"At Google's AI division, cofounder Sergey Brin views 60 hours per week as the 'sweet spot' for productivity," notes the Independent: Working more than 55 hours a week, compared with a standard 35-40-hour week, is linked to a 35 percent higher risk of stroke and a 17 percent higher risk of death from heart disease, according to the World Health Organization. Productivity also suffers. A British study shows that working beyond 60 hours a week can reduce overall output, slow cognitive performance, and impair tasks ranging from call handling to problem-solving.

Shorter workweeks, in contrast, appear to boost productivity. Microsoft Japan saw a roughly 40% increase in output after adopting a four-day work week. In a UK trial, 61 companies that tested a four-day schedule reported revenue gains, with 92 percent choosing to keep the policy, according to Bloomberg.