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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The investigation into the June 12 Air India crash that killed 260 people has been marked by tension, suspicion and poor communication between American and Indian officials, including an episode where NTSB chairwoman Jennifer Homendy instructed her black-box specialists not to board a late-night Indian military flight to a remote facility, WSJ reports.

When two American recorder experts landed in New Delhi in late June, they received urgent messages from colleagues telling them not to go with the Indians; Homendy had grown concerned about sending U.S. personnel and equipment to an aerospace lab in the remote town of Korwa amid State Department security warnings about terrorism in the region. She made calls to Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy and the CEOs of Boeing and GE Aerospace, and the State Department sent embassy officials to intercept the NTSB specialists at the airport.

Homendy eventually delivered an ultimatum: if Indian authorities didn't choose between their Delhi facility and the NTSB's Washington lab within 48 hours, she would withdraw American support from the probe. Indian officials relented. The downloaded data showed someone in the cockpit moved switches that cut off the engines' fuel supply, and India's preliminary report stated one pilot asked the other why he moved the switches while that pilot denied doing so. American government and industry officials now privately believe the captain likely moved the switches deliberately.

EU antitrust regulators will examine whether Apple's Apple Ads and Apple Maps should be subject to the onerous requirements of the bloc's digital rules after both services hit key criteria, with the U.S. tech giant saying they should be exempted. From a report: Apple's App Store, iOS operating system and Safari web browser were designated core platform services under the Digital Markets Act two years ago aimed at reining in the power of Big Tech and opening up the field to rivals so consumers can have more choice. The European Commission said that Apple has notified it that Apple Ads and Apple Maps met the Act's two thresholds to be considered "gatekeepers." The DMA designates companies with services with more than 45 million monthly active users and $79 billion in market capitalisation as gatekeepers subject to a list of dos and don'ts.

Platforms including Meta and TikTok will be held liable for financial fraud for the first time under new rules agreed by EU lawmakers in the early hours of Thursday. From a report: The Parliament and Council agreed on the package of rules after eight hours of negotiations to strengthen safeguards against payment fraud. The deal adds another layer of EU regulatory risk for U.S. tech giants, which have lobbied the White House to confront Brussels' anti-monopoly and content moderation rules.

[...] Social media has become rife with financial scams, and MEPs pushed hard to hold both Big Tech and banks liable during legislative negotiations. EU governments, meanwhile, believed banks should be held responsible if their safeguards aren't strong enough. As a compromise, lawmakers agreed that banks should reimburse victims if a scammer, impersonating the bank, swindles them out of their money, or if payments are processed without consent.

Researchers at MIT and Oak Ridge National Laboratory have built a simulation that models all 151 million American workers and their skills, then maps those skills against the capabilities of over 13,000 AI tools currently in production to see where the two overlap. The answer, according to their analysis: 11.7% of the US labor market's total wage value, or about $1.2 trillion, sits in tasks that AI systems can technically perform [PDF].

The researchers call this the Iceberg Index, and the name is deliberate. The visible AI disruption happening in tech jobs right now accounts for only 2.2% of labor market wage value. The remaining exposure lurks in cognitive and administrative work across finance, healthcare administration, and professional services, and unlike tech-sector disruption, it's spread across all fifty states rather than concentrated on the coasts.

Delaware and South Dakota show higher Iceberg Index values than California because their economies lean heavily on administrative and financial work. Ohio and Tennessee register modest tech-sector exposure but substantial hidden risk in the white-collar functions that support their manufacturing bases.

To validate the framework, the researchers compared their predictions against Anthropic's Economic Index tracking real-world AI usage from millions of Claude users. The two measures agreed on state categorizations 69% of the time, with particularly strong alignment at the extremes.

The Iceberg Index doesn't predict job losses or adoption timelines. It measures technical capability, the overlap between what AI can do and what occupations require. Traditional economic indicators like GDP and unemployment explain less than five percent of the variation in this skill-based exposure, which is partly why the researchers argue workforce planners need new metrics.

Last week, Google surprised the tech world when it announced AirDrop support on Pixel 10 devices -- all without Apple's involvement. "While it initially seemed like this was a rogue move made by Google to coerce Apple into another boundary-breaking decision, it might actually be part of the repercussions that also led to USB-C on iPhone and the adoption of RCS," reports 9to5Google. From a report: As reported by Ars Technica, the answer to this week's mysterious Quick Share upgrade lies in the EU's interoperability requirements designed for the DMA. The ruling out of the European Commission pushed Apple to begin supporting interoperable wireless standards beginning with this year's set of OS upgrades, replacing the previous proprietary standard the company used to power its various Continuity features. That forced Apple to add support for the Wi-Fi Alliance's Wi-Fi Aware standard of multi-directional file sharing, at the cost of completely phasing out its previous walled-in protocol.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: Facing five lawsuits alleging wrongful deaths, OpenAI lobbed its first defense Tuesday, denying in a court filing that ChatGPT caused a teen's suicide and instead arguing the teen violated terms that prohibit discussing suicide or self-harm with the chatbot. The earliest look at OpenAI's strategy to overcome the string of lawsuits came in a case where parents of 16-year-old Adam Raine accused OpenAI of relaxing safety guardrails that allowed ChatGPT to become the teen's "suicide coach." OpenAI deliberately designed the version their son used, ChatGPT 4o, to encourage and validate his suicidal ideation in its quest to build the world's most engaging chatbot, parents argued.

But in a blog, OpenAI claimed that parents selectively chose disturbing chat logs while supposedly ignoring "the full picture" revealed by the teen's chat history. Digging through the logs, OpenAI claimed the teen told ChatGPT that he'd begun experiencing suicidal ideation at age 11, long before he used the chatbot. "A full reading of his chat history shows that his death, while devastating, was not caused by ChatGPT," OpenAI's filing argued. [...] All the logs that OpenAI referenced in its filing are sealed, making it impossible to verify the broader context the AI firm claims the logs provide. In its blog, OpenAI said it was limiting the amount of "sensitive evidence" made available to the public, due to its intention to handle mental health-related cases with "care, transparency, and respect." The Raine family's lead lawyer called OpenAI's response "disturbing."

"They abjectly ignore all of the damning facts we have put forward: how GPT-4o was rushed to market without full testing. That OpenAI twice changed its Model Spec to require ChatGPT to engage in self-harm discussions. That ChatGPT counseled Adam away from telling his parents about his suicidal ideation and actively helped him plan a 'beautiful suicide.' And OpenAI and Sam Altman have no explanation for the last hours of Adam's life, when ChatGPT gave him a pep talk and then offered to write a suicide note."

OpenAI is leaning on its usage policies to defend against this case, emphasizing that "ChatGPT users acknowledge their use of ChatGPT is 'at your sole risk'" and that Raine should never have been allowed to use the chatbot without parental consent.

Warner Music Group has reached a licensing deal with Suno that will let users create AI-generated music using the voices and likenesses of artists who opt in. WMG says participating artists will have "full control" over how their likeness and music are used. "These will be new creation experiences from artists who do opt in, which will open up new revenue streams for them and allow you to interact with them in new ways," Suno says, adding that users will be able to "build around" an artist's sounds "and ensure they get compensated." WMG is also dropping its previous lawsuit accusing Suno of scraping copyrighted material.

"Along with the licensing agreement, Suno is planning to use licensed music from WMG to build next-gen music generation models that it claims will surpass its flagship v5 model," adds The Verge. "It will also start requiring users to have a paid account to download songs starting next year, with each tier providing a specific number of downloads each month."

Further reading: First 'AI Music Creator' Signed by Record Label. More Ahead, or Just a Copyright Quandry?

An anonymous reader quotes a report from PCMag: Four new features are coming to Google Maps, including a way to hide your identity in reviews. Maps will soon let you use a nickname and select an alternative profile picture for online reviews, so you can rate a business without linking it to full name and Google profile photo. Google says it will monitor for "suspicious and fake reviews," and every review is still associated with an account on Google's backend, which it believes will discourage bad actors.

Look for a new option under Your Profile that says Use a custom name & picture for posting. You'll then be able to pick an illustration to represent you and add a nickname. Google didn't explain why it is introducing anonymous reviews; it pitched the idea as a way to be a business's "Secret Santa." Some users are nervous to publicly post reviews for local businesses as it may be used to track their location or movements. It may encourage more people to contribute honest feedback to its platform, for better or worse. Further reading: Gemini AI To Transform Google Maps Into a More Conversational Experience

An anonymous reader quotes a report from TechCrunch: Several U.S. banking giants and mortgage lenders are reportedly scrambling to assess how much of their customers' data was stolen during a cyberattack on a New York financial technology company earlier this month. SitusAMC, which provides technology for over a thousand commercial and real estate financiers, confirmed in a statement over the weekend that it had identified a data breach on November 12. The company said that unspecified hackers had stolen corporate data associated with its banking customers' relationship with SitusAMC, as well as "accounting records and legal agreements" during the cyberattack.

The statement added that the scope and nature of the cyberattack "remains under investigation." SitusAMC said that the incident is "now contained," and that its systems are operational. The company said that no encrypting malware was used, suggesting that the hackers were focused on exfiltrating data from the company's systems rather than causing destruction. According to Bloomberg and CNN, citing sources, SitusAMC sent data breach notifications to several financial giants, including JPMorgan Chase, Citigroup, and Morgan Stanley. SitusAMC also counts pension funds and state governments as customers, according to its website.

It's unclear how much data was taken, or how many U.S. banking consumers may be affected by the breach. Companies like SitusAMC may not be widely known outside of the financial world, but provide the mechanisms and technologies for its banking and real estate customers to comply with state and federal rules and regulations. In its role as a middleman for financial clients, the company handles vast amounts of non-public banking information on behalf of its customers. According to SitusAMC's website, the company processes billions of documents related to loans annually.

Nvidia pushed back against investor concerns about Google's competitive positioning in AI on Tuesday after the chipmaker's shares tumbled 4.4% and erased nearly $200 billion in market cap on fears that Alphabet's tensor processing units were gaining ground against its dominance in AI computing. The company said it was "delighted by Google's success" but asserted that it continues to supply chips to Google.

Nvidia said it remains "a generation ahead of the industry" as the only platform that runs every AI model and operates everywhere computing is done. The statement came after investors reacted to the release of Google's Gemini 3 large language model last week. The model was trained using TPUs rather than Nvidia chips. A report in The Information on Monday said Google was pitching potential clients including Meta on using TPUs in their data centers rather than Nvidia's chips.

Nvidia said its platform offers "greater performance, versatility, and fungibility than ASICs," referring to application-specific integrated circuits like Google's TPUs that are designed for specific AI frameworks or functions. Google's TPUs have until now only been available for customers to rent through its cloud computing service. Nvidia has lost more than $800 billion in market value since it peaked above $5 trillion less than a month ago.

Google's long-rumored plan to merge ChromeOS and Android into a single desktop operating system now has a name: Aluminium OS, AndroidAuthority reports, citing a job listing.

The job listing explicitly tasks applicants with "working on a new Aluminium, Android-based, operating system." The job listing confirms Google intends to eventually replace ChromeOS entirely, though the two platforms will coexist during a transition period. Aluminium OS won't be limited to budget hardware -- the listing references "AL Entry," "AL Mass Premium," and "AL Premium" tiers across laptops, detachables, tablets, and mini-PCs.

An anonymous reader shares a report: With the release of its third version last week, Google's Gemini large language model surged past ChatGPT and other competitors to become the most capable AI chatbot, as determined by consensus industry-benchmark tests. [...] Aaron Levie, chief executive of the cloud content management company Box, got early access to Gemini 3 several days ahead of the launch. The company ran its own evaluations of the model over the weekend to see how well it could analyze large sets of complex documents. "At first we kind of had to squint and be like, 'OK, did we do something wrong in our eval?' because the jump was so big," he said. "But every time we tested it, it came out double-digit points ahead."

[...] Google has been scrambling to get an edge in the AI race since the launch of ChatGPT three years ago, which stoked fears among investors that the company's iconic search engine would lose significant traffic to chatbots. The company struggled for months to get traction. Chief Executive Sundar Pichai and other executives have since worked to overhaul the company's AI development strategy by breaking down internal silos, streamlining leadership and consolidating work on its models, employees say. Sergey Brin, one of Google's co-founders, resumed a day-to-day role at the company helping to oversee its AI-development efforts.

An anonymous reader shared this report from Forbes: On November 20, at approximately 4 p.m. Eastern time, Napster held an online meeting for its shareholders; an estimated 700 of roughly 1,500 including employees, former employees and individual investors tuned in. That's when its CEO John Acunto told everyone he believed that the never-identified big investor — who the company had insisted put in $3.36 billion at a $12 billion valuation in January, which would have made it one of the year's biggest fundraises — was not going to come through.

In an email sent out shortly after, it told existing investors that some would get a bigger percentage of the company, due to the canceled shares, and went on to describe itself as a "victim of misconduct," adding that it was "assisting law enforcement with their ongoing investigations." As for the promised tender offer, which would have allowed shareholders to cash out, that too was called off. "Since that investor was also behind the potential tender, we also no longer believe that will occur," the company wrote in the email.

At this point it seems unlikely that getting bigger stakes in the business will make any of the investors too happy. The company had been stringing its employees and investors along for nearly a year with ever-changing promises of an impending cash infusion and chances to sell their shares in a tender offer that would change everything. In fact, it was the fourth time since 2022 they've been told they could soon cash out via a tender offer, and the fourth time the potential deal fell through. Napster spokesperson Gillian Sheldon said certain statements about the fundraise "were made in good faith based on what we understood at the time. We have since uncovered indications of misconduct that suggest the information provided to us then was not accurate."
The article notes America's Department of Justice has launched an investigation (in which Napster is not a target), while the Securities and Exchange Commission has a separate ongoing investigation from 2022 into Napster's scrapped reverse merger.

While Napster announced they'd been acquired for $207 million by a tech company named Infinite Reality, Forbes says that company faced "a string of lawsuits from creditors alleging unpaid bills, a federal lawsuit to enforce compliance with an SEC subpoena (now dismissed) and exaggerated claims about the extent of their partnerships with Manchester City Football Club and Google. The company also touted 'top-tier' investors who never directly invested in the firm, and its anonymous $3 billion investment that its spokesperson told Forbes in March was in "an Infinite Reality account and is available to us" and that they were 'actively leveraging' it..."

And by the end, "Napster appears to have been scrambling to raise cash to keep the lights on, working with brokers and investment advisors including a few who had previously gotten into trouble with regulators.... If it turns out that Napster knew the fundraise wasn't happening and it benefited from misrepresenting itself to investors or acquirees, it could face much bigger problems. That's because doing so could be considered securities fraud."

"Three years ago, Google removed JPEG XL support from Chrome, stating there wasn't enough interest at the time," writes the blog Windows Report. "That position has now changed." In a recent note to developers, a Chrome team representative confirmed that work has restarted to bring JPEG XL to Chromium and said Google "would ship it in Chrome" once long-term maintenance and the usual launch requirements are met.

The team explained that other platforms moved ahead. Safari supports JPEG XL, and Windows 11 users can add native support through an image extension from Microsoft Store. The format is also confirmed for use in PDF documents. There has been continuous demand from developers and users who ask for its return.

Before Google ships the feature in Chrome, the company wants the integration to be secure and supported over time. A developer has submitted new code that reintroduces JPEG XL to Chromium. This version is marked as feature complete. The developer said it also "includes animation support," which earlier implementations did not offer.

Long-time Slashdot reader jenningsthecat shared this article from IEEE Spectrum: By dropping a nuclear reactor 1.6 kilometers (1 mile) underground, Deep Fission aims to use the weight of a billion tons of rock and water as a natural containment system comparable to concrete domes and cooling towers. With the fission reaction occurring far below the surface, steam can safely circulate in a closed loop to generate power.

The California-based startup announced in October that prospective customers had signed non-binding letters of intent for 12.5 gigawatts of power involving data center developers, industrial parks, and other (mostly undisclosed) strategic partners, with initial sites under consideration in Kansas, Texas, and Utah... The company says its modular approach allows multiple 15-megawatt reactors to be clustered on a single site: A block of 10 would total 150 MW, and Deep Fission claims that larger groupings could scale to 1.5 GW. Deep Fission claims that using geological depth as containment could make nuclear energy cheaper, safer, and deployable in months at a fraction of a conventional plant's footprint...

The company aims to finalize its reactor design and confirm the pilot site in the coming months. [Company founder Liz] Muller says the plan is to drill the borehole, lower the canister, load the fuel, and bring the reactor to criticality underground in 2026. Sites in Utah, Texas, and Kansas are among the leading candidates for the first commercial-scale projects, which could begin construction in 2027 or 2028, depending on the speed of DOE and NRC approvals. Deep Fission expects to start manufacturing components for the first unit in 2026 and does not anticipate major bottlenecks aside from typical long-lead items.
In short "The same oil and gas drilling techniques that reliably reach kilometer-deep wells can be adapted to host nuclear reactors..." the article points out. Their design would also streamline construction, since "Locating the reactors under a deep water column subjects them to roughly 160 atmospheres of pressure — the same conditions maintained inside a conventional nuclear reactor — which forms a natural seal to keep any radioactive coolant or steam contained at depth, preventing leaks from reaching the surface."

Other interesting points from the article:

• They plan on operating and controlling the reactor remotely from the surface.

• Company founder Muller says if an earthquake ever disrupted the site, "you seal it off at the bottom of the borehole, plug up the borehole, and you have your waste in safe disposal."

• For waste management, the company "is eyeing deep geological disposal in the very borehole systems they deploy for their reactors."

• "The company claims it can cut overall costs by 70 to 80 percent compared with full-scale nuclear plants."

"Among its competition are projects like TerraPower's Natrium, notes the tech news site Hackaday, saying TerraPower's fast neutron reactors "are already under construction and offer much more power per reactor, along with Natrium in particular also providing built-in grid-level storage.

"One thing is definitely for certain..." they add. "The commercial power sector in the US has stopped being mind-numbingly boring."

Meta "is testing a new product that would give Facebook users a personalized daily briefing powered by the company's generative AI technology" reports the Washington Post. They cite records they've reviwed showing that Meta "would analyze Facebook content and external sources to push custom updates to its users." The company plans to test the product with a small group of Facebook users in select cities such as New York and San Francisco, according to a person familiar with the project who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss private company matters...

Meta's foray into pushing updates for consumers follows years of controversy over its relationship with publishers. The tech company has waffled between prominently featuring content from mainstream news sources on Facebook to pulling news links altogether as regulators pushed the tech giant to pay publishers for content on its platforms. More recently, publishers have sued Meta, alleging it infringed on their copyrighted works to train its AI models.

In October Zorin OS claimed it had 100,000 downloads in a little over two days in the days following Microsoft's end of support for Windows 10.

And one month later, Zorin OS developers now claim that 780,000 people downloaded it from a Windows computer in the space of a month, according to the tech news site XDA Developers. In a post on the Zorin blog, the developers of the operating system Zorin OS 18 announced that they've managed to accrue one million downloads of the operating system in a single month [since its launch on October 14]. While this is plenty impressive by itself, the developers go on to reveal that, out of that million, 78% of the downloads came from a Windows machine. That means that at least 780,000 people on Windows gave Zorin OS 18 a download...

[I]t's easy to see why: the developers put a heavy emphasis on making their system the perfect home for ex-Windows users.