Chrome is finally adding built-in vertical tabs, "which will move the tabs to the side of the browser window, making it easier to read full page titles and manage tab groups," reports TechCrunch. The company is also introducing an immersive reading mode for a distraction-free, text-focused experience. From the report: The company notes that the new vertical tabs can be enabled at any time by right-clicking on a Chrome window and selecting "Show Tabs Vertically." The company says there's no hard limit on the number of tabs that can be opened (beyond what would be limited already by the user's hardware). The vertical tabs work just as the horizontal tabs do, meaning you can have different Chrome windows with their own set of tabs or tab groups.

[...] Alongside the launch of vertical tabs, Chrome is also rolling out a new Reading Mode experience, which will offer a full-page interface to make it even easier to reduce on-screen clutter to focus on the text. This will be the new default experience for Chrome users, and arrives at a time when web pages, particularly those on news sites, have become cluttered with ads and prompts to subscribe to newsletters.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from TorrentFreak: Following on the heels of the landmark Cox v. Sony ruling, the Supreme Court has vacated the contributory copyright infringement verdict against ISP Grande Communications, ordering the Fifth Circuit to reconsider its decision in light of the new precedent. [...] The order (PDF) effectively removes the case from the Supreme Court docket, urging the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals to take another look at its decision in light of the new ruling.

Given the similarities between the two cases, it is no surprise that the Supreme Court came to this conclusion. It is now up to the Fifth Circuit to revisit whether Grande's conduct meets the intent threshold that was established in Cox. That is a significantly higher bar than the one applied in the original verdict, which found that continuing to provide service to known infringers was enough to establish material contribution.

The music companies previously said they sent over a million copyright infringement notices, but that Grande failed to terminate even a single subscriber account in response. However, without proof of active inducement, these absolute numbers carry less weight now. Whether this translates into a win for Grande on remand remains to be seen. For now, however, the original $47 million verdict is further away than ever.

A New York Times analysis found Google's AI Overviews now answer questions correctly about 90% of the time, which might sound impressive until you realize that roughly 1 in 10 answers is wrong. "[F]or Google, that means hundreds of thousands of lies going out every minute of the day," reports Ars Technica. From the report: The Times conducted this analysis with the help of a startup called Oumi, which itself is deeply involved in developing AI models. The company used AI tools to probe AI Overviews with the SimpleQA evaluation, a common test to rank the factuality of generative models like Gemini. Released by OpenAI in 2024, SimpleQA is essentially a list of more than 4,000 questions with verifiable answers that can be fed into an AI.

Oumi began running its test last year when Gemini 2.5 was still the company's best model. At the time, the benchmark showed an 85 percent accuracy rate. When the test was rerun following the Gemini 3 update, AI Overviews answered 91 percent of the questions correctly. If you extrapolate this miss rate out to all Google searches, AI Overviews is generating tens of millions of incorrect answers per day.

The report includes several examples of where AI Overviews went wrong. When asked for the date on which Bob Marley's former home became a museum, AI Overviews cited three pages, two of which didn't discuss the date at all. The final one, Wikipedia, listed two contradictory years, and AI Overviews confidently chose the wrong one. The benchmark also prompts models to produce the date on which Yo Yo Ma was inducted into the classical music hall of fame. While AI Overviews cited the organization's website that listed Ma's induction, it claimed there's no such thing as the Classical Music Hall of Fame. "This study has serious holes," said Google spokesperson Ned Adriance. "It doesn't reflect what people are actually searching on Google." The search giant likes to use a test called SimpleQA Verified, which uses a smaller set of questions that have been more thoroughly vetted.

Anthropic says its annualized revenue run rate has surpassed $30 billion and disclosed plans to secure roughly 3.5 gigawatts of next-generation Google TPU compute starting in 2027. Broadcom will supply the key chips and networking gear for the effort, the company announced. The Register reports: News of the two deals emerged today in a Broadcom regulatory filing that opens with two items of news. One is a "Long Term Agreement for Broadcom to develop and supply custom Tensor Processing Units ("TPUs") for Google's future generations of TPUs." Google and Broadcom have collaborated to produce custom TPUs. Broadcom CEO Hock Tan recently shared his opinion that hyperscalers don't have the skill to create custom accelerators and predicted Broadcom's chip business will therefore win over $100 billion of revenue from AI chips in 2027 alone.

Working on next-gen TPUs for Google will presumably help to make that prediction a reality. So will the second part of Broadcom's announcement: a "Supply Assurance Agreement for Broadcom to supply networking and other components to be used in Google's next-generation AI racks through up to 2031." Broadcom's filing also revealed one user of Google's next-gen TPU will be Anthropic, which starting in 2027, "will access through Broadcom approximately 3.5 gigawatts as part of the multiple gigawatts of next generation TPU-based AI compute capacity committed by Anthropic."

Cloudflare is accelerating its post-quantum security plans and now aims to make its entire platform fully post-quantum secure by 2029. "The updated timeline follows new developments in quantum computing research that suggest current cryptographic standards could be broken sooner than previously expected," reports SiliconANGLE. From the report: The decision by Cloudflare to move its post-quantum security roadmap forward comes after Google LLC and research from Oratomic demonstrated significant advances in algorithms and hardware capable of breaking widely used encryption methods such as RSA-2048 and elliptic curve cryptography. [...] The company said progress across three key areas -- quantum hardware, error correction and quantum algorithms -- is advancing in parallel and compounding overall capability. Improvements in areas such as neutral atom architectures and more efficient error correction are reducing the resources required to break encryption, while algorithmic advances are lowering computational complexity. [...]

Cloudflare has already deployed post-quantum encryption across a large portion of its network and reports that more than half of human traffic it processes now uses post-quantum key agreement. The company plans to expand support for post-quantum authentication in 2026, followed by broader deployment across its network and products through 2028. By 2029, Cloudflare said, it expects all of its services to be fully post-quantum secure, with those services being available by default across its platform, without requiring customer action or additional cost as part of the company's commitment to security upgrades. Google said it plans to accelerate its post-quantum encryption migration target to 2029.

LinkedIn is facing allegations that it quietly scans users' browsers for installed Chrome extensions. The German group Fairlinked e.V. goes so far as to claim that the site is "running one of the largest corporate espionage operations in modern history."

"The program runs silently, without any visible indicator to the user," the group says. "It does not ask for consent. It does not disclose what it is doing. It reports the results to LinkedIn's servers. This is not a one-time check. The scan runs on every page load, for every visitor." PCMag reports: This browser extension "fingerprinting" technique has been spotted before, but it was previously found to probe only 2,000 to 3,000 extensions. Fairlinked alleges that LinkedIn is now scanning for 6,222 extensions that could indicate a user's political opinions or religious views. For example, the extensions LinkedIn will look for include one that flags companies as too "woke," one that can add an "anti-Zionist" tag to LinkedIn profiles, and two others that can block content forbidden under Islamic teachings.

It would also be a cakewalk to tie the collected extension data to specific users, since LinkedIn operates as a vast professional social network that covers people's work history. Fairlinked's concern is that Microsoft and LinkedIn can allegedly use the data to identify which companies use competing products. "LinkedIn has already sent enforcement threats to users of third-party tools, using data obtained through this covert scanning to identify its targets," the group claims. However, LinkedIn claims that Fairlinked mischaracterizes a LinkedIn safeguard designed to prevent web scraping by browser extensions. "We do not use this data to infer sensitive information about members," the company says. "To protect the privacy of our members, their data, and to ensure site stability, we do look for extensions that scrape data without members' consent or otherwise violate LinkedIn's Terms of Service," LinkedIn adds.

[...] The statement goes on to allege that Fairlinked is from a developer whose account was previously suspended for web scraping. One of the group's board members is listed as "S.Morell," which appears to be Steven Morell, the founder of Teamfluence, a tool that helps businesses monitor LinkedIn activity. [...] Still, the Microsoft-owned site is facing some blowback for not clearly disclosing the browser extension scanning in LinkedIn's privacy policy. Fairlinked is soliciting donations for a legal fund to take on Microsoft and is urging the public to encourage local regulators to intervene.

Longtime Slashdot reader walterbyrd shares a report from Fuel Cells Works: China says the AEP100, a megawatt-class hydrogen-fueled turboprop engine developed by the Aero Engine Corporation of China, has completed its maiden flight on a 7.5-ton unmanned cargo aircraft in Zhuzhou, Hunan. The 16-minute test covered 36km at 220km/h and 300 meters altitude, with the aircraft returning safely after completing its planned maneuvers. State media described it as the world's first test flight of a megawatt-class hydrogen-fueled turboprop engine. [...] The Aero Engine Corporation of China (AECC) says the result shows China now has a full technical chain for hydrogen aviation engines, from core parts to system integration, which is the kind of capability needed before any industrial rollout can begin. You can watch a video of the test flight here.

Russia's "great crackdown" on VPNs — and a clampdown on Telegram's messaging platform — had an unintended side effect, reports Bloomberg. It "triggered the widespread banking outage seen across the country this week, Telegram's billionaire founder Pavel Durov said." "Telegram was banned in Russia, yet 65 million Russians still use it daily via VPNs," Durov said Saturday in a post on Telegram. "The government has spent years trying to ban VPNs too. Their blocking attempts just triggered a massive banking failure; cash briefly became the only payment method nationwide yesterday." Attempts on Friday to limit VPN use could have sparked the disruption affecting banking apps, The Bell and other Russian media reported, citing industry sources who weren't identified.

The outage may have been caused by an overload in the filtering systems run by Russia's communications watchdog, according to the reports, with experts warning that major restrictions risk undermining network stability... Separately, payments for Apple Inc.'s app store and other services became unavailable in Russia from April 1, the US company said on its website, without saying why. Earlier, RBC newswire reported that the Digital Development Ministry had asked mobile operators to disable top-ups, which could help limit VPN use....

Durov, who's being investigated in Russia for allegedly aiding terrorist activity, compared the situation in his home country to Iran, where similar restrictions prompted widespread adoption of VPNs instead of the intended shift to state-backed messaging apps. "Welcome back to the Digital Resistance, my Russian brothers and sisters," said Durov, who has lived in Dubai and France in recent years. "The entire nation is now mobilized to bypass these absurd restrictions," he wrote, adding that Telegram would continue adapting to make its traffic harder to detect and block.

Nine days ago Microsoft released a non-security "preview" update for Windows 11 — not mandatory for the average Windows user, notes ZDNet, "but rather as optional, more for IT admins and power users who want to test them."

TechRepublic adds that the update "was to bring 'production-ready improvements' and generally ensure system stability by optimizing different Windows services." So it's ironic that some (but not all) users reported instead that the update "blocks users at the door, refusing to install or crashing midway through the process."

"It apparently impacted enough people to force Microsoft to take action," writes ZDNet. "Microsoft paused and then pulled the update," and then Tuesday released a new update "designed to replace the glitchy one. This one includes all the new features and improvements from the previous preview update, but also fixes the installation issues that clobbered that update."

Meanwhile, as Windows 11 version 24H2 approaches its end of life this October, Microsoft is now force-updating users to the latest version, reports BleepingComputer: "The machine learning-based intelligent rollout has expanded to all devices running Home and Pro editions of Windows 11, version 24H2 that are not managed by IT departments," Microsoft said in a Monday update to the Windows release health dashboard... "No action is required, and you can choose when to restart your device or postpone the update."
Neowin reports: The good news is that the update from version 24H2 to 25H2 is a minor enablement package, as the two operating systems share the same codebase. As such, the update won't take long, and you should not encounter any disruptions, compatibility issues, or previously unseen bugs... Microsoft recently promised to implement big changes in how Windows Update works, including the ability to postpone updates for as long as you want. However, Microsoft has yet to clarify if that includes staying on a release beyond its support period.

Thanks to long-time Slashdot reader Ol Olsoc for sharing the news.

Slashdot reader Kirkman14 writes: A year before the Web opened to the public, Texas entrepreneur Don Lokke was trying to syndicate weekly political cartoons to bulletin board systems. His "telecomics," as he called them, represent an overlooked early experiment in online comics.

Lokke launched his main series, "Mack the Mouse" at the height of the 1992 Clinton-Bush-Perot presidential race. His mouse protagonist voiced the frustrations felt by everyday Americans about rising taxes and the recession.

Lokke gave away "Mack" for free, but sold subscriptions to his other telecomics, betting sysops would pay for exclusive content. The timing wasn't crazy: enthusiasm for BBSes as an industry was surging, with conferences like ONE BBSCON promoting "BBSing for profit."

But the Web soon deflated those hopes, and Lokke left BBSes behind in 1995. Decades later, about half of his nearly 300 telecomics were recovered and preserved on 16colors.

MarketWatch looks at "surveillance wages," pay rates "based not on an employee's performance or seniority, but on formulas that use their personal data, often collected without employees' knowledge." According to Nina DiSalvo, policy director at labor advocacy group Towards Justice, some systems use signals associated with financial vulnerability — including data on whether a prospective employee has taken out a payday loan or has a high credit-card balance — to infer the lowest pay a candidate might accept. Companies can also scrape candidates' public personal social-media pages, she said...

A first-of-its-kind audit of 500 labor-management artificial-intelligence companies by Veena Dubal, a law professor at University of California, Irvine, and Wilneida Negrón, a tech strategist, found that employers in the healthcare, customer service, logistics and retail industries are customers of vendors whose tools are designed to enable this practice. Published by the Washington Center for Equitable Growth, a progressive economic think tank, the August 2025 report... does not claim that all employers using these systems engage in algorithmic wage surveillance. Instead, it warns that the growing use of algorithmic tools to analyze workers' personal data can enable pay practices that prioritize cost-cutting over transparency or fairness...

Surveillance wages don't stop at the hiring stage — they follow workers onto the job, too. The vendors that provide such services also offer tools that are built to set bonus or incentive compensation, according to the report. These tools track their productivity, customer interactions and real-time behavior — including, in some cases, audio and video surveillance on the job. Nearly 70% of companies with more than 500 employees were already using employee-monitoring systems in 2022, such as software that monitors computer activity, according to a survey from the International Data Corporation. "The data that they have about you may allow an algorithmic decision system to make assumptions about how much, how big of an incentive, they need to give to a particular worker to generate the behavioral response they seek," DiSalvo said.
The article notes that Colorado introduced the "Prohibit Surveillance Data to Set Prices and Wages Act" to ban companies from setting pay rates with algorithms that use payday-loan history, location data or Google search behavior for algorithmically set.

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

Colorado is rolling out an average-speed camera system that tracks vehicles across multiple points instead of catching them at a single camera, making it much harder for drivers to dodge tickets with apps like Waze and Radarbot. Motor1 reports: The state's new automated vehicle identification systems (AVIS) use several cameras to calculate your average speed between them, and if it is 10 miles per hour or more over the limit, you get a ticket. No longer will you be able to slow down as you approach a camera and speed back up after passing it, not that you should be speeding on public roads in the first place.

Colorado began deploying this new camera system after legislators changed the law in 2023, allowing AVIS for law enforcement use. The systems, installed on various roads and highways throughout the state, first began issuing warnings, but police began issuing tickets late last year.

The most recent section of road to fall under surveillance is a stretch of I-25 north of Denver, which brought the state's growing panopticon to our attention. It began issuing tickets on April 2. The Colorado Department of Transportation installed the cameras along a construction zone. The fine is $75 and zero points for exceeding the speed limit, and the police issue it to the vehicle's owner, regardless of who is driving.

Iranian strikes have reportedly knocked out key AWS availability zones in Bahrain and Dubai, leaving parts of both regions effectively offline for an extended period and forcing Amazon to urge teams and customers to shift workloads elsewhere. "These two regions continue to be impaired, and services should not expect to be operating with normal levels of redundancy and resiliency," an internal Amazon communication memo reads. "We are actively working to free and reserve as much capacity as possible in the region for customers, and services should be scaled to the minimal footprint required to support customer migration." Big Technology reports: With the war now nearing its sixth week, Iran has made Amazon infrastructure in the Gulf an economic target and is now eyeing its peers. Amazon's Bahrain facilities have been hit multiple times, including a Wednesday strike that caused a fire. And its facilities in the UAE also sustained multiple hits. The IRGC is threatening multiple other U.S. tech giants, including Microsoft, Google, and Apple.

Amazons infrastructure in Bahrain and Dubai each have three 'availability zones' or clusters of compute. Both Bahrain and Dubai have a zones that are "hard down" and and "impaired but functioning," per the internal communication. "We do not have a timeline for when DXB and BAH will return to normal operations," the internal post said.

Archive of Our Own (AO3) is officially dropping its "beta" label after 17 years. The Organization for Transformative Works, the nonprofit behind the fanfiction site, said the site will keep evolving with new improvements even though it's no longer technically in beta.

"As the AO3 software has been stable for a long time, the change is mostly cosmetic and does not indicate that everything is finalized or perfectly working," the organizations says. "Exiting beta doesn't mean we'll stop continuing to improve AO3 -- our volunteer coders and community contributors will still be working to add to and improve AO3 every day."

Some of the features it's introduced over the years include a tag system, offline fanworks downloads, privacy settings that let creators restrict access to their work, and new modes for multi-chapter works. As it stands, the site says it has more than 10 million registered users and 17 million fanworks.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Wired: Today at a hearing of the Colorado Senate Business, Labor, and Technology committee, lawmakers voted unanimously to move Colorado state bill SB26-090 -- titled Exempt Critical Infrastructure from Right to Repair -- out of committee and into the state senate and house for a vote. The bill modifies Colorado's Consumer Right to Repair Digital Electronic Equipment act, which was passed in 2024 and went into effect in January 2026. While the protections secured by that act are wide, the new SB26-090 bill aims to "exempt information technology equipment that is intended for use in critical infrastructure from Colorado's consumer right to repair laws."

The bill is supported by tech manufacturers like Cisco and IBM, according to lobbying disclosures. These are companies that have vested interests in manufacturing things like routers, server equipment, and computers and stand to profit if they can control who fixes their products and the tools, components, and software used to make those upgrades and repairs. They also cite cybersecurity concerns, saying that giving people access to the tools and systems they would need to repair a device could also enable bad actors to use those methods for nefarious means. (This is a common argument manufacturers make when opposing right-to-repair laws.)

[...] During the hearing, more than a dozen repair advocates spoke from organizations like Pirg, the Repair Association, and iFixit opposing the bill. YouTuber and repair advocate Louis Rossmann was there. The main problem, repair advocates say, is that the bill deliberately uses vague language to make the case for controlling who can fix their products. [...] The Colorado Labor and Technology committee advanced the bill, but it still needs to go through votes on the Colorado Senate and House floors before going into effect. Those votes may take place as early as next week. Regardless of how the bill goes in the state, it's likely that manufacturers will continue their push to alter or undo repair legislation in other states across the country. "The 'information technology' and 'critical infrastructure' thing is as cynical as you can possibly be about it," says Nathan Proctor, the leader of Pirg's US right-to-repair campaign. "It sounds scary to lawmakers, but it just means the internet."

The current wording of the bill "leaves it up to the manufacturers to determine which items they will need to provide repair tools and parts to owners and independent repairers and which ones they don't," says Danny Katz, executive director CoPIRG, the Colorado branch of the consumer advocate group Pirg. "This is a bad policy and would be a big step back for Coloradans' repair rights."

iFixit CEO Kyle Wiens said in the hearing: "There's a general principle in cybersecurity that obscurity is not security," iFixit CEO Kyle Wiens said in the hearing. "The money that's behind the scenes, that's what's driving the bill."

The Wall Street Journal shares the "wild behind-the-scenes story" of how the world's largest and most destructive botnet was uncovered and taken down, writes Slashdot reader sturgeon. "At times, the network known as Kimwolf included more than a million compromised home Android devices and digital photo frames -- enough DDoS firepower to disrupt internet traffic across the U.S. and beyond." From the report: Sitting in his dorm room at the Rochester Institute of Technology, Benjamin Brundage was closing in on a mystery that had even seasoned internet investigators baffled. A cat meme helped him crack the case. A growing network of hacked devices was launching the biggest cyberattacks ever seen on the internet. It had become the most powerful cyberweapon ever assembled, large enough to knock a state or even a small country offline. Investigators didn't know exactly who had built it -- or how. Brundage had been following the attacks, too -- and, in between classes, was conducting his own investigation. In September, the college senior started messaging online with an anonymous user who seemed to have insider knowledge.

As they chatted on Discord, a platform favored by videogamers, Brundage was eager to get more information, but he didn't want to come off as too serious and shut down the conversation. So every now and then he'd send a funny GIF to lighten the mood. Brundage was fluent in the memes, jokes and technical jargon popular with young gamers and hackers who are extremely online. "It was a bit of just asking over and over again and then like being a bit unserious," said Brundage. At one point, he asked for some technical details. He followed up with the cat meme: a six-second clip that showed a hand adjusting a necktie on a fluffy gray cat. Brundage didn't expect it to work, but he got the information. "It took me by surprise," he said.

Eventually the leaker hinted there was a new vulnerability on the internet. Brundage, who is 22, would learn it threatened tens of millions of consumers and as much as a quarter of the world's corporations. As he unraveled the mystery, he impressed veteran researchers with his findings -- including federal law enforcement, which took action against the network two weeks ago. Chad Seaman, a researcher at Akamai, joked at one point that the internet could go down if Brundage spent too much time on his exams.

OpenAI is acquiring tech news podcast TBPN, a fast-growing daily show hosted by John Coogan and Jordi Hays. OpenAI says TBPN will keep its editorial independence, even though the acquisition is widely viewed as part of a broader effort to influence public discourse around AI. CNBC reports: In the announcement, OpenAI CEO of AGI Deployment Fidji Simo wrote that their mission of bringing artificial general intelligence comes with a responsibility to have a space for "constructive conversation about the changes AI creates." Altman has appeared on TBPN multiple times and is a frequent presence across media and podcasts, even hitting NBC's "Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon" in December.

The announcement says TBPN will maintain editorial independence and continue to choose its own guests. "TBPN is my favorite tech show. We want them to keep that going and for them to do what they do so well," Altman wrote in a post on X. "I don't expect them to go any easier on us, am sure I'll do my part to help enable that with occasional stupid decisions." OpenAI did not disclose the terms of the deal but said TBPN will be housed within its strategy organization. "While we've been critical of the industry at times, after getting to know Sam and the OpenAI team, what stood out most was their openness to feedback and commitment to getting this right," wrote Hays in a statement. "Moving from commentary to real impact in how this technology is distributed and understood globally is incredibly important to us."

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: Google's Gemini AI models have improved by leaps and bounds over the past year, but you can only use Gemini on Google's terms. The company's Gemma open-weight models have provided more freedom, but Gemma 3, which launched over a year ago, is getting a bit long in the tooth. Starting today, developers can start working with Gemma 4, which comes in four sizes optimized for local usage. Google has also acknowledged developer frustrations with AI licensing, so it's dumping the custom Gemma license.

Like past versions of its open-weight models, Google has designed Gemma 4 to be usable on local machines. That can mean plenty of things, of course. The two large Gemma variants, 26B Mixture of Experts and 31B Dense, are designed to run unquantized in bfloat16 format on a single 80GB Nvidia H100 GPU. Granted, that's a $20,000 AI accelerator, but it's still local hardware. If quantized to run at lower precision, these big models will fit on consumer GPUs. Google also claims it has focused on reducing latency to really take advantage of Gemma's local processing. The 26B Mixture of Experts model activates only 3.8 billion of its 26 billion parameters in inference mode, giving it much higher tokens-per-second than similarly sized models. Meanwhile, 31B Dense is more about quality than speed, but Google expects developers to fine-tune it for specific uses.

The other two Gemma 4 models, Effective 2B (E2B) and Effective 4B (E4B), are aimed at mobile devices. These options were designed to maintain low memory usage during inference, running at an effective 2 billion or 4 billion parameters. Google says the Pixel team worked closely with Qualcomm and MediaTek to optimize these models for devices like smartphones, Raspberry Pi, and Jetson Nano. Not only do they use less memory and battery than Gemma 3, but Google also touts "near-zero latency" this time around. The Apache 2.0 license is much more flexible with its terms of use for commercial restrictions, "granting you complete control over your data, infrastructure, and models," says Google.

Clement Delangue, co-founder and CEO of Hugging Face, called it "a huge milestone" that will help developers use Gemma for more projects and expand what Google calls the "Gemmaverse."

Even on NASA's Artemis II mission around the moon, astronauts apparently still have to deal with broken Microsoft Outlook. One of the crew members, Reid Wiseman, jokingly reported that he had "two Microsoft Outlooks" and neither worked. 404 Media reports: On April 1, four astronauts from the U.S. and Canada embarked on a 10-day flight to loop around the moon. Spotted by VGBees podcast host Niki Grayson on the NASA livestream of live views from the , around 2 a.m. ET, mission control acknowledges an issue with a process control system and offers to remote in -- yes, like how your office IT guy would pause his CoD campaign to log into Okta for you because you used the wrong password too many times.

One of the astronauts, Reid Wiseman, says that's chill, but while they're in there: "I also see that I have two Microsoft Outlooks, and neither one of those are working." Astronauts are trained for decades in some of the most physically and mentally grueling environments of any career. They're some of the smartest people on the planet, and they have to be, before we strap them to 3.2 million pounds of jet fuel and make them do complex experiments and high-stakes decisions for days on end. And yet, once they get up there, fucking Outlook is borked.

Nvidia has begun rolling out a beta feature that automatically compiles game shaders while a PC is idle. It won't eliminate shader compilation the first time a game runs, but Ars Technica reports it could help reduce those repeated wait times. From the report: Nvidia's new Auto Shader Compilation system promises to "reduc[e] the frequency of game runtime compilation after driver updates" for users running Nvidia's GeForce Game Ready Driver 595.97 WHQL or later. When the feature is active and your machine is idle, the app will automatically start rebuilding DirectX drivers for your games so they're all set to roll the next time they launch.

While the feature defaults to being turned off when the Nvidia App is first downloaded, users can activate it by going to the Graphics Tab > Global Settings > Shader Cache. There, they can set aside disk space for precompiled shaders and decide how many system resources the compilation process should use. App users can also manually force shader recompilation through the app rather than waiting for the machine to go idle.

Unfortunately, Nvidia warns that users will still have to generate shaders in-game after downloading a title for the first time. The Auto Shader Compiler system only generates the new shaders needed after subsequent driver updates following that first run of a new title.