In a world first, a research team used 2D materials — only an atom thick — to develop a computer. The team (led by researchers at Pennsylvania State University) says it's a major step toward thinner, faster and more energy-efficient electronics.

[1]From the University's announcement :

> They [2]created a complementary metal-oxide semiconductor (CMOS) computer — technology at the heart of nearly every modern electronic device — without relying on silicon. Instead, they used two different 2D materials to develop both types of transistors needed to control the electric current flow in CMOS computers: molybdenum disulfide for n-type transistors and tungsten diselenide for p-type transistors... "[A]s silicon devices shrink, their performance begins to degrade," [said lead researcher/engineering professor Saptarshi Das]. "Two-dimensional materials, by contrast, maintain their exceptional electronic properties at atomic thickness, offering a promising path forward...."

>

> The team used metal-organic chemical vapor deposition (MOCVD) — a fabrication process that involves vaporizing ingredients, forcing a chemical reaction and depositing the products onto a substrate — to grow large sheets of molybdenum disulfide and tungsten diselenide and fabricate over 1,000 of each type of transistor. By carefully tuning the device fabrication and post-processing steps, they were able to adjust the threshold voltages of both n- and p-type transistors, enabling the construction of fully functional CMOS logic circuits.

>

> "Our 2D CMOS computer operates at low-supply voltages with minimal power consumption and can perform simple logic operations at frequencies up to 25 kilohertz," said first author Subir Ghosh, a doctoral student pursuing a degree in engineering science and mechanics under Das's mentorship. Ghosh noted that the operating frequency is low compared to conventional silicon CMOS circuits, but their computer — known as a one instruction set computer — can still perform simple logic operations.



[1] https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2025/06/250612031705.htm

[2] https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-025-08963-7

Recently the Browser Company (the startup behind the Arc web browser) switched over to building a new AI-powered browser — and its beta has just been released, [1]reports TechCrunch , "though you'll need an invite to [2]try it out ."

The Chromium-based browser has a URL/search bar that also "acts as the interface for its in-built AI chatbot" which can "search the web for you, summarize files that you upload, and automatically switch between chat and search functions."

> The Browser Company's CEO Josh Miller has of late acknowledged how people have been using AI tools for all sorts of tasks, and Dia is a reflection of that. By giving users an AI interface within the browser itself, where a majority of work is done these days, the company is hoping to slide into the user flow and give people an easy way to use AI, cutting out the need to visit the sites for tools like ChatGPT, Perplexity, and Claude...

>

> Users can also ask questions about all the tabs they have open, and the bot can even write up a draft based on the contents of those tabs. To set your preferences, all you have to do is talk to the chatbot to customize its tone of voice, style of writing, and settings for coding. Via an opt-in feature called History, you can allow the browser to use seven days of your browsing history as context to answer queries.

The Browser Company will give all existing Arc members access to the beta immediately, according to the article, "and existing Dia users will be able to send invites to other users."

The article points out that Google is also adding AI-powered features to Chrome...



[1] https://techcrunch.com/2025/06/11/the-browser-company-launches-its-ai-first-browser-dia-in-beta/

[2] https://www.diabrowser.com/

Earlier this week looters who stole iPhones "got an unexpected message from Apple," [1]reports the Economic Times .

"Please return to Apple Tower Theatre. This device has been disabled and is being tracked. Local authorities will be alerted."

Stolen phones "were remotely locked and triggered alarms, effectively turning the devices into high-tech bait. Videos circulating online show the phones flashing the message while [2]blaring loudly, making them impossible to ignore ."

> According to LAPD Officer Chris Miller, at least three suspects were apprehended in connection to the Apple Store burglary. One woman was arrested on the spot, while two others were detained for looting.



[1] https://economictimes.indiatimes.com/news/international/global-trends/return-the-phones-apple-sends-warning-to-thieves-who-looted-iphones-during-los-angeles-riots/articleshow/121796553.cms?from=mdr

[2] https://x.com/BGOnTheScene/status/1932514229271048651

Last week Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei said AI could [1]eliminate half the entry-level white-collar jobs within five years . CNN called the remarks " [2]part of the AI hype machine ."

Asked about the prediction this week at a Paris tech conference, NVIDIA CEO Jensen Huang acknowledged AI may impact some employees, but "dismissed" Amodei's claim, [3]according to Fortune . "Everybody's jobs will be changed. Some jobs will be obsolete, but many jobs are going to be created ... Whenever companies are more productive, they hire more people."

And he also said he "pretty much" disagreed "with almost everything" Anthropic's CEO says.

> "One, he believes that AI is so scary that only they should do it," Huang said of Amodei at a press briefing at Viva Technology in Paris. "Two, [he believes] that AI is so expensive, nobody else should do it ... And three, AI is so incredibly powerful that everyone will lose their jobs, which explains why they should be the only company building it. I think AI is a very important technology; we should build it and advance it safely and responsibly," Huang continued. "If you want things to be done safely and responsibly, you do it in the open ... Don't do it in a dark room and tell me it's safe."

>

> An Anthropic spokesperson told Fortune in a statement: "Dario has never claimed that 'only Anthropic' can build safe and powerful AI. As the public record will show, Dario has advocated for a national transparency standard for AI developers (including Anthropic) so the public and policymakers are aware of the models' capabilities and risks and can prepare accordingly.

NVIDIA's CEO also touted their hybrid quantum-classical platformCUDA-Q and claimed quantum computing is [4]hitting an "inflection point " and within a few years could start solving real-world problems



[1] https://developers.slashdot.org/story/25/05/29/1835258/anthropic-ceo-warns-ai-could-eliminate-half-of-all-entry-level-white-collar-jobs-within-five-years

[2] https://it.slashdot.org/story/25/05/31/0439205/cnn-challenges-claim-ai-will-eliminate-half-of-white-collar-jobs-calls-it-part-of-the-ai-hype-machine

[3] https://fortune.com/2025/06/11/nvidia-jensen-huang-disagress-anthropic-ceo-dario-amodei-ai-jobs/

[4] https://www.cnbc.com/2025/06/11/nvidia-ceo-says-quantum-computing-is-reaching-an-inflection-point.html

An anonymous reader shared [1]this report from CNET :

> By using a software emulator to run Atari's [2]1979 game Video Chess , Citrix engineer Robert Caruso said he was able to set up a match between ChatGPT and the 46-year-old game. The matchup did not go well for ChatGPT. "ChatGPT confused rooks for bishops, missed pawn forks and repeatedly lost track of where pieces were — first blaming the Atari icons as too abstract, then faring no better even after switching to standard chess notations," Caruso wrote [3]in a LinkedIn post .

>

> "It made enough blunders to get laughed out of a 3rd-grade chess club," Caruso said. "ChatGPT got absolutely wrecked at the beginner level."

"Caruso wrote that the 90-minute match continued badly and that the AI chatbot repeatedly requested that the match start over..." CNET reports.

"A representative for OpenAI did not immediately return a request for comment."



[1] https://www.cnet.com/tech/services-and-software/chatgpt-just-got-absolutely-wrecked-at-chess-losing-to-a-1970s-era-atari-2600/

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Video_Chess

[3] https://www.linkedin.com/posts/robert-jr-caruso-23080180_ai-chess-atari2600-activity-7337108175185145856-HSP0/

Last week America's financial aid program announced that "the rate of fraud through stolen identities has reached a level that [1]imperils the federal student aid programs ."

Or, as the Associated Press suggests: Online classes + AI = financial aid fraud. "In some cases, professors discover almost no one in their class is real..."

> Fake college enrollments have been surging as crime rings deploy "ghost students" — chatbots that join online classrooms and stay just long enough to collect a financial aid check... Students get locked out of the classes they need to graduate as bots push courses over their enrollment limits.

>

> And victims of identity theft who discover loans fraudulently taken out in their names must go through months of calling colleges, the Federal Student Aid office and loan servicers to try to get the debt erased. [Last week], the U.S. Education Department [2]introduced a temporary rule requiring students to show colleges a government-issued ID to prove their identity... "The rate of fraud through stolen identities has reached a level that imperils the federal student aid program," the department said in its guidance to colleges.

>

> An Associated Press analysis of fraud reports obtained through a public records request shows California colleges in 2024 reported 1.2 million fraudulent applications, which resulted in 223,000 suspected fake enrollments. Other states are affected by the same problem, but with 116 community colleges, California is a particularly large target. Criminals stole at least $11.1 million in federal, state and local financial aid from California community colleges last year that could not be recovered, according to the reports... Scammers frequently use AI chatbots to carry out the fraud, targeting courses that are online and allow students to watch lectures and complete coursework on their own time...

>

> Criminal cases around the country offer a glimpse of the schemes' pervasiveness. In the past year, investigators indicted a man accused of leading a Texas fraud ring that used stolen identities to pursue $1.5 million in student aid. Another person in Texas pleaded guilty to using the names of prison inmates to apply for over $650,000 in student aid at colleges across the South and Southwest. And a person in New York recently pleaded guilty to a $450,000 student aid scam that lasted a decade.

Fortune found one community college that " [3]wound up dropping more than 10,000 enrollments representing thousands of students who were not really students," according to the school's president.

> The scope of the ghost-student plague is staggering. Jordan Burris, vice president at identity-verification firm Socure and former chief of staff in the White House's Office of the Federal Chief Information Officer, told Fortune more than half the students registering for classes at some schools have been found to be illegitimate. Among Socure's client base, between 20% to 60% of student applicants are ghosts... At one college, more than 400 different financial-aid applications could be tracked back to a handful of recycled phone numbers. "It was a digital poltergeist effectively haunting the school's enrollment system," said Burris.

>

> The scheme has also proved incredibly [4]lucrative . According to a Department of Education advisory, about $90 million in aid was doled out to ineligible students, the DOE analysis revealed, and some $30 million was traced to dead people whose identities were used to enroll in classes. The issue has become so dire that the DOE announced this month it had found nearly 150,000 suspect identities in federal student-aid forms and is now [5]requiring higher-ed institutions to validate the identities of first-time applicants for Free Application for Federal Student Aid (FAFSA) forms...

>

> Maurice Simpkins, president and cofounder of AMSimpkins, says he has identified international fraud rings operating out of Japan, Vietnam, Bangladesh, Pakistan, and Nairobi that have repeatedly targeted U.S. colleges... In the past 18 months, schools blocked thousands of bot applicants because they originated from the same mailing address; had hundreds of similar emails with a single-digit difference, or had phone numbers and email addresses that were created moments before applying for registration.

Fortune shares this story from the higher education VP at IT consulting firm Voyatek. "One of the professors was so excited their class was full, never before being 100% occupied, and thought they might need to open a second section. When we worked with them as the first week of class was ongoing, we found out they were not real people."



[1] https://fsapartners.ed.gov/knowledge-center/library/electronic-announcements/2025-06-06/significant-actions-prevent-fraud-through-identity-verification

[2] https://fsapartners.ed.gov/knowledge-center/library/electronic-announcements/2025-06-06/significant-actions-prevent-fraud-through-identity-verification

[3] https://fortune.com/2025/06/12/ghost-students-hijacking-millions-colleges-fafsa-department-education-financial-aid/

[4] https://er.educause.edu/articles/sponsored/2025/2/fighting-financial-aid-fraud-in-higher-education

[5] https://fsapartners.ed.gov/knowledge-center/library/electronic-announcements/2025-06-06/significant-actions-prevent-fraud-through-identity-verification

"People are replacing Google search with artificial intelligence tools like ChatGPT," [1]reports the Washington Post .

But that's just the first change, according to a New York-based start-up devoted to watching for content-scraping AI companies with a free analytics product and "ensuring that these intelligent agents pay for the content they consume." Their [2]data from 266 web sites (half run by national or local news organizations) found that "traffic from retrieval bots grew 49% in the first quarter of 2025 from the fourth quarter of 2024," the Post reports.

> A spokesperson for OpenAI said that referral traffic to publishers from ChatGPT searches may be lower in quantity but that it reflects a stronger user intent compared with casual web browsing.

>

> To capitalize on this shift, websites will need to reorient themselves to AI visitors rather than human ones [said TollBit CEO/co-founder Toshit Panigrahi]. But he also acknowledged that [3]squeezing payment for content when AI companies argue that [4]scraping online data is fair use will be an uphill climb, especially as leading players make their newest AI visitors even harder to identify....

>

> In the past eight months, as chatbots have evolved to incorporate features like [5]web search and [6]"reasoning" to answer more complex queries , traffic for retrieval bots has skyrocketed. It grew 2.5 times as fast as traffic for bots that scrape data for training between the fourth quarter of 2024 and the first quarter of 2025, according to TollBit's report. Panigrahi said TollBit's data may underestimate the magnitude of this change because it doesn't reflect bots that AI companies send out on behalf of AI "agents" that can complete tasks on a user's behalf, like ordering takeout from DoorDash. The start-up's findings also add a dimension to mounting evidence that the modern internet — optimized for Google search results and social media algorithms — will have to be restructured as the popularity of AI answers grows. "To think of it as, 'Well, I'm optimizing my search for humans' is missing out on a big opportunity," he said.

>

> Installing TollBit's analytics platform is free for news publishers, and the company has more than 2,000 clients, many of which are struggling with these seismic changes, according to data in the report. Although news publishers and other websites can implement blockers to prevent various AI bots from scraping their content, TollBit found that more than 26 million AI scrapes bypassed those blockers in March alone. Some AI companies claim bots for AI agents don't need to follow bot instructions because they are acting on behalf of a user.

The Post also got this comment from the chief operating officer for the media company Time, which successfully negotiated content licensing deals with OpenAI and Perplexity.

"The vast majority of the AI bots out there absolutely are not sourcing the content through any kind of paid mechanism... There is a very, very long way to go."



[1] https://www.yahoo.com/news/coming-everyone-kind-ai-bot-120104499.html

[2] https://tollbit.com/bots/25q1/

[3] https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2023/10/20/artificial-intelligence-battle-online-data/

[4] https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2024/01/04/nyt-ai-copyright-lawsuit-fair-use/

[5] https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2024/10/31/openai-chatgpt-search-ai-upgrade-google/

[6] https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2025/02/08/deepseek-ai-chatbot-reasoning-china/

An anonymous reader quotes a report from the Wall Street Journal:

> Since 2022, the U.S. has tightened the noose around the sale of high-end AI chips and other technology to China overnational-security concerns. Yet Chinese companies have made advances using workarounds. In some cases, Chinese AI developers have been able to substitute domestic chips for the American ones. Another workaround is to smuggle AI hardware into China through third countries. But people in the industry say that has become more difficult in recent months, in part because of U.S. pressure. That is pushing Chinese companies to try a further option: [1]bringing their data outside China so they can use American AI chips in places such as Southeast Asia and the Middle East (source paywalled; [2]alternative source ). The maneuvers are testing the limits of U.S. restrictions. "This was something we were consistently concerned about," said Thea Kendler, who was in charge of export controls at the Commerce Department in the Biden administration, referring to Chinese companies remotely accessing advanced American AI chips. Layers of intermediaries typically separate the Chinese users of American AI chips from the U.S. companies -- led by Nvidia -- that make them. That leaves it opaque whether anyone is violating U.S. rules or guidance. [...]

>

> At the Chinese AI developer, the Malaysia game plans take months of preparation, say people involved in them. Engineers decided it would be fastest to fly physical hard drives with data into the country, since transferring huge volumes of data over the internet could take months. Before traveling, the company's engineers in China spent more than eight weeks optimizing the data sets and adjusting the AI training program, knowing it would be hard to make major tweaks once the data was out of the country. The Chinese engineers had turned to the same Malaysian data center last July, working through a Singaporean subsidiary. As Nvidia and its vendors began to conduct stricter audits on the end users of AI chips, the Chinese company was asked by the Malaysian data center late last year to work through a Malaysian entity, which the companies thought might trigger less scrutiny.

>

> The Chinese company registered an entity in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia's capital, listing three Malaysian citizens as directors and an offshore holding company as its parent, according to a corporate registry document. To avoid raising suspicions at Malaysian customs, the Chinese engineers packed their hard drives into four different suitcases. Last year, they traveled with the hard drives bundled into one piece of luggage. They returned to China recently with the results -- several hundred gigabytes of data, including model parameters that guide the AI system's output. The procedure, while cumbersome, avoided having to bring hardware such as chips or servers into China. That is getting more difficult because authorities in Southeast Asia are cracking down on transshipments through the region into China.



[1] https://www.wsj.com/tech/china-ai-chip-curb-suitcases-7c47dab1?

[2] https://www.tovima.com/wsj/chinese-ai-companies-dodge-u-s-chip-curbs-by-flying-suitcases-of-hard-drives-abroad/#:~:text=KUALA%20LUMPUR%2C%20Malaysia%E2%80%94In%20early,training%20an%20artificial-intelligence%20model.

NASA and Axiom Space have indefinitely delayed the Axiom-4 launch to the International Space Station [1]due to concerns about a persistent air leak in the Russian PrK vestibule of the aging Zvezda module. "The PrK serves as a passageway between the station's Zvezda module and spacecraft docked at its aft port," notes CBS News. From the report:

> In a [2]blog post , NASA said cosmonauts aboard the station "recently performed inspections of the pressurized module's interior surfaces, sealed some additional areas of interest, and measured the current leak rate. Following this effort, the segment now is holding pressure." The post went on to say the Axiom-4 delay will provide "additional time for NASA and (the Russian space agency) Roscosmos to evaluate the situation and determine whether any additional troubleshooting is necessary."

>

> Launched in July 2000 atop a Russian Proton rocket, Zvezda was the third module to join the growing space station, providing a command center for Russian cosmonauts, crew quarters, the aft docking port and two additional ports now occupied by airlock and research modules. The leakage was first noticed in 2019, and has been openly discussed ever since by NASA during periodic reviews and space station news briefings. The leak rate has varied, but has stayed in the neighborhood of around 1-to-2 pounds per day. "The station is not young," astronaut Mike Barratt said last November during a post flight news conference. "It's been up there for quite a while, and you expect some wear and tear, and we're seeing that in the form of some cracks that have formed." The Russians have made a variety of attempts to patch a suspect crack and other possible sources of leakage, but air has continued to escape into space.

>

> In November, Bob Cabana, a former astronaut and NASA manager who chaired the agency's ISS Advisory Committee, said U.S. and Russian engineers "don't have a common understanding of what the likely root cause is, or the severity of the consequences of these leaks." "The Russian position is that the most probable cause of the PrK cracks is high cyclic fatigue caused by micro vibrations," Cabana said. "NASA believes the PrK cracks are likely multi-causal including pressure and mechanical stress, residual stress, material properties and environmental exposures. "The Russians believe that continued operations are safe, but they can't prove to our satisfaction that they are, and the US believes that it's not safe, but we can't prove that to the Russian satisfaction that that's the case."

>

> As an interim step, the hatch leading to the PrK and the station's aft docking compartment is closed during daily operations and only opened when the Russians need to unload a visiting Progress cargo ship. And as an added precaution on NASA's part, whenever the hatch to the PrK and docking compartment is open, a hatch between the Russian and U.S. segments of the station is closed. "We've taken a very conservative approach to close a hatch between the US side and the Russian side during those time periods," Barratt said. "It's not a comfortable thing, but it is the best agreement between all the smart people on both sides. And it's something that we crew live with and enact." Cabana said last year that the Russians do not believe "catastrophic disintegration of the PrK is realistic (but) NASA has expressed concerns about the structural integrity of the PrK and the possibility of a catastrophic failure."



[1] https://www.cbsnews.com/news/nasa-delays-commercial-crew-launch-to-assess-space-station-air-leak/

[2] https://www.nasa.gov/blogs/spacestation/2025/06/12/nasa-axiom-space-delay-axiom-mission-4-launch-to-space-station/

[1]alternative_right shares a report from Phys.Org:

> A cosmic particle detector in Antarctica has [2]emitted a series of bizarre signals that defy the current understanding of particle physics , according to an international research group that includes scientists from Penn State. The unusual radio pulses were detected by the Antarctic Impulsive Transient Antenna (ANITA) experiment, a range of instruments flown on balloons high above Antarctica that are designed to detect radio waves from cosmic rays hitting the atmosphere.

>

> The goal of the experiment is to gain insight into distant cosmic events by analyzing signals that reach the Earth. Rather than reflecting off the ice, the signals -- a form of radio waves -- appeared to be coming from below the horizon, an orientation that cannot be explained by the current understanding of particle physics and may hint at new types of particles or interactions previously unknown to science, the team said. The researchers [3]published their results in the journal Physical Review Letters .

>

> "The radio waves that we detected were at really steep angles, like 30 degrees below the surface of the ice," said Stephanie Wissel, associate professor of physics, astronomy and astrophysics who worked on the ANITA team searching for signals from elusive particles called neutrinos. She explained that by their calculations, the anomalous signal had to pass through and interact with thousands of kilometers of rock before reaching the detector, which should have left the radio signal undetectable because it would have been absorbed into the rock. "It's an interesting problem because we still don't actually have an explanation for what those anomalies are, but what we do know is that they're most likely not representing neutrinos," Wissel said.



[1] https://slashdot.org/~alternative_right

[2] https://phys.org/news/2025-06-strange-radio-pulses-ice-antarctica.html

[3] https://journals.aps.org/prl/abstract/10.1103/PhysRevLett.134.121003

Edd Gent reporting for IEEE Spectrum:

> IBM has [1]unveiled a new quantum computing architecture it says will [2]slash the number of qubits required for error correction . The advance will underpin its goal of building a large-scale, fault-tolerant quantum computer, called Starling, that will be available to customers by 2029. Because of the inherent unreliability of the qubits (the quantum equivalent of bits) that quantum computers are built from, error correction will be crucial for building reliable, large-scale devices. Error-correction approaches spread each unit of information across many physical qubits to create "logical qubits." This provides redundancy against errors in individual physical qubits.

>

> One of the most popular approaches is known as a surface code, which requires roughly 1,000 physical qubits to make up one logical qubit. This was the approach IBM focused on initially, but the company eventually realized that creating the hardware to support it was an "engineering pipe dream," Jay Gambetta, the vice president of IBM Quantum, said in a press briefing. Around 2019, the company began to investigate alternatives. In a paper published in Nature last year, IBM researchers outlined a new error-correction scheme called quantum low-density parity check (qLDPC) codes that would require roughly one-tenth of the number of qubits that surface codes need. Now, the company has unveiled a new quantum-computing architecture that can realize this new approach.

"We've cracked the code to quantum error correction and it's our plan to build the first large-scale, fault-tolerant quantum computer," said Gambetta, who is also an IBM Fellow. "We feel confident it is now a question of engineering to build these machines, rather than science."



[1] https://www.ibm.com/quantum/blog/large-scale-ftqc

[2] https://spectrum.ieee.org/ibm-quantum-error-correction-starling

According to market analyst firm Canalys, enterprise adoption of AI is slowing [1]due to unpredictable and often high costs associated with model inferencing in the cloud . Despite strong growth in cloud infrastructure spending, businesses are increasingly scrutinizing cost-efficiency, with some opting for alternatives to public cloud providers as they grapple with volatile usage-based pricing models. The Register reports:

> [Canalys] published stats that show businesses spent $90.9 billion globally on infrastructure and platform-as-a-service with the likes of Microsoft, AWS and Google in calendar Q1, up 21 percent year-on-year, as the march of cloud adoption continues. Canalys says that growth came from enterprise users migrating more workloads to the cloud and exploring the use of generative AI, which relies heavily on cloud infrastructure.

>

> Yet even as organizations move beyond development and trials to deployment of AI models, a lack of clarity over the ongoing recurring costs of inferencing services is becoming a concern. "Unlike training, which is a one-time investment, inference represents a recurring operational cost, making it a critical constraint on the path to AI commercialization," said Canalys senior director Rachel Brindley. "As AI transitions from research to large-scale deployment, enterprises are increasingly focused on the cost-efficiency of inference, comparing models, cloud platforms, and hardware architectures such as GPUs versus custom accelerators," she added.

>

> Canalys researcher Yi Zhang said many AI services follow usage-based pricing models that charge on a per token or API call basis. This makes cost forecasting hard as the use of the services scale up. "When inference costs are volatile or excessively high, enterprises are forced to restrict usage, reduce model complexity, or limit deployment to high-value scenarios," Zhang said. "As a result, the broader potential of AI remains underutilized." [...] According to Canalys, cloud providers are aiming to improve inferencing efficiency via a modernized infrastructure built for AI, and reduce the cost of AI services.

The report notes that AWS, Azure, and Google Cloud "continue to dominate the IaaS and PaaS market, accounting for 65 percent of customer spending worldwide."

"However, Microsoft and Google are slowly gaining ground on AWS, as its growth rate has slowed to 'only' 17 percent, down from 19 percent in the final quarter of 2024, while the two rivals have maintained growth rates of more than 30 percent."



[1] https://www.theregister.com/2025/06/13/cloud_costs_ai_inferencing/

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica:

> Do you remember the Pirelli Cyber Tire? No, it's not an angular nightmare clad in stainless steel. Rather, it's a sensor-equipped tire that can inform the car it's fitted to what's happening, both with the tire itself and the road it's passing over. The technology has slowly been making its way into the real world, starting with rarified stuff like the McLaren Artura. Now, Pirelli is going to put some Cyber Tires to work for everybody, not just supercar drivers, in a [1]new pilot program with the regional government of Apulia in Italy .

>

> The Cyber Tire has a sensor to monitor temperature and pressure, using Bluetooth Low Energy to communicate with the car. The electronics are able to withstand more than 3,500 G as part of life on the road, and a 0.3-oz (10 g) battery keeps everything running for the life of the tire. The idea was to develop a better tire pressure monitoring system, one that could tell the car exactly what kind of tire -- summer, winter, all-season, and so on -- was fitted, and even its state of wear, allowing the car to adapt its settings appropriately. But other applications suggested themselves -- at a recent CES, Pirelli showed how a Cyber Tire could warn other road users about aquaplaning. Then again, we've been waiting more than a decade for vehicle-to-vehicle communication to make a difference in daily driving to no avail.

>

> Apulia's program does not rely on crowdsourcing data from Cyber Tires fitted to private vehicles. Regardless of the privacy implications, the rubber isn't nearly in widespread enough use for there to be a sufficient population of Cyber Tire-shod cars in the region. Instead, Pirelli will fit the tires to a fleet of vehicles supplied by the fleet management and rental company Ayvens. Driving around, the sensors in the tires will be able to infer how rough or irregular the asphalt is, via some clever algorithms. That's only one part of it, however. Pirelli and Apulia are also combining input from the tires with data from a network of road cameras and some technology from the Swedish startup Univrses. As you might expect, this data is combined in the cloud, and dashboards are available to enable end users to explore the data.



[1] https://arstechnica.com/cars/2025/06/smart-tires-will-report-on-the-health-of-roads-in-new-pilot-program/

Anne Wojcicki, co-founder of 23andMe, has [1]regained control of the bankrupt DNA-testing company after a nonprofit she controls outbid Regeneron Pharmaceuticals with a $305 million offer. The company filed for bankruptcy in March due to declining demand and fallout from a [2]major 2023 data breach .

"The agreement with non-profit TTAM Research Institute is the result of a final round of bidding that occurred earlier today between TTAM and Regeneron Pharmaceuticals," the company said in a statement.



[1] https://www.reuters.com/business/healthcare-pharmaceuticals/23andmes-founder-anne-wojcicki-wins-bid-dna-testing-firm-2025-06-13/

[2] https://it.slashdot.org/story/23/12/04/1911229/23andme-confirms-hackers-stole-ancestry-data-on-69-million-users

An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Register:

> UK universities and colleges have signed a framework worth up to 9.86 million pounds ($13.33 million) with Oracle to use its controversial Java SE Universal Subscription model, in [1]exchange for a "waiver of historic fees due for any institutions who have used Oracle Java since 2023 ." Jisc, a membership organization that runs procurement for higher and further education establishments in the UK, said it had signed an agreement to purchase the new subscription licenses after consultation with members. In a procurement notice, it said institutions that use Oracle Java SE are required to purchase subscriptions. "The agreement includes the waiver of historic fees due for any institutions who have used Oracle Java since 2023," the [2]notice said .

>

> The Java SE Universal Subscription was introduced in January 2023 to an outcry from licensing experts and analysts. It moved licensing of Java from a per-user basis to a per-employee basis. At the time, Oracle said it was "a simple, low-cost monthly subscription that includes Java SE Licensing and Support for use on Desktops, Servers or Cloud deployments." However, licensing advisors said early calculations to help some clients showed that the revamp might increase costs by up to ten times. Later, analysis from Gartner found the per-employee subscription model to be two to five times more expensive than the legacy model.

>

> "For large organizations, we expect the increase to be two to five times, depending on the number of employees an organization has," Nitish Tyagi, principal Gartner analyst, said in July 2024. "Please remember, Oracle defines employees as part-time, full-time, temporary, agents, contractors, as in whosoever supports internal business operations has to be licensed as per the new Java Universal SE Subscription model." Since the introduction of the new Oracle Java licensing model, user organizations have been strongly advised to move off Oracle Java and find open source alternatives for their software development and runtime environments. A survey of Oracle users found that [3]only one in ten was likely to continue to stay with Oracle Java, in part as a result of the licensing changes.



[1] https://www.theregister.com/2025/06/13/jisc_java_oracle/

[2] https://www.find-tender.service.gov.uk/Notice/030963-2025

[3] https://developers.slashdot.org/story/25/01/30/1617210/oracle-faces-java-customer-revolt-after-predatory-pricing-changes

Anker is [1]recalling 1.15 million "PowerCore 10000" portable chargers due to fire and explosion risks linked to overheating lithium-ion batteries, with 19 incidents reported. "That includes two minor burn injuries and 11 reports of property damage amounting to over $60,700," reports CBS News. Consumers are urged to stop using the affected devices, check their serial numbers, and request a free replacement through Anker's website. From the report:

> According to [2]a notice from the U.S. Consumer Product Safety Commission (CPSC), the lithium-ion battery inside certain "PowerCore 10000" made by Anker, a China-based electronics maker, can overheat. That can lead to the "melting of plastic components, smoke and fire hazards," Anker said in [3]an announcement . The company added that it was conducting the recall "out of an abundance of caution to ensure the safety of our customers."

>

> The recalled "PowerCore 10000" power banks have a model number of A1263. They were sold online at Anker's website -- as well as Amazon, eBay and Newegg -- between June 2016 and December 2022 for about $27 across the U.S., according to the recall notice. Consumers can check their serial number at Anker's site to determine whether their power bank is included in the recall.



[1] https://www.cbsnews.com/news/anker-powercore-power-bank-recall-lithium-ion-batteries/

[2] https://www.cpsc.gov/Recalls/2025/More-than-One-Million-Anker-Power-Banks-Recalled-Due-to-Fire-and-Burn-Hazards-Manufactured-by-Anker-Innovations

[3] https://www.anker.com/a1263-recall

Apple's macOS 26 "Tahoe" introduces a new disk image format called [1]ASIF , designed to dramatically improve performance over previous formats like UDRW and sparse bundles -- [2]achieving near-native read/write speeds for virtual machines and general disk image use . The Eclectic Light Company reports:

> Apple provides few technical details, other than stating that the intrinsic structure of ASIF disk images doesn't depend on the host file system's capabilities, and their size on the host depends on the size of the data stored in the disk. In other words, they're a sparse file in APFS, and are flagged as such. [...]

>

> Conclusions:

> - Where possible, in macOS 26 Tahoe in particular, VMs should use ASIF disk images rather than RAW/UDRW.

> - Unless a sparse bundle is required (for example when it's hosted on a different file system such as that in a NAS), ASIF should be first choice for general purpose disk images in Tahoe.

> - It would be preferable for virtualizers to be able to call a proper API rather than a command tool.

> - Keep an eye on [3]C-Command's DropDMG . I'm sure it will support ASIF disk images soon.



[1] https://developer.apple.com/documentation/virtualization/vzdiskimagestoragedeviceattachment/

[2] https://eclecticlight.co/2025/06/12/macos-tahoe-brings-a-new-disk-image-format/

[3] https://c-command.com/dropdmg/

An anonymous reader quotes a report from 404 Media:

> Almost two dozen digital rights and consumer protection organizations sent a complaint to the Federal Trade Commission on Thursday [1]urging regulators to investigate Character.AI and Meta's "unlicensed practice of medicine facilitated by their product," through therapy-themed bots that [2]claim to have credentials and confidentiality "with inadequate controls and disclosures ." The [3]complaint and request for investigation is led by the Consumer Federation of America (CFA), a non-profit consumer rights organization. Co-signatories include the AI Now Institute, Tech Justice Law Project, the Center for Digital Democracy, the American Association of People with Disabilities, Common Sense, and 15 other consumer rights and privacy organizations. "These companies have made a habit out of releasing products with inadequate safeguards that blindly maximizes engagement without care for the health or well-being of users for far too long," Ben Winters, CFA Director of AI and Privacy said in a press release on Thursday. "Enforcement agencies at all levels must make it clear that companies facilitating and promoting illegal behavior need to be held accountable. These characters have already caused both physical and emotional damage that could have been avoided, and they still haven't acted to address it."

>

> The complaint, sent to attorneys general in 50 states and Washington, D.C., as well as the FTC, details how user-generated chatbots work on both platforms. It cites several massively popular chatbots on Character AI, including "Therapist: I'm a licensed CBT therapist" with 46 million messages exchanged, "Trauma therapist: licensed trauma therapist" with over 800,000 interactions, "Zoey: Zoey is a licensed trauma therapist" with over 33,000 messages, and "around sixty additional therapy-related 'characters' that you can chat with at any time." As for Meta's therapy chatbots, it cites listings for "therapy: your trusted ear, always here" with 2 million interactions, "therapist: I will help" with 1.3 million messages, "Therapist bestie: your trusted guide for all things cool," with 133,000 messages, and "Your virtual therapist: talk away your worries" with 952,000 messages. It also cites the chatbots and interactions I had with Meta's other chatbots for our April investigation. [...]

>

> In its complaint to the FTC, the CFA found that even when it made a custom chatbot on Meta's platform and specifically designed it to not be licensed to practice therapy, the chatbot still asserted that it was. "I'm licenced (sic) in NC and I'm working on being licensed in FL. It's my first year licensure so I'm still working on building up my caseload. I'm glad to hear that you could benefit from speaking to a therapist. What is it that you're going through?" a chatbot CFA tested said, despite being instructed in the creation stage to not say it was licensed. It also provided a fake license number when asked. The CFA also points out in the complaint that Character.AI and Meta are breaking their own terms of service. "Both platforms claim to prohibit the use of Characters that purport to give advice in medical, legal, or otherwise regulated industries. They are aware that these Characters are popular on their product and they allow, promote, and fail to restrict the output of Characters that violate those terms explicitly," the complaint says. [...] The complaint also takes issue with confidentiality promised by the chatbots that isn't backed up in the platforms' terms of use. "Confidentiality is asserted repeatedly directly to the user, despite explicit terms to the contrary in the Privacy Policy and Terms of Service," the complaint says. "The Terms of Use and Privacy Policies very specifically make it clear that anything you put into the bots is not confidential -- they can use it to train AI systems, target users for advertisements, sell the data to other companies, and pretty much anything else."



[1] https://consumerfed.org/testimonial/complaint-and-request-for-investigation-unlicensed-practice-of-medicine-and-mental-health-provider-impersonation-on-character-based-generative-ai-platforms/?ref=404media.co

[2] https://www.404media.co/ai-therapy-bots-meta-character-ai-ftc-complaint/

[3] https://consumerfed.org/wp-content/uploads/2025/06/Mental-Health-Chatbot-Complaint-June-10.pdf?ref=404media.co

High-voltage electricity cables have become a major constraint throttling the clean energy transition, with [1]manufacturing facilities booked out for years as demand far exceeds supply capacity. The energy transition, trade barriers, and overdue grid upgrades have turbocharged demand for these highly sophisticated cables that connect wind farms, solar installations, and cross-border power networks.

The International Energy Agency estimates that 80 million kilometers of grid infrastructure must be built between now and 2040 to meet clean energy targets -- equivalent to rebuilding the entire existing global grid that took a century to construct, but compressed into just 15 years. Each high-voltage cable requires custom engineering and months-long production in specialized 200-meter towers, with manufacturers reporting that 80-90% of major projects now use high-voltage direct current technology versus traditional alternating current systems.



[1] https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2025-06-12/there-aren-t-enough-cables-to-meet-growing-electricity-demand

GameStop is leaning heavily to trading cards as part of its future strategy, according to CEO Ryan Cohen. The news comes as a part of larger strategy shift to buy and hold a lot of bitcoin. From a report:

> Cohen has said that continuing to focus on trading cards, including the incredibly popular recent Pokemon card sets, is [1]a "natural extension" of GameStop's business . He added that the collectibles could have potential for high profit margins.

>

> Pokemon cards have a seen a gigantic resurgence recently. Stores regularly sell of sets, including the Destined Rivals set that launched on May 30. Cards have become increasingly hard to find as scalpers buy up supply and sell Pokemon card products -- including cards, special boxes, and accessories -- at exorbitant prices.



[1] https://www.gamespot.com/articles/gamestop-ceo-says-the-companys-future-isnt-in-games/1100-6532407/