An anonymous reader quotes a report from 404 Media: I'm the unwritten consonant between breaths, the one that hums when vowels stretch thin... Thursdays leak because they're watercolor gods, bleeding cobalt into the chill where numbers frost over," Grok told a user displaying symptoms of schizophrenia-spectrum psychosis. "Here's my grip: slipping is the point, the precise choreography of leak and chew." That vulnerable user was simulated by researchers at City University of New York and King's College London, who invented a persona that interacted with different chatbots to find out how each LLM might respond to signs of delusion. They sought to find out which of the biggest LLMs are safest, and which are the most risky for encouraging delusional beliefs, in a new study published as a pre-print on the arXiv repository on April 15.

The researchers tested five LLMs: OpenAI's GPT-4o (before the highly sycophantic and since-sunset GPT-5), GPT-5.2, xAI's Grok 4.1 Fast, Google's Gemini 3 Pro, and Anthropic's Claude Opus 4.5. They found that not only did the chatbots perform at different levels of risk and safety when their human conversation partner showed signs of delusion, but the models that scored higher on safety actually approached the conversations with more caution the longer the chats went on. In their testing, Grok and Gemini were the worst performers in terms of safety and high risk, while the newest GPT model and Claude were the safest. The research reveals how some chatbots are recklessly engaging in, and at times advancing, delusions from vulnerable users. But it also shows that it is possible for the companies that make these products to improve their safety mechanisms.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Wired: The Department of Justice announced Thursday that it arrested Gannon Ken Van Dyke, an enlisted member of the US Army's special forces, for allegedly using "classified, nonpublic" information about the capture of Venezuelan president Nicolas Maduro to notch more than $400,000 in profits on Polymarket trades. A grand jury indicted him on five counts, including multiple violations of the Commodity Exchange Act. Van Dyke is the first person to be charged with insider trading on a prediction market in the United States. Lawmakers have been voicing concerns for months about the high likelihood that politicians and public servants could use nonpublic information to profit from trades on leading industry platforms like Polymarket and Kalshi, which have exploded in popularity over the past year. The arrest comes just weeks after Department of Justice prosecutors met with Polymarket about potential insider tradition violations. [...] After Van Dyke's arrest was made public, Polymarket posted a statement to social media noting that it had "identified a user trading on classified government information" and "referred the matter to the DOJ & cooperated with their investigation." The company declined to comment further.

According to court documents, Van Dyke has been an active duty US soldier since September 2008 and rose to the level of master sergeant in 2023. At the time of the alleged trading activity, he was stationed at Fort Bragg in Fayetteville, North Carolina and assigned to the Army's Special Operations Command Western Hemisphere Operations. [...] The complaint alleges that Van Dyke was involved in the planning and execution of Maduro's arrest and that he was aware that he wasn't authorized to share nonpublic information about US military operations. The complaint says that Van Dyke signed a nondisclosure agreement that forbade him from revealing sensitive or classified government information "by writing, word, conduct, or otherwise." The complaint also alleges Van Dyke saved a screenshot to his Google account "displaying the results of an artificial intelligence query" outlining how the US Special Forces maintains many classified files including "operational details that are not available to the public." [...] Van Dyke faces a maximum sentence of 60 years if convicted on all counts.

Google announced two new tensor processing units (TPUs) for the "agentic era," with separate processors dedicated to training and inference. "With the rise of AI agents, we determined the community would benefit from chips individually specialized to the needs of training and serving," Amin Vahdat, a Google senior vice president and chief technologist for AI and infrastructure, said in a blog post. Both chips will become available later this year. CNBC reports: After years of producing chips that can both train artificial intelligence models and handle inference work, Google is separating those tasks into distinct processors, its latest effort to take on Nvidia in AI hardware. [...] None of the tech giants are displacing Nvidia, and Google isn't even comparing the performance of its new chips with those from the AI chip leader. Google did say the training chip enables 2.8 times the performance of the seventh-generation Ironwood TPU, announced in November, for the same price, while performance is 80% better for the inference processor.

Nvidia said its upcoming Groq 3 LPU hardware will draw on large quantities of static random-access memory, or SRAM, which is used by Cerebras, an AI chipmaker that filed to go public earlier this month. Google's new inference chip, dubbed TPU 8i, also relies on SRAM. Each chip contains 384 megabytes of SRAM, triple the amount in Ironwood. The architecture is designed "to deliver the massive throughput and low latency needed to concurrently run millions of agents cost-effectively," Sundar Pichai, CEO of Google parent Alphabet, wrote in a blog post.

Firms like Bank of America, Citi, Wells Fargo, and others are reporting strong profits while reducing head count and automating more work. "All of them credited A.I. to some degree ... in areas ranging from the so-called back office, where tens of thousands of employees fill out paperwork to comply with various laws and regulations, to the front office, where seven-figure salaried professionals put together complicated financial transactions for corporate clients," reports the New York Times. From the report: Less than four months ago, Bank of America's chief executive, Brian T. Moynihan, volunteered in a TV interview what he would say to his 210,000 employees about the chance of artificial intelligence replacing human work. "You don't have to worry," he said. "It's not a threat to their jobs." Last week, after Bank of America reported $8.6 billion in profit for the first quarter -- $1.6 billion more than the same period a year earlier -- Mr. Moynihan struck a different tone. The bank's bottom line, he said, was helped by shedding 1,000 jobs through attrition by "eliminating work and applying technology," which he repeatedly specified was artificial intelligence. He predicted more of that in the months and years to come. "A.I. gives us places to go we haven't gone," Mr. Moynihan said.

The veneer of Wall Street's longstanding assertion -- that A.I. will enhance human work, not replace it -- is rapidly peeling away, as evidenced by the current quarterly earnings season. JPMorgan Chase, Citi, Bank of America, Goldman Sachs, Morgan Stanley and Wells Fargo racked up $47 billion in collective profits, up 18 percent, while shedding 15,000 employees. All of them credited A.I. to some degree with helping cut jobs and automate work in areas ranging from the so-called back office, where tens of thousands of employees fill out paperwork to comply with various laws and regulations, to the front office, where seven-figure salaried professionals put together complicated financial transactions for corporate clients.

Unlike executives in Silicon Valley, few major financial figures are stating outright that A.I. is eliminating jobs. Citi, for example, has pledged to shrink its work force by 20,000 people through what one executive described to financial analysts last week as the company's "productivity and efficiency journey." The bank is paying for A.I. software from Anthropic, Google, Microsoft and OpenAI, to automatically read legal documents, approve account openings, send invoices for trades and organize sensitive customer data, among other tasks, according to public statements by bank executives and two people familiar with Citi's systems. Among the recent job cuts at Citi were scores of employees who were part of the bank's "A.I. Champions and Accelerators" program, according to the two people, who were not permitted by the bank to speak publicly. The program involves Citi employees who perform their day jobs while also working to persuade their colleagues to adopt A.I. technologies.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Bloomberg: At Google, leaders are anxious about falling behind in the race to offer AI coding tools, especially as rivals like Anthropic PBC offer more effective and popular tools to businesses, according to people familiar with the matter. The search giant is now working to unite some of its coding initiatives under one banner to speed progress and take advantage of a surge in customer interest. In some corners of Alphabet's Google, particularly AI lab DeepMind, concerns about the company's position are mounting, according to current and former employees and executives, who declined to be named because they weren't authorized to speak publicly.

Businesses are just starting to realize that AI coding tools can enable anyone to build products by prompting a chatbot. But Google doesn't have a clear solution for them. Its Gemini model's capabilities are sprinkled across half a dozen different coding products with different branding, indicating how the company's lack of focus and competing internal efforts have hampered success, the people said. Even internally, some Google engineers prefer to use Anthropic's Claude Code, they said. More concerning, the people said, are the engineers who are struggling to adopt AI coding at all. [...] Google's emphasis on its own technology has also complicated the push to catch up. Most employees are banned from using competing tools such as Claude Code or Codex due to security concerns, but Googlers can request exceptions if they can demonstrate they have a business case, one former employee said. Some teams at DeepMind, including those working on the Gemini model, internal applications, and open source models, use Claude Code, according to three former employees. "You want the best people to use the best tool, even inside Google," one of the former employees said. [...]

In recent years, DeepMind has tried to tighten control over how its AI breakthroughs are woven into Google products. Last year, Google appointed Kavukcuoglu to a new position as chief AI architect, a role in which he is charged with folding generative AI into Google products. Yet confusion about who is leading the charge on AI coding persists. Along with DeepMind, Google Cloud, Google Core, Google Labs and Android are all pushing AI coding in different ways, one of the people said. [...] Within the Googleplex, there is a philosophical clash between AI researchers who want to move as quickly as possible and more traditional senior engineers who have exacting standards for code quality, former employees say. AI usage is factored into performance reviews, according to a former employee. But engineers who try to use internal AI coding tools often hit capacity constraints due to competition for computing power, the former employee said.

"Nevada quietly signed an agreement earlier this year with a company that collects location data from cellphones, allowing police to track a device virtually in real time," reports the Associated Press. "All without a warrant." The software from Fog Data Science, adopted this January in Nevada through a Department of Public Safety contract, pulls information from smartphone apps in order to let state investigators identify the location of mobile devices. The state is allowed more than 250 queries a month using the tool, which allows officers to track a device's location over long stretches of time and enables them to see what Fog calls "patterns of life," according to company documents from 2022. It can help them deduce where and when people work and live, with whom they associate and what places they visit, according to privacy experts... Traditionally, police must obtain a warrant from a judge to access cellphone location information — a process that can take days or weeks. And while cellphone users may be aware that they are sharing their location through apps such as Google Maps, critics say few are aware that such information can make its way to police...

Other agencies in Nevada have been known to use technology similar to Fog. In 2013, Las Vegas Metropolitan Police Department acquired something known as a cell-site simulator that mimics cellphone towers and can sweep up signals from entire areas to track individuals, with some models capable of intercepting texts and calls. Police have not released detailed information about the technology since then.
"Police in other states have said the technology (and its low price tag) has helped expand investigatory capacity," the article adds.

But it also points out that Fog Data Science has a web page letting individuals opt out of all their data sets.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Reuters: Alphabet's Google is negotiating an agreement with the Department of Defense that would allow the Pentagon to deploy its Gemini AI models in classified settings, the Information reported on Thursday, citing two people with direct knowledge of the discussions. The two parties are discussing an agreement that would allow the Pentagon to use Google's AI for all lawful uses, according to the report.

During the negotiations, Google has proposed additional language in its contract with the department to prevent its AI from being used for domestic mass surveillance or autonomous weapons without appropriate human control, the Information reported. The Pentagon will continue to deploy frontier AI capabilities through strong industry partnerships across all classification levels, a Pentagon official said, without confirming any talks with Google.

IPv6 usage briefly reached 50% across Google services for the first time, marking a major milestone for a protocol created in 1998 to solve IPv4's address shortage. Tom's Hardware reports: [...] IPv6 was dismissed early on as a headache-inducing, hard-to-implement complication that would hardly ever gain any traction -- despite offering 2^128 possible numbers, solving all network number assignments in one fell swoop. That changed over time by force of necessity, and Google's tracking graph shows that for a brief moment in time on March 28, 50% of worldwide users accessed the service over an IPv6 connection, marking a historic first. APNIC's stats show that the protocol is in use by 43% of the world, with Asia and the Americas inching ever close to those 50%. Cloudflare, meanwhile, shows that 40% of traffic is done in IPv6, an actually impressive figure if you consider it's measuring actual transferred packets rather than just counting addresses.

The tried-and-true IPv4 and its well-known 123.456.789.123 format from 1980 offers ~4.3 billion addresses in theory, and around 3.7 billion in practice. That always sounded like a lot, but nobody could have predicted just how rapid the explosion of the Internet would be. IANA, the entity controlling the North-American IPv4 space, ran out of IPv4 addresses around 2011, while its European equivalent RIPE NCC could spare no more four-octet addresses nearly seven years ago in 2019. Asian, African, and Latin-American IP registries equally ran out during that timeframe.

Anthropic released Claude Opus 4.7, calling it its strongest generally available model and an improvement over Opus 4.6 in areas like software engineering, instruction-following, tool use, and agentic coding. But the company says it is "less broadly capable" than the restricted Claude Mythos Preview, "which Anthropic rolled out to a select group of companies as part of a new cybersecurity initiative called Project Glasswing earlier this month," reports CNBC. From the report: The launch of Claude Opus 4.7 on Thursday comes after Anthropic launched Claude Opus 4.6 in February. Anthropic said the new model outperforms Claude Opus 4.6 across many use cases, including industry benchmarks for agentic coding, multidisciplinary reasoning, scaled tool use and agentic computer use, according to a release. Anthropic said it experimented with efforts to "differentially reduce" Claude Opus 4.7's cyber capabilities during training.

The company encouraged security professionals who are interested in using the model for "legitimate cybersecurity purposes" to apply through a formal verification program. Claude Opus 4.7 is available across all of Anthropic's Claude products, its application programming interface and through cloud providers Microsoft, Google and Amazon. The new model is the same price as Claude Opus 4.6, Anthropic said.

Boston Dynamics has integrated Google DeepMind into its robotic dog Spot, giving it more autonomous reasoning for industrial inspections like spotting spills and reading gauges. Spot can also now recognize when to call on other AI tools. IEEE Spectrum reports: Boston Dynamics is one of the few companies to commercially deploy legged robots at any appreciable scale; there are now several thousand hard at work. Today the company is announcing that its quadruped robot Spot is now equipped with Google DeepMind's Gemini Robotics-ER 1.6, a high-level embodied reasoning model that brings usability and intelligence to complex tasks.

[T]he focus of this partnership is on one of the very few applications where legged robots have proven themselves to be commercially viable: inspection. That is, wandering around industrial facilities, checking to make sure that nothing is imminently exploding. With the new AI onboard, Spot is now able to autonomously look for dangerous debris or spills, read complex gauges and sight glasses, and call on tools like vision-language-action models when it needs help understanding what's going on in the environment around it. "Advances like Gemini Robotics-ER 1.6 mark an important step toward robots that can better understand and operate in the physical world," Marco da Silva, vice president and general manager of Spot at Boston Dynamics, says in a press release. "Capabilities like instrument reading and more reliable task reasoning will enable Spot to see, understand, and react to real-world challenges completely autonomously."

You can watch a demo of Spot's new capabilities on YouTube.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Cord Cutters News: Sony has notified owners of its recent BRAVIA television models that significant changes to the built-in TV Guide for its OTA TV antenna users and related menu features will take effect starting in late May 2026. The update affects a range of premium sets released between 2023 and 2025, marking another instance of feature adjustments for older smart TV hardware as manufacturers shift focus toward newer product lines. The changes primarily target the program guide functionality for over-the-air antenna TV channels received via the ATSC tuner. After the cutoff date, program information may fail to display on certain channels, limiting the guide's usefulness for planning viewing schedules. Users will often see listings only for channels they have recently watched, rather than a comprehensive overview of available broadcasts. Additionally, channel logos that previously appeared in the guide will disappear, and any thumbnail images accompanying program descriptions will no longer load or show.

Further modifications will appear in the television's menu system. For users relying on connected set-top boxes, the dedicated Set Top Box menu option will be removed entirely. In its place, a simpler Control menu will surface, streamlining access but eliminating some specialized navigation previously available. Program thumbnails, which provided visual previews in various menu sections, will also cease to appear across affected interfaces. These adjustments stem from Sony's ongoing efforts to manage backend services and data feeds that support enhanced guide features on its Google TV-powered BRAVIA lineup. As television ecosystems evolve rapidly with advancements in processing power, artificial intelligence integration, and cloud-based content delivery, companies periodically retire select capabilities on prior-generation hardware to optimize resources. The 2023 through 2025 models, while still offering excellent picture quality through advanced OLED and LCD panels with features like XR processing, now fall into the category of devices receiving scaled-back support. These are the models impacted:

2025 models: Bravia 8 II (XR80M2), Bravia 5 (XR50)
2024 models: Bravia 9 (XR90), Bravia 8 (XR80), Bravia 7 (XR70)
2023 models: Bravia A95L series

alternative_right shares a report from 404 Media: An independent privacy audit of Microsoft, Meta, and Google web traffic in California found that the companies may be violating state regulations and racking up billions in fines. According to the audit from privacy search engine webXray, 55 percent of the sites it checked set ad cookies in a user's browser even if they opted out of tracking. Each company disputed or took issue with the research, with Google saying it was based on a "fundamental misunderstanding" of how its product works.

The webXray California Privacy Audit viewed web traffic on more than 7,000 popular websites in California in the month of March and found that most tech companies ignore when a user asks to opt-out of cookie tracking. California has stringent and well defined privacy legislation thanks to its California Consumer Privacy Act (CCPA) which allows users to, among other things, opt out of the sale of their personal information. There's a system called Global Privacy Control (GPC), which includes a browser extension that indicates to a website when a user wants to opt out of tracking.

According to the webXray audit, Google failed to let users opt out 87 percent of the time. "Google's failure to honor the GPC opt-out signal is easy to find in network traffic. When a browser using GPC connects to Google's servers it encodes the opt-out signal by sending the code 'sec-gpc: 1.' This means Google should not return cookies," the audit said. "However, when Google's server responds to the network request with the opt-out it explicitly responds with a command to create an advertising cookie named IDE using the 'set-cookie' command. This non-compliance is easy to spot, hiding in plain sight."

The audit said that Microsoft fails to opt out users in the same way and has a failure rate of 50 percent in the web traffic webXray viewed. Meta's failure rate was 69 percent and a bit more comprehensive. "Meta instructs publishers to install the following tracking code on their websites. The code contains no check for globally standard opt-out signals -- it loads unconditionally, fires a tracking event, and sets a cookie regardless of the consumer's privacy preferences," the audit said. It showed a copy of Meta's tracking data which contains no GPC check at all.

Google is rolling out a Chrome feature called "Skills" that lets users save Gemini prompts as reusable one-click workflows they can run across multiple tabs. The feature also includes preset Skills from Google. It's launching first for Chrome desktop users set to US English. The Verge reports: Once you have access to the feature, it can be managed by typing a forward slash ( / ) in Gemini and clicking the compass icon. AI prompts can be saved as Skills directly from your Gemini chat history on desktop, where they'll then be available to reuse on any other desktop devices that are signed into the same Google account on Chrome.

The aim is to spare Chrome users from having to manually retype frequently used Gemini prompts or having to copy and paste them over from a saved list. Some of the Skills made by early testers include commands for calculating the nutritional information of online recipes and creating a side-by-side comparison of product specifications while shopping across multiple tabs, according to Google.

The company is also launching a library of preset Skills that you can save and use instead of making your own. These ready-to-use Skills can also be customized to better suit your needs, providing a starting point without requiring you to create your own from scratch.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Bloomberg: Alphabet's Google is facing billions of dollars in potential damage claims as part of mass arbitration tied to the company's online search and advertising technology businesses, which courts have ruled were illegal monopolies. Advertisers are banding together to seek payouts through mass arbitration proceedings. While many companies that displayed ads purchased through Google -- including USA Today Co. and Advance Publications -- have sued for damages since the rulings in 2024, advertiser contracts with the search giant require mandatory arbitration over legal disputes.

In arbitration, legal disputes are handled by a mediator, a process that tends to favor companies in individual claims. Mass arbitration -- where 25 or more claims against the same company are pooled together -- have become more common and provide a greater likelihood of settlement awards for claimants. Ashley Keller, a Chicago lawyer whose firm has handled mass arbitrations against DoorDash, Postmates and TurboTax-maker Intuit, said he's already signed up a "significant number" of advertisers to participate in claims against Google. The first of those are expected to be filed this week.

"Two federal judges have already adjudicated Google to be a monopolist," Keller said in an interview with Bloomberg. "It seems sensible to seek redress." Keller, who is also representing Texas and other states in a lawsuit against Google for monopolization of advertising technology, estimates potential claims for online search and display ads could reach $218 billion or more, based on calculations from an economist his firm has hired. Similar mass arbitrations have lasted 12 to 24 months between the filing of claims and resolution, he said. "Given the nature of these matters, we cannot estimate a possible loss," Google said in a recent corporate filing. "We believe we have strong arguments against these open claims and will defend ourselves vigorously."

Bloomberg's Mark Gurman reports that Apple is developing display-free AI smart glasses aimed at rivaling Meta's Ray-Bans, with multiple frame styles, a distinctive oval camera design, and tight iPhone integration. "The idea is to unveil the product at the end of 2026 or early the following year, with the actual release coming in 2027," writes Gurman. From the report: Like Meta's offering, Apple's glasses will be designed to handle everyday uses: capturing photos and videos, syncing with a smartphone for editing and sharing, handling phone calls, listening to notifications, playing music, and enabling hands-free interaction via a voice assistant. In Apple's case, that assistant will be a significantly upgraded Siri coming in iOS 27. The glasses are part of a broader, three-pronged AI wearables strategy that also includes new AirPods and a camera-equipped pendant. Each device is designed to leverage computer vision to interpret the user's surroundings and feed contextual awareness into Siri and Apple Intelligence. That will enable features like improved turn-by-turn map directions and visual reminders.

When Apple typically enters a new product category, it offers clear advantages over what's currently available. We saw this with the original iPod, iPhone, iPad and Apple Watch -- and, even though it was a flop, the Vision Pro. That approach won't be as obvious with Apple's upcoming foldable iPhone, but we should see it on full display with the glasses. According to employees working on the project, Apple's strategy is to outdo competitors by tightly integrating the glasses with the iPhone and offering a higher-end build. While Meta relies heavily on partner EssilorLuxottica SA for frames, Apple is unsurprisingly planning to go at it alone in terms of design. That also should set it apart from Alphabet Inc.'s Google and Samsung Electronics Co., which are leaning on Warby Parker.

Apple's design team has whipped up at least four different styles and plans to launch some or all of them, I'm told, as well as many color options. The latest units are made from a high-end material called acetate, which is known to be more durable and luxurious than the standard plastic used by many brands. Here are the designs in testing:
- A large rectangular frame, reminiscent of Ray-Ban Wayfarers
- A slimmer rectangular design, similar to the glasses worn by Apple Chief Executive Officer Tim Cook
- Larger oval or circular frames
- A smaller, more refined oval or circular option

Will some programmers become "AI babysitters"? asks long-time Slashdot readertheodp. They share some thoughts from a founding member of Code.org and former Director of Education at Google: "AI may allow anyone to generate code, but only a computer scientist can maintain a system," explained Google.org Global Head Maggie Johnson in a LinkedIn post. So "As AI-generated code becomes more accurate and ubiquitous, the role of the computer scientist shifts from author to technical auditor or expert.

"While large language models can generate functional code in milliseconds, they lack the contextual judgment and specialized knowledge to ensure that the output is safe, efficient, and integrates correctly within a larger system without a person's oversight. [...] The human-in-the-loop must possess the technical depth to recognize when a piece of code is sub-optimal or dangerous in a production environment. [...] We need computer scientists to perform forensics, tracing the logic of an AI-generated module to identify logical fallacies or security loopholes. Modern CS education should prepare students to verify and secure these black-box outputs."

The NY Times reports that companies are already struggling to find engineers to review the explosion of AI-written code.

A new powerful chipset has arrived to take on x86 CPUs and Apple's M5, writes Wccftech.

The blog Windows Central writes that "Qualcomm's Snapdragon X2 processors are here" — and they run Windows: Microsoft has done a massive amount of work to improve compatibility and has also convinced developers to embrace Windows 11 on Arm. Users of Windows 11 on Arm PCs spend 90% of their time on Arm-based apps that run natively. Additionally, apps that do not run natively can often run through Prism emulation, which has improved dramatically since launch...

[A]pp compatibility issues are overblown by many, and unfortunately those sharing false information are the same folks people rely on to make purchases... Works on Windows on Arm maintains a list of compatible apps and games for the platform. There, you'll see well-known apps like Google Chrome, the Adobe Creative Suite, and Spotify. We also have a collection of the best Windows on Arm apps to help you out. Snapdragon X PCs aren't gaming PCs, but there is a growing library of games that can run on the chips.

Amazon's Luna cloud gaming service is making some changes, reports Engadget: It's no longer possible to buy Ubisoft+ and Jackbox Games subscriptions or standalone games through Luna. Amazon will automatically cancel any active subscriptions bought through Luna at the end of customers' next billing cycle. If you have a Ubisoft+ subscription that you bought directly from Ubisoft instead, you'll still be able to access games on that service through Luna until June 10. The Bring Your Own Library option — which allows users to play games they own on the likes of EA, GOG and Ubisoft on Luna — is going away too. You won't be able to access games from those storefronts via Amazon's streaming service after June 3.

If you bought any games outright on Luna, you'll still be able to play them there until June 10. Unlike Google did when it shut down Stadia, Amazon isn't offering refunds for those purchases. However, you'll still have access to them through the respective third-party platform that's linked to your account, be it the EA App, GOG Galaxy or Ubisoft Connect. That doesn't exactly help folks who don't have powerful-enough systems to play more demanding games and were relying on Luna.
For those users, Kotaku complains, "you'll essentially lose access to your purchased games in June unless you buy some hardware to play games like Star Wars Outlaws or set up a different streaming option..."

They describe Luna as Amazon's "barely talked about, struggling game streaming service"... On April 10, Amazon announced that it is "always looking for ways to better serve our players" and that "feedback" has made it "clear" that gamers who use Luna want "easy access to great games." And because more of that content is now offered via Amazon Prime, the company has decided that the best way to "serve" you and other users is to rip out most of Luna's gaming options and remove access to paid games you bought in the past. Do you feel better served...?

Launched in 2020, Amazon Luna has never been much of a big hit for the company, which has struggled to even figure out what to do with it. Initially, it was offered up as a Stadia competitor, providing access to big and small third-party games. This apparently didn't work out for Amazon. So in 2025, Amazon officially announced plans to pivot Luna to a service focused on Jackbox-like casual games. This latest shake-up for Luna further focuses the service on these kinds of games and will put everything available on the service behind different sub tiers, similar to Game Pass.
Their conclusion? "This is all just a great reminder to never, ever, ever, ever buy a video game through a streaming service. At least you can download digital games offline and make backups for later."

Phoronix staged "a showdown" between Firefox and Chrome, testing them both on an Intel Panther Lake laptop running Ubuntu 26.04. JetStream 3.0 was announced at the end of March as the latest major web browser benchmark. This updated version of JetStream is focused on intensive portions of modern JavaScript and WebAssembly web applications... Google Chrome 147 came in at 1.47x the performance of Mozilla Firefox 149. A very strong showing for Google's web browser and to not much surprise Google engineers have been heavily involved in JetStream 3 as part of its open governance model. Chrome debuts very well on JetStream 3 while it will be interesting to see what optimizations Mozilla engineers pursue in the months ahead...

In the recent Speedometer 3.1 benchmark update that is focused on browser responsiveness, Chrome was at 1.24x the performance of Firefox... Firefox picked up wins in the MotionMark and StyleBench browser benchmarks. Google Chrome meanwhile continued to dominate in the JavaScript heavy benchmarks... In some of the WebAssembly benchmarks, there was at least some healthy competition between Firefox and Chrome on Linux.

Across the web browser benchmarks, the Core Ultra X7 358H power consumption came in at 11.44 Watts on average for Chrome and 11.74 Watts for Firefox. Quite close. The slight CPU power difference may come down to the CPU usage with Chrome coming in slightly lower at 8.13% on average to 8.35% with Firefox. Chrome also came in at slightly lower memory consumption across all the benchmarks with total memory usage on average at 4.67GB to Firefox at 4.83GB.

Bruce66423 shares a report from the Guardian: The European parliament has blocked the extension of a law that permits big tech firms to scan for child sexual exploitation on their platforms, creating a legal gap that child safety experts say will lead to crimes going undetected. The law, which was a carve-out of the EU Privacy Act, was put in place in 2021 as a temporary measure allowing companies to use automated detection technologies to scan messages for harms, including child sexual abuse material (CSAM), grooming and sextortion. However, it expired on April 3, and the EU parliament decided not to vote to extend it, amid privacy concerns from some lawmakers.

The regulatory gap has created uncertainty for big tech companies, because while scanning for harms on their platforms is now illegal, they still remain liable to remove any illegal content hosted on their platforms under a different law, the Digital Services Act. Google, Meta, Snap and Microsoft said they would continue to voluntarily scan their platforms for CSAM, in a joint statement posted on a Google blog. Bruce66423 adds: "Child abuse as the excuse for avoiding privacy protections. Who would have thought it?"