alternative_right shares a report: New York state lawmakers voted to stop the NYPD's attempt to block its radio communications from the public Thursday, with the bill expected to head to Gov. Kathy Hochul's desk. The "Keep Police Radio Public Act" passed both the state Senate and state Assembly, with a sponsor of the legislation arguing the proposal strikes the "proper balance" in the battle between transparency and sensitive information.

"Preserving access to police radio is critical for a free press and to preserve the freedoms and protections afforded by the public availability of this information," state Sen. Michael Gianaris (D-Queens) said in a statement. "As encrypted radio usage grows, my proposal strikes the proper balance between legitimate law enforcement needs and the rights and interests of New Yorkers."

The bill, which was sponsored in the Assembly by lawmaker Karines Reyes (D-Bronx), is meant to make real-time police radio communications accessible to emergency services organizations and reporters. "Sensitive information" would still be kept private, according to the legislation. In late 2023, the NYPD began encrypting its radio communications to increase officer safety and "protect the privacy interests of victims and witnesses." However, it led to outcry from press advocates and local officials concerned about reduced transparency and limited access to real-time information.

A bill to address the issue has passed both chambers of New York's legislature, but Governor Hochul has not yet indicated whether she will sign it.

An anonymous reader shares a report: There are more than 1,000 technology unicorns, meaning venture-backed companies worth $1 billion or more, but at least one in 5 are likely to fail, said Rich Wong, a partner at venture capital firm Accel Partners. "I think maybe out of that thousand, 20% fully die. The end," Wong said on Thursday at the Bloomberg Tech conference in San Francisco.

The estimate reinforces what's become a grim calculus for many companies. Tech start-up valuations soared during the 2021 pandemic boom -- before crashing back to earth, as interest rates rose and venture capital investments fell. Of the companies that don't fail, about half will be stuck -- muddling along without being able to grow bigger or go public, Wong said. Some of those may "ultimately have reality set in," and sell themselves for lower prices than once seemed feasible. Others, not quite failing, "will be a bit zombie-ish and grind on," he said.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from KrebsOnSecurity: Ukraine has seen nearly one-fifth of its Internet space come under Russian control or sold to Internet address brokers since February 2022, a new study finds. The analysis indicates large chunks of Ukrainian Internet address space are now in the hands of shadowy proxy and anonymity services that are nested at some of America's largest Internet service providers (ISPs). The findings come in a report that examines how the Russian invasion has affected Ukraine's domestic supply of Internet Protocol Version 4 (IPv4) addresses. Researchers at Kentik, a company that measures the performance of Internet networks, found that while a majority of ISPs in Ukraine haven't changed their infrastructure much since the war began in 2022, others have resorted to selling swathes of their valuable IPv4 address space just to keep the lights on.

For example, Ukraine's incumbent ISP Ukrtelecom is now routing just 29 percent of the IPv4 address ranges that the company controlled at the start of the war, Kentik found. Although much of that former IP space remains dormant, Ukrtelecom told Kentik's Doug Madory they were forced to sell many of their address blocks "to secure financial stability and continue delivering essential services." "Leasing out a portion of our IPv4 resources allowed us to mitigate some of the extraordinary challenges we have been facing since the full-scale invasion began," Ukrtelecom told Madory.

Madory found much of the IPv4 space previously allocated to Ukrtelecom is now scattered to more than 100 providers globally, particularly at three large American ISPs -- Amazon (AS16509), AT&T (AS7018), and Cogent (AS174). Another Ukrainian Internet provider -- LVS (AS43310) -- in 2022 was routing approximately 6,000 IPv4 addresses across the nation. Kentik learned that by November 2022, much of that address space had been parceled out to over a dozen different locations, with the bulk of it being announced at AT&T. Ditto for the Ukrainian ISP TVCOM, which currently routes nearly 15,000 fewer IPv4 addresses than it did at the start of the war. Madory said most of those addresses have been scattered to 37 other networks outside of Eastern Europe, including Amazon, AT&T, and Microsoft.

UK tech job openings have surged 21% to pre-pandemic levels, driven largely by a 200% spike in demand for AI skills. London accounted for 80% of the AI-related postings. The Register reports: Accenture collected data from LinkedIn in the first and second week of February 2025, and supplemented the results with a survey of more than 4,000 respondents conducted by research firm YouGov between July and August 2024. The research found a 53 percent annual increase in those describing themselves as having tech skills, amounting to 1.69 million people reporting skills in disciplines including cyber, data, and robotics. [...]

The research found that London-based companies said they would allocate a fifth of their tech budgets to AI this year, compared to 13 percent who said the same and were based in North East England, Scotland, and Wales. Growth in revenue per employee increased during the period when LLMs emerged, from 7 percent annually between 2018 and 2022 to 27 percent between 2018 and 2024. Meanwhile, growth in the same measure fell slightly in industries less affected by AI, such as mining and hospitality, the researchers said.

China's southernmost province of Hainan is piloting a programme to grant select corporate users broad access to the global internet, a rare move in a country known for having some of the world's most restrictive online censorship, as the island seeks to transform itself into a global free-trade port. From a report: Employees of companies registered and operating in Hainan can apply for the "Global Connect" mobile service through the Hainan International Data Comprehensive Service Centre (HIDCSC), according to the agency, which is overseen by the state-run Hainan Big Data Development Centre.

The programme allows eligible users to bypass the so-called Great Firewall, which blocks access to many of the world's most-visited websites, such as Google and Wikipedia. Applicants must be on a 5G plan with one of the country's three major state-backed carriers -- China Mobile, China Unicom or China Telecom -- and submit their employer's information, including the company's Unified Social Credit Code, for approval. The process can take up to five months, HIDCSC staff said.

Google's self-driving taxi service Waymo has surpassed 10 million total paid rides, marking a significant milestone in the transition of autonomous vehicles from novelty to mainstream transportation option. The company's growth trajectory, WSJ argues, shows clear signs of exponential scaling, with weekly rides jumping from 10,000 in August 2023 to over 250,000 currently. Waymo is on track to hit 20 million rides by the end of 2025. The story adds: This is not just because Waymo is expanding into new markets. It's because of the way existing markets have come to embrace self-driving cars.

In California, the most recent batch of quarterly data reported by the company was the most encouraging yet. It showed that Waymo's number of paid rides inched higher by roughly 2% in both January and February -- and then increased 27% in March. In the nearly two years that people in San Francisco have been paying for robot chauffeurs, it was the first time that Waymo's growth slowed down for several months only to dramatically speed up again. Waymo currently operates in Phoenix, Los Angeles, and San Francisco, with expansion planned for Austin, Atlanta, Miami, and Washington D.C. The service faces incoming competition from Tesla, which plans to launch its own robotaxi service in Austin this month. Waymo remains unprofitable despite raising $5.6 billion in funding last year.

Meta CTO Andrew Bosworth said that the "tides have turned" in Silicon Valley and made it more palatable for the tech industry to support the US military's efforts. From a report: There's long existed a "silent majority" who wanted to pursue defense projects, Bosworth said during an interview at the Bloomberg Tech summit in San Francisco on Wednesday. "There's a much stronger patriotic underpinning than I think people give Silicon Valley credit for," he said. Silicon Valley was founded on military development and "there's really a long history here that we are kind of hoping to return to, but it is not even day one," Bosworth added. He described Silicon Valley's new openness to work with the US military as a "return to grace."

FFmpeg has added support for WHIP (WebRTC-HTTP Ingestion Protocol), enabling sub-second latency live streaming by leveraging WebRTC's fast, secure video delivery capabilities. It's a major update that introduces a new WHIP muxer to make FFmpeg more powerful for real-time broadcasting applications. Phoronix's Michael Larabel reports: WHIP uses HTTP for exchanging initial information and capabilities and then uses STUN binding to establish a UDP session. Encryption is supported -- and due to WebRTC, mandatory -- with WHIP and audio/video frames are split into RTP packets. WebRTC-HTTP Ingestion Protocol is an IETF standard for ushering low-latency communication over WebRTC to help with streaming/broadcasting uses. With this FFmpeg commit introducing nearly three thousand lines of new code, an initial WHIP muxer has been introduced. You can learn more about WebRTC WHIP in this presentation by Millicast (PDF).

Announced in an internal memo from Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella, LinkedIn CEO Ryan Roslansky has been appointed to also lead the Office, Outlook, and Microsoft 365 Copilot teams as part of an internal AI reorganization. Roslansky will report to Rajesh Jha for Office while continuing to run LinkedIn independently under Nadella. The Verge reports: "LinkedIn remains a top priority and will continue to operate as an independent subsidiary," says Nadella in his memo. "This move brings us closer to the original vision we laid out nine years ago with the LinkedIn acquisition: connecting the world's economic graph with the Microsoft Graph. And I look forward to how Ryan will bring his product ethos and leadership to entertainment and devices." Sumit Chauhan and Gaurav Sareen, senior executives in the Office and Microsoft 365 teams, will remain on the entertainment and devices leadership team, but along with their teams they'll join Jon Friedman and the UX team to work directly for Roslansky.

Charles Lamanna and his BIC team are also moving to report to Rajesh Jha as part of an AI shakeup. "Charles has consistently kept us focused on what it takes to win in business applications and the agent layer, and I look forward to the impact he and his team will have in entertainment and devices," says Nadella. In a separate memo, Lamanna also announced that starting July 2nd Lili Cheng will take on the newly expanded role of CTO of the BIC team. Dan Lewis is also taking on the role of corporate vice president of Copilot Studio. "We are poised to reinvent every role and every business process, and start to reimagine organizations as composed of people and agents," says Lamanna in an internal memo.

Both the Lamanna and Roslansky moves are very interesting, as the business Copilot team and Microsoft 365 Copilot team have been in separate parts of Microsoft's sprawling AI and cloud teams up until this point. This has led to a situation where nobody really owns Copilot all up inside Microsoft, but now the separate leaders of Microsoft 365 Copilot and the business Copilot teams now both report to Rajesh Jha. The consumer Copilot will still be run by Microsoft AI CEO Mustafa Suleyman.

king*jojo shares a report: Linux desktop darling KDE is weighing in on the controversy around the impending demise of Windows 10 support with a lurid "KDE for Windows 10 Exiles" campaign. KDE's alarming "Exiles" page opens with the text "Your computer is toast" followed by a warning that Microsoft wants to turn computers running Windows 10 into junk from October 14.

"It may seem like it continues to work after that date for a bit, but when Microsoft stops support for Windows 10, your perfectly good computer will be officially obsolete." Beneath a picture of a pile of tech junk, including a rotary telephone and some floppy drives, KDE proclaims: "Windows 10 will degrade as more and more bugs come to light. With nobody to correct them, you risk being hacked. Your data, identity, and control over your device could be stolen."

A group of financially motivated cyberscammers who specialize in Scattered-Spider-like fake IT support phone calls managed to trick employees at about 20 organizations into installing a modified version of Salesforce's Data Loader that allows the criminals to steal sensitive data. From a report: Google Threat Intelligence Group (GTIG) tracks this crew as UNC6040, and in research published today said they specialize in voice-phishing campaigns targeting Salesforce instances for large-scale data theft and extortion.

These attacks began around the beginning of the year, GTIG principal threat analyst Austin Larsen told The Register. "Our current assessment indicates that a limited number of organizations were affected as part of this campaign, approximately 20," he said. "We've seen UNC6040 targeting hospitality, retail, education and various other sectors in the Americas and Europe." The criminals are really good at impersonating IT support personnel and convincing employees at English-speaking branches of multinational corporations into downloading a modified version of Data Loader, a Salesforce app that allows users to export and update large amounts of data.

According to Automotive News (paywalled), the $17,190 base-model Nissan Versa S -- the last U.S.-market production car with a five-speed manual -- is ending production. A Nissan spokesperson told Auto News that the company is "trimming the fat" to focus on models with the strongest business performance -- and the manual Versa S didn't make the cut. The Drive reports: Looks like Nissan is trying to create as much savings as possible to handle the 25% tariff on cars imported from Mexico. [...] When you go to Nissan's site and check out the Versa, the first thing you see under its name is "Get the Nissan you want free from new tariffs." So if Nissan is going to eat the additional tariff cost for customers, it can't be manufacturing cars that won't sell well. And manuals reportedly only accounted for 5% of Versa sales in 2024.

As the manual Versa dies, it brings the five-speed manual transmission down with it. What was once a common drivetrain configuration is now a memory -- when the last stick-shift Versa leaves a Nissan lot, there won't be any new five-speed manual vehicles for sale in the United States. Only six-speed and a few seven-speed manuals will remain. [...] Killing the manual Versa won't be a big sales hit, since barely any customers wanted it, but it will end Nissan's ability to market a sub-$18,000 car.

T-Mobile announced Tuesday it will expand its fiber internet service to more than 500,000 households nationwide, offering three symmetrical speed tiers with five-year price locks starting June 5th. The plans range from 500 Mbps at $80 monthly to 2 Gbps at $110 monthly, with $5 autopay discounts for debit card payments. The expansion follows T-Mobile's joint venture with fiber provider Lumos and its pending Metronet acquisition, positioning the wireless carrier to reach 12 to 15 million households by 2030 as it challenges AT&T and Verizon's multibillion-dollar fiber investments.

Meta has struck a 20-year deal with energy company Constellation to keep the Clinton Clean Energy Center nuclear plant in Illinois operational, the social media giant's first nuclear power purchase agreement as it seeks clean energy sources for AI data centers. The aging facility, which was slated to close in 2017 after years of financial losses and currently operates under a state tax credit reprieve until 2027, will receive undisclosed financial support that enables a 30-megawatt capacity expansion to 1,121 MW total output.

The arrangement preserves 1,100 local jobs while generating electricity for 800,000 homes, as Meta purchases clean energy certificates to offset a portion of its growing carbon footprint driven by AI operations.

An anonymous reader shares a report: Open source software used by hobbyist drones powered an attack that wiped out a third of Russia's strategic long range bombers on Sunday afternoon, in one of the most daring and technically coordinated attacks in the war. In broad daylight on Sunday, explosions rocked air bases in Belaya, Olenya, and Ivanovo in Russia, which are hundreds of miles from Ukraine. The Security Services of Ukraine's (SBU) Operation Spider Web was a coordinated assault on Russian targets it claimed was more than a year in the making, which was carried out using a nearly 20-year-old piece of open source drone autopilot software called ArduPilot.

ArduPilot's original creators were in awe of the attack. "That's ArduPilot, launched from my basement 18 years ago. Crazy," Chris Anderson said in a comment on LinkedIn below footage of the attack. On X, he tagged his the co-creators Jordi Munoz and Jason Short in a post about the attack. "Not in a million years would I have predicted this outcome. I just wanted to make flying robots," Short said in a reply to Anderson. "Ardupilot powered drones just took out half the Russian strategic bomber fleet."

ArduPilot is an open source software system that takes its name from the Arduino hardware systems it was originally designed to work with. It began in 2007 when Anderson launched the website DIYdrones.com and cobbled together a UAV autopilot system out of a Lego Mindstorms set.

The Ninth Circuit has ruled that the 1967 Ford Mustang fastback nicknamed "Eleanor" in Gone in 60 Seconds is a film prop rather than a protectable character. The panel said the car fails all three Towle test prongs, so it cannot receive standalone copyright protection. sinij writes: The ruling states that the Mustang doesn't pass tests that would qualify it as a character. In the past, studio aggressively went after builders for any Mustang that even remotely approximated Eleanor, making it a hassle to restomod classic Mustangs.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Register: Broadcom's VMware business unit has dropped the lowest tier of its channel program, a move one analyst told The Register will benefit its rivals. The virtualization pioneer currently operates a four-tier channel program spanning Pinnacle, Premier, Select, and Registered partners. On Sunday the business unit announced the retirement of the Registered tier. A blog post written by Brian Moats, Broadcom's Senior Vice President for Global Commercial Sales and Partners, states VMware made the decision because "the vast majority of customer impact and business momentum comes from partners operating within the top three tiers."

Laura Falko, Broadcom's Head of Global Partner Programs, Marketing & Experience, told The Register "The vast majority of these [Registered] partners are inactive and lack the capabilities to support customers through VMware's evolving private cloud journey. That's why the Registered tier is being retired to ensure every active partner meets a higher standard of technical, sales, and service readiness." Falko told us VMware will give Registered partners 60 days' notice before deauthorization and then "work proactively with affected customers to transition them to qualified partners in the new ecosystem, ensuring continuity and support throughout the change."

VMware has also introduced new requirements for partners in its remaining tiers. The virtualization giant will require Pinnacle and Premier partners to maintain dedicated sales and technical resources, and to "execute joint business plans with VMware to ensure alignment and delivery with mutual results." The Broadcom business unit is also "beginning the process of transitioning partners who no longer meet the minimum program requirements or have not demonstrated consistent engagement," suggesting even Pinnacle, Premier, and Select partners are not safe. The Register asked VMware to define "consistent engagement" and Falko told us it includes "regular deal activity," ongoing participation in joint sales activities, staying up to date with training, and "sustained, proactive commitment to a partner's VMware customer base." The changes will only apply in its Americas, and Asia-Pacific and Japan regions. Broadcom didn't explain why Europe was excluded.

The Register notes that trade associations in Europe have criticized Broadcom's changes at VMware and urged the European Commission to investigate the company.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from 404 Media: The moderators of a pro-artificial intelligence Reddit community announced that they have been quietly banning "a bunch of schizoposters" who believe "they've made some sort of incredible discovery or created a god or become a god," highlighting a new type of chatbot-fueled delusion that started getting attention in early May. "LLMs [Large language models] today are ego-reinforcing glazing-machines that reinforce unstable and narcissistic personalities," one of the moderators of r/accelerate, wrote in an announcement. "There is a lot more crazy people than people realise. And AI is rizzing them up in a very unhealthy way at the moment."

The moderator said that it has banned "over 100" people for this reason already, and that they've seen an "uptick" in this type of user this month. The moderator explains that r/accelerate "was formed to basically be r/singularity without the decels." r/singularity, which is named after the theoretical point in time when AI surpasses human intelligence and rapidly accelerates its own development, is another Reddit community dedicated to artificial intelligence, but that is sometimes critical or fearful of what the singularity will mean for humanity. "Decels" is short for the pejorative "decelerationists," who pro-AI people think are needlessly slowing down or sabotaging AI's development and the inevitable march towards AI utopia. r/accelerate's Reddit page claims that it's a "pro-singularity, pro-AI alternative to r/singularity, r/technology, r/futurology and r/artificial, which have become increasingly populated with technology decelerationists, luddites, and Artificial Intelligence opponents."

The behavior that the r/accelerate moderator is describing got a lot of attention earlier in May because of a post on the r/ChatGPT Reddit community about "Chatgpt induced psychosis." From someone saying their partner is convinced he created the "first truly recursive AI" with ChatGPT that is giving them "the answers" to the universe. [...] The moderator update on r/accelerate refers to another post on r/ChatGPT which claims "1000s of people [are] engaging in behavior that causes AI to have spiritual delusions." The author of that post said they noticed a spike in websites, blogs, Githubs, and "scientific papers" that "are very obvious psychobabble," and all claim AI is sentient and communicates with them on a deep and spiritual level that's about to change the world as we know it. "Ironically, the OP post appears to be falling for the same issue as well," the r/accelerate moderator wrote. "Particularly concerning to me are the comments in that thread where the AIs seem to fall into a pattern of encouraging users to separate from family members who challenge their ideas, and other manipulative instructions that seem to be cult-like and unhelpful for these people," an r/accelerate moderator told 404 Media. "The part that is unsafe and unacceptable is how easily and quickly LLMs will start directly telling users that they are demigods, or that they have awakened a demigod AGI. Ultimately, there's no knowing how many people are affected by this. Based on the numbers we're seeing on reddit, I would guess there are at least tens of thousands of users who are at this present time being convinced of these things by LLMs. As soon as the companies realise this, red team it and patch the LLMs it should stop being a problem. But it's clear that they're not aware of the issue enough right now."

Moderators of the subreddit often cite the term "Neural Howlround" to describe a failure mode in LLMs during inference, where recursive feedback loops can cause fixation or freezing. The term was first coined by independent researcher Seth Drake in a self-published, non-peer-reviewed paper. Both Drake and the r/accelerate moderator above suggest the deeper issue may lie with users projecting intense personal meaning onto LLM responses, sometimes driven by mental health struggles.

Linux user share on Steam rose to 2.69% in May 2025 -- the highest level recorded since at least 2018. GamingOnLinux reports: Overall user share for May 2025:

- Windows 95.45% -0.65%
- Linux 2.69% +0.42%
- macOS 1.85% +0.23%

Even with SteamOS 3 now being a little more widely available, the rise was not from SteamOS directly. Filtering to just the Linux numbers gives us these most popular distributions:

- SteamOS Holo 64 bit 30.95% -2.83%
- Arch Linux 64 bit 10.09% +0.64%
- Linux Mint 22.1 64 bit 7.76% +1.56%
- Freedesktop SDK 24.08 (Flatpak runtime) 64 bit 7.42% +1.01%
- Ubuntu Core 22 64 bit 4.63% +0.01%
- Ubuntu 24.04.2 LTS 64 bit 4.30% -0.14%
- CachyOS 64 bit 2.54% +2.54%
- EndeavourOS Linux 64 bit 2.44% -0.02%
- Manjaro Linux 64 bit 2.43% -0.18%
- Pop!_OS 22.04 LTS 64 bit 2.17% -0.06%
- Debian GNU/Linux 12 (bookworm) 64 bit 1.99% -0.28%
- Other 23.27% -2.27%

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: It has become a common refrain during Google's antitrust saga: What happened to "don't be evil?" Google's unofficial motto has haunted it as it has grown ever larger, but a shareholder lawsuit sought to rein in some of the company's excesses. And it might be working. The plaintiffs in the case have reached a settlement with Google parent company Alphabet, which will spend a boatload of cash on "comprehensive" reforms. The goal is to steer Google away from the kind of anticompetitive practices that got it in hot water.

Under the terms of the settlement, obtained by Bloomberg Law, Alphabet will spend $500 million over the next 10 years on systematic reforms. The company will have to form a board-level committee devoted to overseeing the company's regulatory compliance and antitrust risk, a rarity for US firms. This group will report directly to CEO Sundar Pichai. There will also be reforms at other levels of the company that allow employees to identify potential legal pitfalls before they affect the company. Google has also agreed to preserve communications. Google's propensity to use auto-deleting chats drew condemnation from several judges overseeing its antitrust cases. The agreement still needs approval from US District Judge Rita Lin in San Francisco, but that's mainly a formality at this point. Naturally, Alphabet does not admit to any wrongdoing under the terms of the settlement, but it may have to pay tens of millions in legal fees on top of the promised $500 million investment.