Microsoft appears to be readying its own DLSS-like AI upscaling feature for PC games. From a report: X user PhantomOcean3 discovered the feature inside the latest test versions of Windows 11 over the weekend, with Microsoft describing its automatic super resolution as a way to "use AI to make supported games play more smoothly with enhanced details." That sounds a lot like Nvidia's Deep Learning Super Sampling (DLSS) technology, which uses AI to upscale games and improve frame rates and image quality. AMD and Intel also offer their own variants, with FSR and XeSS both growing in popularity in recent PC game releases.

stikves writes: Today, Broadcom announced immediate end of ESXi availability. ESXi has been an important tool for many "homelab" enthusiasts -- offering simple bare metal virtualization for small setups. Unfortunately they don't offer a replacement, except for paid subscription services.

Nvidia blog: Every country needs to own the production of their own intelligence, NVIDIA founder and CEO Jensen Huang told attendees Monday at the World Governments Summit in Dubai. Huang, who spoke as part of a fireside chat with the UAE's Minister of AI, His Excellency Omar Al Olama, described sovereign AI -- which emphasizes a country's ownership over its data and the intelligence it produces -- as an enormous opportunity for the world's leaders. "It codifies your culture, your society's intelligence, your common sense, your history -- you own your own data," Huang told Al Olama during their conversation, a highlight of an event attended by more than 4,000 delegates from 150 countries.

"We completely subscribe to that vision," Al Olama said. "That's why the UAE is moving aggressively on creating large language models and mobilizing compute." Huang's appearance in the UAE comes as the Gulf State is moving rapidly to transform itself from an energy powerhouse into a global information technology hub. Dubai is the latest stop for Huang in a global tour that has included meetings with leaders in Canada, France, India, Japan, Malaysia, Singapore and Vietnam over the past six months. The Middle East is poised to reap significant benefits from AI, with PwC projecting a $320 billion boost to the region's economy by 2030.

Many websites are using AI tools to generate fake obituaries about average people for profit. These articles lack substantiating details but are optimized for SEO, frequently outranking legitimate obituaries, The Verge reports. The fake obituaries, as one can imagine, are causing distress for grieving families and friends. In response, Google told The Verge that it aims to surface high-quality information but struggles with "data voids." The company terminated some YouTube channels sharing fake notices but declined to say if the flagged websites violate policies.

A lawsuit involving the now-defunct Google+ social media site "has been settled for $350 million," reports CPO magazine, "after a lengthy appeals process played out..."

"[T]he total pool after attorney and legal fees are deducted is likely to be well over $200 million." [The lawsuit] dates all the way back to 2018, when Google internally discovered that the Google+ API was being abused to access the private data of about half a million of the social media service's users. Google opted not to publicly declare the breach, as they were not legally compelled to.

News of it came via the Wall Street Journal in late 2018. Google shareholders contend that the company kept the issue under wraps due to the Cambridge Analytica scandal that Facebook was experiencing at the time, believing that they would suffer a similar negative PR blow. This was supported by an internal company memo that became public.

As the news of the exploitable software glitch gradually came out, Google shareholders took a hit as the company collectively lost tens of billions of dollars in market value. The lead plaintiff in the case is Rhode Island Treasurer James Diossa, who was responsible for overseeing a state pension fund that held stock in Google parent company Alphabet.

Google+ was shuttered in 2019 after an eight-year run due in part to repeated technical issues with unauthorized API access (as well as low user engagement).
"If the settlement is approved by the 9th Circuit judge, the proceeds will be available to Google shareholders who held stock at any time from April 23, 2018, to April 30, 2019...

"A separate class-action privacy lawsuit involving users who had private data exposed during the incident was settled in 2018 for $7.5 million, leading to very low payments for each of the claimants."

Last night in San Francisco's Chinatown, "A person jumped on the hood of a Waymo driverless taxi and smashed its windshield..." reports the Verge, "generating applause before a crowd formed around the car and covered it in spray paint, breaking its windows, and ultimately set it on fire." The fire department arrived minutes later, according to a report in The Autopian, but by then flames had already fully engulfed the car.... Waymo representative Sandy Karp told The Verge via email that the fully autonomous car "was not transporting any riders" when it was attacked and fireworks were tossed inside the car, sparking the flames...

The fire takes place against the backdrop of simmering tension between San Francisco residents and automated vehicle operators... Just last week, a Waymo car struck a cyclist who had reportedly been following behind a truck turning across its path.
The "burnt-out husk of the electric Waymo Jaguar" appears in a video posted on YouTube, according to the article. "Another set of videos posted by software developer Michael Vendi gives a view into the scene as it played out and the fire grew."

San Francisco's 49ers play in the Super Bowl this afteroon, so last night's celebrations for Chinese New Year could be followed by additional celebrations tonight. Police Chief Bill Scott is already urging residents to behave responsibly. "Please don't light anything on fire."

Remember "Servo," Mozilla's "next-generation browser engine," focused on performance and robustness?

"The developers of Servo are starting 2024 by going all in..." reports It's FOSS News, citing a social media post from FOSDEM. "[T]he Servo Project team were there showing off the work done so far." If you were not familiar, Servo is an experimental browser engine that leverages the power of Rust to provide a memory-safe and modular experience that is highly adaptable. After Mozilla created Servo back in 2012 as a research project, it saw its share of ups and downs over the years, with it making a comeback in 2023; thanks to a fresh approach by the developers on how Servo should move forward.

Even though there are plenty of open source Chrome alternatives, with this, there's a chance that we will get some really cool options based on Servo that just might give Blink and Gecko a run for the money! Just a few months back, in September 2023, after The Servo Project officially joined Linux Foundation Europe, the existing contributors from Igalia stepped up their game by taking over the project maintenance. To complement that, at Open Source Summit Europe last year, Manuel Rego from Igalia shared some really useful insights when he presented.

He showcased stuff like the WebGL support, cross-platform support including mobile support for Android and Linux, among other things. They have experimented with Servo for embedded applications use-cases (like running it on Raspberry Pi), and have plans to make advances on it. As far as I can see, it looks like, Servo is faster for Raspberry Pi compared to Chromium. You can explore more such demos on Servo's demo webpage.
2024's roadmap includes "Initial Android support, that will see Servo being made to build on modern Android versions," according to the article, "with the developers publishing nightly APKs on the official website some time in the future."

One fun fact? "Even though Mozilla dropped the experimental project, Firefox still utilizes some servo components in the browser"

Another FOSDOM update from social media: "Thunderbird is also embracing Rust."

Thursday a climate technology startup called Twelve "took a major step toward producing sustainable aviation fuel..." reports Bloomberg, "by launching its commercial-scale carbon transformation unit." Twelve is among the emerging companies working on ways to transform captured CO2 into useful products. In the case of the Berkeley, California-based startup, its nascent technology will be critical to cleaning up one of the hardest-to-decarbonize sectors: aviation. Twelve uses a technique called electrolysis that uses electricity to repurpose carbon dioxide and water into various products. When the electricity is generated from renewables, the process is essentially no-carbon. The company's CO2 electrochemical reactor — called OPUS — will be at the center of its first commercial production plant for sustainable aviation fuel, under construction in Moses Lake and set to be completed this year. The plant will run on hydropower and use CO2 captured from a nearby ethanol plant. That CO2 and water will be fed through OPUS and turned into synthetic gas, the basis of sustainable aviation fuel.

Twelve's airline customers can blend it with traditional jet fuel. The resulting carbon credit can be bought by corporate customers like Microsoft to offset their business travel-related emissions...

Although Twelve's carbon transformation technology can be used to make products ranging from spandex pants to car parts, it pivoted to focus more fully on sustainable aviation fuel after the announcement of tax credits for SAF blending, carbon capture and utilization, and hydrogen production, said Twelve co-founder and Chief Science Officer Etosha Cave. Those tax credits helped the company launch this commercial unit. "Without that, we would not be competitive in terms of being able to get to market at the stage we're at," Cave said.
It's still not cost competitive with traditional jet fuel, the article points out, "but airlines are under increasing pressure from governments and their own net zero commitments to integrate SAF into their fuel mix.

"Twelve would not disclose its cost to make the fuel, though it said it expects prices to go down as its technology scales up and eventually reach parity with traditional jet fuel."

Shell once announced it would build 48 new Hydrogen fueling stations for light-duty vehicles in California, according to the blog Hydrogen Insights. But then in September, Shell told the site they'd "discontinued" that plan.

And last month the Inside EVs blog noted that in all of 2023, just 2,968 hydrogen cars were sold "in the United States — and by that, we mean in California, where the series-produced models are available." That's according to data from the Hydrogen Fuel Cell Partnership — admittedly a 10% increase from 2022's sales figure of 2,707 — but with both numbers lower than 2021's sales of 3,341. "The overall cumulative sales of hydrogen fuel cell vehicles exceeded 17,940 as of the end of the quarter (not counting vehicles removed from use), which is 20% more than a year ago."

Then this week Shell said it will "no longer be operating" any light-duty hydrogen fuelling stations in the U.S., and will close all seven of its California pumping stations immediately. (Three in San Francisco, one in Berkeley, one in San Jose, and two in the Sacramento area.) Inside EVs says Shell's move "represents another blow to the struggling hydrogen car market in the only state where the fuel is widely available at all." Shell had, until recently, operated seven of the 55 total retail hydrogen stations in California, per the Hydrogen Fuel Cell Partnership (H2FCP). That makes this a blow, but not apocalyptic news for the (small) hydrogen community....

In the letter announcing the closure, Shell Hydrogen Vice President Andrew Beard said they were shutting them down "due to hydrogen supply complications and other external market factors." It's not hard to see what Beard is referencing here... Hydrogen Insight reports that this shortage has been disrupting stations since August 13...

Some are also down for repairs, as many hydrogen stations suffer from serious reliability issues. Iwatani, a Japanese gas company that is one of the two largest names in American hydrogen filling stations, is currently suing the company that provided the core technology for its stations. In a court filing viewed by Hydrogen Insight, Iwatini alleges that its provider did not test its equipment in a real-world commercial scenario, hid defects, and misled the company. It is, in short, a big mess.

All of this makes the future of hydrogen fuel-cell vehicles in the United States even more uncertain. The technology has struggled to catch on, as the stations and their fuel remain expensive. Though hydrogen car manufacturers usually include a large amount of free fuel in the purchase of a vehicle, once that runs out consumers are left with eye-watering prices from stations that are often broken, out of fuel, or swarmed with long lines. It's why used hydrogen cars are so cheap, and why they still aren't a good deal.

Few companies can make a better case for it than Shell, though, as the cheapest way to produce hydrogen involves a lot of natural gas. Its proximity to the fossil-fuel industry was supposed to make it cheaper, and provide incentive for robust fueling infrastructure. That hasn't played out, though, and one of the largest oil giants is throwing in the towel. If even a fossil giant like Shell can't justify investing in the future of light-duty hydrogen infrastructure, we're not sure who can.

America's Federal Aviation Administration "is midway through a review of manufacturing at Boeing," reports the Associated Press, but "already knows that changes must be made in how the government oversees the aircraft manufacturer." FAA Administrator Michael Whitaker suggested that Boeing — under pressure from airlines to produce large numbers of planes — is not paying enough attention to safety.

Whitaker said that FAA has had two challenges since January 5, when an emergency door panel blew off a Boeing 737 Max 9 jetliner over Oregon. "One, what is wrong with this airplane? But two, what's going on with the production at Boeing?" Whitaker told a House subcommittee. "There have been issues in the past. They don't seem to be getting resolved, so we feel like we need to have a heightened level of oversight."

Whitaker, who took over the FAA about three months ago, was making his first appearance on Capitol Hill since the blowout over Oregon.... Whitaker said the FAA is halfway through a six-week audit that has involved placing "about two dozen" inspectors in Boeing's 737 plant in Renton, Washington, and "maybe half a dozen" at a Wichita, Kansas, plant where supplier Spirit AeroSystems makes the fuselages for 737s. The inspectors are looking for gaps in the quality of work during the manufacturing process that might have contributed to a door plug blowing off an Alaska Airlines Max 9 at 16,000 feet over Oregon. Whitaker said he expects the FAA will keep people in the Boeing and Spirit factories after the audit is done, but he said the numbers haven't been determined.

For many years, the FAA has relied on employees of aircraft manufacturers to perform some safety-related work on planes being built by their companies. That saves money for the government, and in theory taps the expertise of industry employees, but it was criticized after two deadly crashes involving Boeing Max 8 planes in 2018 and 2019. "In order to have a truly safe system, it seems to me that we can't rely on the manufacturers themselves to be their own watchdogs," Rep. Colin Allred, D-Texas, said during Tuesday's hearing. Whitaker has said that the self-checking practice — in theory, overseen by FAA inspectors — should be reconsidered, but he again stopped short of saying it should be scrapped. But he said closer monitoring of Boeing is needed.

"The current system is not working because it is not delivering safe aircraft," Whitaker said. "Maybe we need to look at the incentives to make sure safety is getting the appropriate first rung of consideration that it deserves."

An anonymous Slashdot reader shared this report from SiliconANGLE: The Rust Foundation, which supports the development of the popular open-source Rust programming language... shared that Google LLC had made a $1 million contribution specifically earmarked for a C++/Rust interoperability effort known as the "Interop Initiative." The initiative aims to foster seamless integration between Rust and the widely used C++ programming language, addressing one of the significant barriers to Rust's adoption in legacy systems entrenched in C++ code.

Rust has the ability to prevent common memory errors that plague C++ programs and offers a path toward more secure and reliable software systems. However, transitioning from C++ to Rust presents notable challenges, particularly for organizations with extensive C++ codebases. The Interop Initiative seeks to mitigate these challenges by facilitating smoother transitions and enabling organizations to leverage Rust's advantages without completely overhauling their existing systems.

As part of the initiative, the Rust Foundation will collaborate closely with the Rust Project Leadership Council, stakeholders and member organizations to develop a comprehensive scope of work. The collaborative effort will focus on enhancing build system integration, exploring artificial intelligence-assisted code conversion techniques and expanding upon existing interoperability frameworks. By addressing these strategic areas, the initiative aims to accelerate the adoption of Rust across the software industry and hence contribute to advancing memory safety and reducing the prevalence of software vulnerabilities.
A post on Google's security blog says they're excited to collaborate "to ensure that any additions made are suitable and address the challenges of Rust adoption that projects using C++ face. Improving memory safety across the software industry is one of the key technology challenges of our time, and we invite others across the community and industry to join us in working together to secure the open source ecosystem for everyone."

The blog post also includes this quote from Google's VP of engineering, Android security and privacy. "Based on historical vulnerability density statistics, Rust has proactively prevented hundreds of vulnerabilities from impacting the Android ecosystem. This investment aims to expand the adoption of Rust across various components of the platform."

The Register adds: Lars Bergstrom, director of Android platform tools and libraries and chair of the Rust Foundation Board, announced the grant and said that the funding will "improve the ability of Rust code to interoperate with existing legacy C++ codebases.... Integrating Rust today is possible where there is a fallback C API, but for high-performance and high-fidelity interoperability, improving the ability to work directly with C++ code is the single biggest initiative that will further the ability to adopt Rust...."

According to Bergstrom, Google's most significant increase in the use of Rust has occurred in Android, where interoperability started receiving attention in 2021, although Rust is also being deployed elsewhere.... Bergstrom said that as of mid-2023, Google had more than 1,000 developers who had committed Rust code, adding that the ad giant recently released the training material it uses. "We also have a team working on building out interoperability," he added. "We hope that this team's work on addressing challenges specific to Google's codebases will complement the industry-wide investments from this new grant we've provided to the Rust Foundation."

Google's grant matches a $1 million grant last November from Microsoft, which also committed $10 million in internal investment to make Rust a "first-class language in our engineering systems." The Google-bucks are expected to fund further interoperability efforts, along the lines of KDAB's bidirectional Rust and C++ bindings with Qt.

In a blog post today, Meta announced that it'll stop showing political content across Instagram and Threads unless users explicitly choose to have it recommended to them. The Verge reports: Meta announced that it's expanding an existing Reels policy that limits political content from people you're not following (including posts about social issues) from appearing in recommended feeds to more broadly cover the company's Threads and Instagram platforms. "Our goal is to preserve the ability for people to choose to interact with political content, while respecting each person's appetite for it," said Instagram head Adam Mosseri, announcing on Threads that the changes will be applied over the next few weeks. Facebook is also expected to roll out these new controls at a later, undisclosed date.

Users who still want to have content "likely to mention governments, elections, or social topics that affect a group of people and/or society at large" recommended to them can choose to turn off this limitation within their account settings. The changes will apply to public accounts when enabled and only in places where content is being recommended, such as Explore, Reels, in-feed recommendations, and suggested users. The update won't change how users view content from accounts they choose to follow, so accounts that aren't eligible to be recommended can still post political content to their followers via their feed and Stories.

For creators, Meta says that "if your account is not eligible to be recommended, none of your content will be recommended regardless of whether or not all of your content goes against our recommendations guidelines." When these changes do go live, professional accounts on Instagram will be able to use the Account Status feature to check if posting political content is impacting their eligibility for recommendation. Professional accounts can also use Account Status to contest decisions that revoke this eligibility, alongside editing, removing, or pausing politically related posts until the account is eligible to be recommended again.

It appears that the government of Canada is going to ban the Flipper Zero, the tiny, modular hacking device that's become popular with techies for its deviant digital powers. From a report: On Thursday, following a summit that focused on "the growing challenge of auto theft in Canada," the country's Minister of Innovation, Science and Industry posted a statement on X, saying "Criminals have been using sophisticated tools to steal cars...Today, I announced we are banning the importation, sale and use of consumer hacking devices, like flippers, used to commit these crimes.

In a press release issued on Thursday, the Canadian government confirmed that it will be pursuing "all avenues to ban devices used to steal vehicles by copying the wireless signals for remote keyless entry, such as the Flipper Zero." The Flipper, which is technically a penetration testing device, has been controversial due to its ability to hack droves of smart products. Alex Kulagin, the COO of Flipper Devices, said in a statement shared with Gizmodo that the device couldn't be used to "hijack any car" and that certain circumstances would have to be met for it to happen:

An Apple executive lobbied against a strong right-to-repair bill in Oregon Thursday, which is the first time the company has had an employee actively outline its stance on right to repair at an open hearing. 404 Media: Apple's position in Oregon shows that despite supporting a weaker right to repair law in California, it still intends to control its own repair ecosystem. It also sets up a highly interesting fight in the state because Google has come out in favor of the same legislation Apple is opposing. "It is our belief that the bill's current language around parts pairing will undermine the security, safety, and privacy of Oregonians by forcing device manufacturers to allow the use of parts of unknown origin in consumer devices," John Perry, Apple's principal secure repair architect, told the legislature. This is a quick about-face for the company, which after years of lobbying against right to repair, began to lobby for it in California last fall. The difference now is that Oregon's bill includes a critical provision that Google says it can easily comply with but that is core for Apple to maintain its dominance over the repair market.

President Joe Biden's administration plans to launch a $5 billion semiconductor research consortium to bolster chip design and hardware innovation in the US and counter China's efforts to capture the cutting edge of the industry. From a report: Officials on Friday are set to formally establish the National Semiconductor Technology Center, or NSTC, which marks the second major research and development investment from the 2022 Chips Act following a $3 billion advanced packaging initiative. The consortium plans to invest hundreds of millions of dollars into workforce development and intends to open funding applications in early March for research grants, Commerce Undersecretary for Standards and Technology Dr. Laurie E. Locascio said in an interview with Bloomberg News. Officials are working to prevent China from benefiting from NSTC-funded research while filling gaps in the US research ecosystem for key areas like packaging and hardware, she said, as electronic components have become a key US-China battleground.

Sam Altman was already trying to lead the development of human-level artificial intelligence. Now he has another great ambition: raising trillions of dollars to reshape the global semiconductor industry. From a report: The OpenAI chief executive officer is in talks with investors including the United Arab Emirates government to raise funds for a wildly ambitious tech initiative that would boost the world's chip-building capacity, expand its ability to power AI, among other things, and cost several trillion dollars, according to people familiar with the matter. The project could require raising as much as $5 trillion to $7 trillion, one of the people said.

The fundraising plans, which face significant obstacles, are aimed at solving constraints to OpenAI's growth, including the scarcity of the pricey AI chips required to train large language models behind AI systems such as ChatGPT. Altman has often complained that there aren't enough of these kinds of chips -- known as graphics processing units, or GPUs -- to power OpenAI's quest for artificial general intelligence, which it defines as systems that are broadly smarter than humans. Such a sum of investment would dwarf the current size of the global semiconductor industry. Global sales of chips were $527 billion last year and are expected to rise to $1 trillion annually by 2030. Global sales of semiconductor manufacturing equipment -- the costly machinery needed to run chip factories -- last year were $100 billion, according to an estimate by the industry group SEMI.

John Walker, the founder of computer-aided design software company Autodesk and co-author of AutoCAD, passed away on February 2nd. He was 74. Consultant and programmer Owen Wengerd shared the news on behalf of John's family (via Scanalyst, a website created by John): It is with great sadness that we announce John's death on Friday, February 2, 2024. He was born in Maryland, USA to William and Bertha Walker, who preceded him in death. John is survived by his wife Roxie Walker and a brother, Bill Walker of West Virginia. Declining to follow in his family tradition of becoming a medical doctor, John attended Case Western Reserve University (CWRU) to pursue a future in astronomy. However, after he discovered the brave new world of computers, he never looked back. John worked at the university's Project Chi (X) computing center where he studied computer science and earned a degree in electrical engineering.

John met Roxie on Thanksgiving Day in 1972, and they married the following year. Roxie and John drove cross-country a few months later for John's new job in California. Eventually he left that first job and worked at various others in the bay area. In late 1976, John designed his own circuit board based on the then-new Texas Instruments TMS9900 microprocessor. This venture became Marinchip Systems, and eventually led to Autodesk. The beginnings of Autodesk are well documented by John himself in The Autodesk File 2.0k and from there John's story is best told by John himself in his prodigious work, which is all methodically organized and available to the public at his website Fourmilab 1.4k.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from MacRumors: The Apple Music, Apple TV, and Apple Devices apps that Apple has been testing for Windows machines have officially launched, ending a long preview period and bringing an end to the iTunes app on some computers. The Apple Music, Apple TV, and Apple Devices app are part of Apple's effort to split iTunes on PC into multiple platforms to mirror how these apps work on Macs. On Windows 10 and later, PC customers can download the three separate apps to manage devices and access Apple Music and Apple TV content. Microsoft first announced plans for Apple Music and Apple TV apps for the Microsoft Store back in October 2022, so the split from iTunes has been in the works for more than a year.

The Apple Music app gives Windows users a way to listen to and manage music from their iTunes library, including iTunes Store purchases, while the Apple TV app allows users to watch and manage movies and TV shows from iTunes. Both of the apps also give access to Apple's streaming services, Apple Music and Apple TV+. The Apple Devices app is designed to allow PC owners to update, back up, and restore and manage their iPhones and iPads, and sync content from their PCs. Using the standalone apps requires Windows 10 or later, and all three apps must be installed to transition away from iTunes. After the apps have been added to a PC, iTunes is used only to access podcasts and audiobooks. The iTunes library should not be deleted, because it is used by the Apple Music and Apple TV apps.

In a first for Uber since becoming a public company, the ride-hailing service posted its first full-year profit and its stock hit an all-time high Wednesday. "Like its final year as a private company, the last time Uber turned a profit, it got a huge tailwind from investments that helped fuel profits, $1 billion in 2023," reports the Associated Press. "The difference is that Uber has started making money from operations." From the report: Uber and other ride-share companies struggled through the COVID-19 pandemic. The company, whose stock recently joined the S&P 500 index, saw its ride-hailing business stymied as government lockdowns kept millions at home. But Uber has focused on cutting costs and, during the pandemic, building up a then-nascent food-delivery division, which has since become a major revenue driver. Uber's ride-hailing service, meanwhile, has gradually bounced back and the numbers from the fourth quarter suggest both are trending in the right direction.

Delivery revenue grew 6%, and revenue for the ride-share part of the business climbed 34%. Industry analysts also noted growth in the company's membership platform. "Uber One now has roughly 19 million members across 25 countries, wrote William Blair's Ralph Schackart. "Uber One members generate roughly 30% of mobility and delivery gross bookings, up roughly 700 basis points year-over-year." Revenue totaled $9.94 billion, beating Wall Street projections for $9.75 billion. Gross bookings surged 22% from the prior-year period to $37.6 billion. For the year, Uber posted a profit of $1.89 billion, or 87 cents per share, on revenue of $37.28 billion.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from TechCrunch: Pakistan has temporarily suspended mobile phone network and internet services across the country to combat any "possible threats," a top ministry said, as the South Asian nation commences its national election. In a statement, Pakistan's interior ministry said the move was prompted by recent incidents of terrorism in the country. The internet was accessible through wired broadband connections, local journalists posted on X earlier Thursday. But NetBlocks, an independent service that tracks outages, said later that Pakistan had started to block internet services as well. The polls have opened in the nation and will close at 5 p.m. The interior ministry didn't say when it will switch back on the mobile services.