Pebble smartwatches are officially reclaiming their iconic name after Core Devices CEO Eric Migicovsky successfully recovered the Pebble trademark. "Great news -- we've been able to recover the trademark for Pebble! Honestly, I wasn't expecting this to work out so easily," Core Devices CEO Eric Migicovsky writes in an update blog. "Core 2 Duo is now Pebble 2 Duo. Core Time 2 is now Pebble Time 2." The Verge reports: As a refresher, Pebble was one of the OG smartwatches. Despite a loyal customer base, however, it wasn't able to compete with bigger names like Fitbit, the Apple Watch, or Samsung. In 2016, Pebble was acquired by Fitbit for $23 million, marking the end of the first Pebble era. Along the way, Fitbit was acquired by Google. That's important because the tech giant agreed to open-source Pebble's software, and Migicovsky announced earlier this year that Pebble was making a comeback. However, because Migicovsky didn't have the trademark, the new Pebble watches were initially dubbed the Core 2 Duo and the Core Time 2.

"With the recovery of the Pebble trademark, that means you too can use the word Pebble for Pebble related software and hardware projects," Migicovsky writes, acknowledging Pebble's history of community development.

Microsoft used China-based engineering teams to maintain cloud computing systems for multiple federal departments including Justice, Treasury, and Commerce, extending the practice beyond the Defense Department that the company announced last week it would discontinue. The work occurred within Microsoft's Government Community Cloud, which handles sensitive but unclassified federal information and has been used by the Justice Department's Antitrust Division for criminal and civil investigations, as well as parts of the Environmental Protection Agency and Department of Education.

Microsoft employed "digital escorts" -- U.S.-based personnel who supervised the foreign engineers -- similar to the arrangement it used for Pentagon systems. Following ProPublica's reporting, Microsoft issued a statement indicating it would take "similar steps for all our government customers who use Government Community Cloud to further ensure the security of their data." Competing cloud providers Amazon Web Services, Google, and Oracle told ProPublica they do not use China-based support for federal contracts.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Electrek: The "holy grail" of electric vehicle battery tech may be here sooner than you'd think. Mercedes-Benz is testing EVs with solid-state batteries on the road, promising to deliver over 600 miles of range. Earlier this year, Mercedes marked a massive milestone, putting "the first car powered by a lithium-metal solid-state battery on the road" for testing. Mercedes has been testing prototypes in the UK since February.

The company used a modified EQS prototype, equipped with the new batteries and other parts. The battery pack was developed by Mercedes-Benz and its Formula 1 supplier unit, Mercedes AMG High-Performance Powertrains (HPP) Mercedes is teaming up with US-based Factorial Energy to bring the new battery tech to market. In September, Factorial and Mercedes revealed the all-solid-state Solstice battery. The new batteries, promising a 25% range improvement, will power the German automaker's next-generation electric vehicles.

According to Markus Schafer, the automaker's head of development, the first Mercedes EVs powered by solid-state batteries could be here by 2030. During an event in Copenhagen, Schafer told German auto news outlet Automobilwoche, "We expect to bring the technology into series production before the end of the year." In addition to providing a longer driving range, Mercedes believes the new batteries can significantly reduce costs. Schafer said current batteries won't suffice, adding, "At the core, a new chemistry is needed." Mercedes and Factorial are using a sulfide-based solid electrolyte, said to be safer and more efficient.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: Donald Trump vowed to save TikTok before taking office, claiming only he could make a deal to keep the app operational in the US despite national security concerns. But then, he put Vice President JD Vance in charge of the deal, and after months of negotiations, the US still doesn't seem to have found terms for a sale that the Chinese government is willing to approve. Now, Trump Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick has confirmed that if China won't approve the latest version of the deal -- which could result in a buggy version of TikTok made just for the US -- the administration is willing to shut down TikTok. And soon.

On Thursday, Lutnick told CNBC that TikTok would stop operating in the US if China and TikTok owner ByteDance won't sell the app to buyers that Trump lined up, along with control over TikTok's algorithm. Under the deal Trump is now pushing, "China can have a little piece or ByteDance, the current owner, can keep a little piece," Lutnick said. "But basically, Americans will have control. Americans will own the technology, and Americans will control the algorithm." However, ByteDance's board has long maintained that the US can alleviate its national security fears -- that China may be using the popular app to manipulate and spy on Americans -- without forcing a sale. In January, a ByteDance board member, Bill Ford, told World Economic Forum attendees that a non-sale option "could involve a change of control locally to ensure" TikTok "complies with US legislation" without selling off the app or its algorithm.

At this point, Lutnick suggested that the US is unwilling to bend on the requirement that the US control the recommendation algorithm, which is viewed as the secret sauce that makes the app so popular globally. ByteDance may be unwilling to sell the algorithm partly because then it would be sharing its core intellectual property with competitors in the US. Earlier this month, Trump had claimed that he wasn't "confident" that China would approve the deal, even though he thought it was "good for China." Analysts have suggested that China views TikTok as a bargaining chip in its tariff negotiations with Trump, which continue to not go smoothly, and it may be OK with the deal but unwilling to release the bargaining chip without receiving key concessions from the US. For now, the US and China are enjoying a 90-day truce that could end in August, about a month before the deadline Trump set to sell TikTok in mid-September.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from 9to5Google: Beyond AI Overviews and AI Mode, Google is working on "Web Guide" to better organize Search results into categories with additional context and insights. Simply, "Web Guide groups web links in helpful ways." There are headers and summaries before you see two or so links, with the ability to load "More." The goal is to make it "easier to find information and web pages," with this AI organization better surfacing pages "that you may not have previously discovered."

It leverages a "custom version of Gemini to better understand both a search query and content on the web." It uses a query fan-out technique, like AI Mode, to perform "multiple related searches to identify the most relevant results." Google says Web Guide is ideal for both open-ended searches ("how to solo travel in Japan"), and detailed queries in multiple sentences: "My family is spread across multiple time zones. What are the best tools for staying connected and maintaining close relationships despite the distance?"

In the latter example, grouping will see "pages related to specific aspects of your query." This is available in Search Labs (Web Guide) by going to the "Web" tab/filter. As such, you can switch to "All" for the usual experience. However, Google will experiment with showing AI-organized results in the All tab and other parts of Search over time. Further reading: Google Users Are Less Likely To Click on Links When an AI Summary Appears in the Results, Pew Research Finds

Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella addressed growing internal unease at the company Thursday morning in a company-wide memo that acknowledged the "uncertainty and seeming incongruence" of conducting layoffs while achieving record profits and AI investments. The tech giant has eliminated more than 15,000 positions in 2025, including 9,000 cuts in early July alone, marking one of the most aggressive periods of job reductions in Microsoft's history.

Nadella described this as the "enigma of success in an industry that has no franchise value," noting that Microsoft is thriving by "every objective measure" with strong market performance and record capital investments. "Progress isn't linear. It's dynamic, sometimes dissonant, and always demanding. But it's also a new opportunity for us to shape, lead through, and have greater impact than ever before," he added. Microsoft President Brad Smith said that an estimated $80 billion in capital expenditures over the past year created pressure to reduce operating costs.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Register: Some customers of Broadcom's VMware business currently cannot access security patches, putting them at greater risk of attack. Customers in that perilous position hold perpetual licenses for VMware products but do not have a current support contract with Broadcom, which will not renew those contracts unless users sign up for software subscriptions. Yet many customers in this situation run products that Broadcom continues to support with patches and updates.

In April 2024, Broadcom CEO Hock Tan promised "free access to zero-day security patches for supported versions of vSphere" so customers "are able to use perpetual licenses in a safe and secure fashion." VMware patches aren't freely available; users must log on to Broadcom's support portal to access the software. Some VMware users in this situation have told The Register that when they enter the portal they cannot download patches, and that VMware support staff have told them it may be 90 days before the software fixes become available. "Because our support portal requires validation of customer entitlements for software patches, only entitled customers have access to the patches at this time," a VMware spokesperson said. "A separate patch delivery cycle will also be available for non-entitled customers and will follow at a later date."

The timing of that "later date" remains uncertain. The Register also notes that "users haven't had access to patches since May."

An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Guardian: In addition to sanitation, medicine, education, wine, public order, irrigation, roads, a freshwater system and public health, the Romans also produced a lot of inscriptions. Making sense of the ancient texts can be a slog for scholars, but a new artificial intelligence tool from Google DeepMind aims to ease the process. Named Aeneas after the mythical Trojan hero, the program predicts where and when inscriptions were made and makes suggestions where words are missing. Historians who put the program through its paces said it transformed their work by helping them identify similar inscriptions to those they were studying, a crucial step for setting the texts in context, and proposing words to fill the inevitable gaps in worn and damaged artefacts. [...]

The Google team led by Yannis Assael worked with historians to create an AI tool that would aid the research process. The program is trained on an enormous database of nearly 200,000 known inscriptions, amounting to 16m characters. Aeneas takes text, and in some cases images, from the inscription being studied and draws on its training to build a list of related inscriptions from 7th century BC to 8th century BC. Rather than merely searching for similar words, the AI identifies and links inscriptions through deeper historical connections. Having trained on the rich collection of inscriptions, the AI can assign study texts to one of 62 Roman provinces and estimate when it was written to within 13 years. It also provides potential words to fill in any gaps, though this has only been tested on known inscriptions where text is blocked out.

In a test run, researchers set Aeneas loose on a vast inscription carved into monuments around the Roman empire. The self-congratulatory Res Gestae Divi Augusti describes the life achievements of the first Roman emperor, Augustus. Aeneas came up with two potential dates for the work, either the first decade BC or between 10 and 20AD. The hedging echoes the debate among scholars who argue over the same dates. In another test, Aeneas analysed inscriptions on a votive altar from Mogontiacum, now Mainz in Germany, and revealed through subtle linguistic similarities how it had been influenced by an older votive altar in the region. "Those were jaw-dropping moments for us," said [Dr Thea Sommerschield, a historian at the University of Nottingham who developed Aeneas with the tech firm]. Details are published in Nature and Aeneas is available to researchers online.

Palmer Luckey, known for founding Oculus and defense-tech firm Anduril, is now eyeing U.S.-manufactured laptops as his next venture. While past American laptops have largely relied on foreign components, Luckey is exploring the possibility of building a fully "Made in USA" device that meets strict FTC standards -- though doing so may cost a premium. Tom's Hardware reports: ["Would you buy a Made In America computer from Anduril for 20% more than Chinese-manufactured options from Apple?" asked Luckey in a post on X.] Luckey previously asked the same question at the Reindustrialize Summit, a conference whose website said it was devoted to "convening the brightest and most motivated minds at the intersection of technology and manufacturing," which shared a clip of Luckey discussing the subject, wherein he talks about the extensive research he has already done around building a PC in the U.S. Luckey wouldn't be the first to make a laptop in the U.S. (PCMag collected a list of domestic PCs, including laptops, in 2021.) But those products use components sourced from elsewhere; they're assembled in the U.S. rather than manufactured there.

That distinction matters, according to the Made in USA Standard published by the Federal Trade Commission. To quote: "For a product to be called Made in USA, or claimed to be of domestic origin without qualifications or limits on the claim, the product must be 'all or virtually all' made in the U.S. [which] means that the final assembly or processing of the product occurs in the United States, all significant processing that goes into the product occurs in the United States, and all or virtually all ingredients or components of the product are made and sourced in the United States. That is, the product should contain no -- or negligible -- foreign content." How much more would you be willing to pay for a laptop that was truly made in America?

Apple is expected to avoid hefty daily fines from the EU by modifying its App Store policies -- allowing developers to direct users to external payment options and adjusting its fee structure. Reuters reports: The company last month said developers will pay a 20% processing fee for purchases made via the App Store, though the fees could go as low as 13% for Apple's small-business program. Developers who send customers outside the App Store for payment will pay a fee between 5% and 15%. They will also be able to use as many links as they wish to send users to outside forms of payment.

Apple made the changes after the EU antitrust enforcer handed it a 500 million euro ($586.7 million) fine in April, saying its technical and commercial restrictions prevented app developers from steering users to cheaper deals outside the App Store in breach of the Digital Markets Act. The company was given 60 days to scrap the restraints to comply with the DMA aimed at reining in Big Tech and giving rivals more room to compete. The European Commission is expected to approve the changes in the coming weeks, although the timing could still change, the people said. "All options remain on the table. We are still assessing Apple's proposed changes," the EU watchdog said.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: A California lawmaker halted an effort to pass a law that would force Internet service providers to offer $15 monthly plans to people with low incomes. Assemblymember Tasha Boerner proposed the state law a few months ago, modeling the bill on a law enforced by New York. It seemed that other states were free to impose cheap-broadband mandates because the Supreme Court rejected broadband industry challenges to the New York law twice.

Boerner, a Democrat who is chair of the Communications and Conveyance Committee, faced pressure from Internet service providers to change or drop the bill. She made some changes, for example lowering the $15 plan's required download speeds from 100Mbps to 50Mbps and the required upload speeds from 20Mbps to 10Mbps. But the bill was still working its way through the legislature when, according to Boerner, Trump administration officials told her office that California could lose access to $1.86 billion in Broadband Equity, Access, and Deployment (BEAD) funds if it forces ISPs to offer low-cost service to people with low incomes.

That amount is California's share of a $42.45 billion fund created by Congress to expand access to broadband service. The Trump administration has overhauled program rules, delaying the grants. One change is that states can't tell ISPs what to charge for a low-cost plan. The US law that created BEAD requires Internet providers receiving federal funds to offer at least one "low-cost broadband service option for eligible subscribers." But in new guidance from the National Telecommunications and Information Administration (NTIA), the agency said it prohibits states "from explicitly or implicitly setting the LCSO [low-cost service option] rate a subgrantee must offer." "All they would have to do to get exempted from AB 353 [the $15 broadband bill] would be to apply to the BEAD program," said Boerner. "Doesn't matter if their application was valid, appropriate, granted, or they got public money at the end of the day and built the projects -- the mere application for the BEAD program would exempt them from 353, if it didn't jeopardize from $1.86 billion to begin with. And that was a tradeoff I was unwilling to make."

Another California bill in the Senate would encourage, not require, ISPs to offer cheap broadband by making them eligible for Lifeline subsidies if they sell 100/20Mbps service for $30 or less.

Microsoft has recruited more than 20 AI employees from Google's DeepMind research division, the newest front in a talent war being waged by Silicon Valley's tech giants as they jostle to gain an edge in the nascent technology. From a report: Amar Subramanya, the former head of engineering for Google's Gemini chatbot, is the latest to move to Microsoft from its rival, according to a post on his LinkedIn profile on Tuesday. "The culture here is refreshingly low ego yet bursting with ambition," he wrote, confirming his appointment as corporate vice-president of AI.

Subramanya will join other DeepMind staff including engineering lead Sonal Gupta, software engineer Adam Sadovsky and product manager Tim Frank, according to people familiar with Microsoft's recruiting. The Seattle-based company has persuaded at least 24 staff to join in the past six months, they added.

FCC Chairman Brendan Carr is proposing (PDF) to roll back key Biden-era broadband policies, scrapping the long-term gigabit speed goal, halting analysis of broadband affordability, and reinterpreting deployment standards in a way that favors industry metrics over consumer access. The proposal, which is scheduled for a vote on August 7, narrows the scope of Section 706 evaluations to focus on whether broadband is being deployed rather than whether it's affordable or universally accessible. Ars Technica reports: The changes will make it easier for the FCC to give the broadband industry a passing grade in an annual progress report. FCC Chairman Brendan Carr's proposal would give the industry a thumbs-up even if it falls short of 100 percent deployment, eliminate a long-term goal of gigabit broadband speeds, and abandon a new effort to track the affordability of broadband.

Section 706 of the Telecommunications Act requires the FCC to determine whether broadband is being deployed "on a reasonable and timely basis" to all Americans. If the answer is no, the US law says the FCC must "take immediate action to accelerate deployment of such capability by removing barriers to infrastructure investment and by promoting competition in the telecommunications market."

Generally, Democratic-led commissions have found that the industry isn't doing enough to make broadband universally available, while Republican-led commissions have found the opposite. Democratic-led commissions have also periodically increased the speeds used to determine whether advanced telecommunications capabilities are widely available, while Republican-led commissioners have kept the speed standards the same.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Reuters: Figma is targeting a fully-diluted valuation of up to $16.4 billion in its initial public offering, as the cloud-based design software firm prepares for a debut on the NYSE that could inject fresh momentum into a resurgent market for tech listings. The San Francisco-based company, along with some investors, is eyeing proceeds of up to $1.03 billion by selling nearly 37 million shares priced between $25 and $28 each, it said on Monday. The listing could be a major milestone for Figma, coming more than a year after its $20 billion sale to Adobe failed due to regulatory hurdles in Europe and the UK. Figma's IPO is expected to occur the week of July 28th, offering shares priced between $25 and $28. It'll trade under the symbol "FIG".

Eric Schmidt, Google's former CEO, has a simple suggestion for young workers struggling to focus at work or relax: turn off your phone. Schmidt told the "Moonshots" podcast that researchers "can't think deeply" when their phones keep buzzing with notifications.

The tech veteran, who spent 10 years running Google and helped build Android's notification system, admitted the industry has worked to "monetize your attention" through constant ads and alerts.

Sir Keir Starmer's government is seeking a way out of a clash with the Trump administration over the UK's demand that Apple provide it with access to secure customer data, Financial Times reported Monday, citing two officials. From the report: The officials both said the Home Office, which ordered the tech giant in January to grant access to its most secure cloud storage system, would probably have to retreat in the face of pressure from senior leaders in Washington, including Vice President JD Vance.

"This is something that the vice president is very annoyed about and which needs to be resolved," said an official in the UK's technology department. "The Home Office is basically going to have to back down." Both officials said the UK decision to force Apple to break its end-to-end encryption -- which has been raised multiple times by top officials in Donald Trump's administration -- could impede technology agreements with the US.

An anonymous reader shares a report: Microsoft is teaming up with the French government to create a digital replica of Paris' Notre-Dame Cathedral, France's most visited monument, the U.S. tech company's president, Brad Smith, said on Monday. The 862-year-old Gothic masterpiece was reopened last December after a five-year restoration following a devastating fire in 2019. A digital replica will serve as a record of the building's architectural details, Microsoft said. It will also provide a virtual experience for visitors and those unable to visit.

T-Mobile is expanding support for the L4S standard across its 5G Advanced network over the next few weeks, becoming the first wireless carrier in the United States to implement the Low Latency, Low Loss, Scalable Throughput technology. The standard helps high-priority internet packets move with fewer delays to make video calls and cloud games feel smoother by allowing devices to manage congestion and reduce buffering issues that can occur even on higher bandwidth connections.

L4S is already deployed in many cities, the company said. Users will not need special phones or plans to access the network-driven improvements.

San Francisco-based startup Orchid Health "screens embryos for thousands of potential future illnesses," reports the Washington Post, calling it "the first company to say it can sequence an embryo's entire genome of 3 billion base pairs." It uses as few as five cells from an embryo to test for more than 1,200 of these uncommon single-gene-derived, or monogenic, conditions. The company also applies custom-built algorithms to produce what are known as polygenic risk scores, which are designed to measure a future child's genetic propensity for developing complex ailments later in life, such as bipolar disorder, cancer, Alzheimer's disease, obesity and schizophrenia. Orchid, [founder Noor] Siddiqui said in a tweet, is ushering in "a generation that gets to be genetically blessed and avoid disease." Right now, at $2,500 per embryo-screening on top of the average $20,000 for a single cycle of IVF, Siddiqui's social network in Silicon Valley and other tech hubs is an ideal target market...

Yet several genetic scientists told The Post they doubt Orchid's core claim: that it can accurately sequence an entire human genome from just five cells collected from an early-stage embryo, enabling it to see many more single- and multiple-gene-derived disorders than other methods have. Experts have struggled to extract accurate genetic information from small embryonic samples, said Svetlana Yatsenko, a Stanford University pathology professor who specializes in clinical and research genetics. Genetic tests that use saliva or blood samples typically collect hundreds of thousands of cells. For its vastly smaller samples, Orchid uses a process called amplification, which creates copies of the DNA retrieved from the embryo. That process, Yatsenko said, can introduce major inaccuracies. "You're making many, many mistakes in the amplification," she said, rendering it problematic to declare any embryo free of a particular disease, or positive for one. "It's basically Russian roulette...."

Numerous fertility doctors and scientists also told The Post they have serious reservations about screening embryos through polygenic risk scoring, the technique that allows Orchid and other companies to predict future disease by tying clusters of hundreds or even thousands of genes to disease outcomes and in some cases to other traits, such as intelligence and height. The vast majority of diseases that afflict humans are associated with many different genes rather than a single gene... And for traits such as intelligence, polygenic scoring has almost negligible predictive capacity — just a handful of IQ points... Or parents might select against an unwanted trait, such as schizophrenia, without understanding how they may be screening out desired traits associated with the same genes, such as creativity... The American College of Medical Genetics and Genomics calls the benefits of screening embryos for polygenic risks "unproven" and warns that such tests "should not be offered" by clinicians. A pioneer of polygenic risk scores, Harvard epidemiology professor Peter Kraft, has criticized Orchid, saying on X that "the science doesn't add up" and that "waving a magic wand and changing some of these variants at birth may not do anything at all."
The article notes several startups are already providing predictions on intelligence. "In the United States, there are virtually no restrictions on the types of genetic predictions companies can offer, and no external vetting of their proprietary scoring methods."

Fast Company's tech editor Harry McCracken (also harrymccSlashdot reader #1,641,347) writes: As part of Fast Company's "1995 week", I wrote about IBM's ThinkPad 701, the famous model with an expanding "butterfly" keyboard [which could be stretched from 9.7-inches to 11.5 inches]. By putting full-sized keys in a subnotebook-sized laptop, it solved one of mobile computing's biggest problems.

IBM discontinued it before the end of the year, and neither it nor anyone else ever made anything similar again. And yet it remains amazing.
Check out this 1995 ad for the keyboard! The article calls the butterfly ThinkPad "one of the best things the technology industry has ever done with moving parts," and revisits 1995's race "to design a subnotebook-sized laptop with a desktop-sized keyboard." It's still comically thick, standing almost as tall as four MacBook Airs stacked on each other. That height is required to accommodate multiple technologies later rendered obsolete by technological progress, such as a dial-up fax/modem, an infrared port, two PCMCIA expansion card slots, and a bulky connector for an external docking station... Lifting the screen set off a system of concealed gears and levers that propelled the two sections of keyboard into position with balletic grace... A Businesweek article cited sales of 215,000 units and said it was 1995's best-selling PC laptop. Yet by the time that story appeared in February 1996, the 701 had been discontinued. IBM never made anything like it again. Neither did anyone else...

As portable computers became more popular, progress in display technology had made it possible for PC makers to use larger screens. Manufacturers were also getting better at fitting a laptop's necessary components into less space. These advances let them design a new generation of thin, light laptops that went beyond the limitations of subnotebooks. Once IBM could make a lightweight laptop with a wider screen, "the need for an expanding keyboard was no longer essential," says [butterfly ThinkPad engineer] George Karidis. "It would have just been a novelty."
The article notes a fan's open source guides for repairing butterfly Thinkpads at Project Butterfly, and all the fan-community videos about it on YouTube, "from an excellent documentary to people simply being entranced by it.

"As a thing of wonder, it continues to transcend its own obsolescence."