Sony has begun mass suspensions of PlayStation accounts linked to Russian users, including those registered in other countries like Turkiye and Kazakhstan, in an effort to crack down on circumvention of regional restrictions like PS Plus access. This move follows Sony's 2022 exit from the Russian market due to the war in Ukraine. Ukrainska Pravda reports: Russians are trying to bypass the blocks and are contacting PlayStation support, but these attempts are to no avail. Users with purchased accounts encounter the most problems -- Sony checks IP addresses for verification. There are already many similar reports. In some cases, accounts with thousands of roubles worth of games purchased have been blocked. Russian media outlets like RT are reporting the news.

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Qualcomm announced plans to re-enter the data center market with custom CPUs designed to integrate with Nvidia GPUs and software. As CNBC reports, the move supports Qualcomm's broader strategy to diversify beyond smartphones and into high-growth areas like data centers, PCs, and automotive chips. From the report: "I think we see a lot of growth happening in this space for decades to come, and we have some technology that can add real value added," Cristiano Amon, CEO of Qualcomm, told CNBC in an interview on Monday. "So I think we have a very disruptive CPU." Amon said the company will make an announcement about the CPU roadmap and the timing of its release "very soon," without offering specifics. The data center CPU market remains highly competitive. Big cloud computing players like Amazon and Microsoft already design and deploy their own custom CPUs. AMD and Intel also have a strong presence. Addressing the competition, Amon said that there will be a place for Qualcomm in the data center CPU space. "As long as ... we can build a great product, we can bring innovation, and we can add value with some disruptive technology, there's going to be room for Qualcomm, especially in the data center," Amon said. "[It] is a very large addressable market that will that will see a lot of investment for decades to come." Last week, Qualcomm signed a memorandum of understanding with Saudi-based AI frim Humain to develop data centers, joining a slew of U.S. tech companies making deals in the region. Humain will operate under Saudi Arabia's Public Investment Fund.

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An anonymous reader quotes a report from Bloomberg: While using website data to build a Google Search topped with artificial intelligence-generated answers, an Alphabet executive acknowledged in an internal document that there was an alternative way to do things: They could ask web publishers for permission, or let them directly opt out of being included. But giving publishers a choice would make training AI models in search too complicated, the company concludes in the document, which was unearthed in the company's search antitrust trial. It said Google had a "hard red line" and would require all publishers who wanted their content to show up in the search page to also be used to feed AI features. Instead of giving options, Google decided to "silently update," with "no public announcement" about how they were using publishers' data, according to the document, written by Chetna Bindra, a product management executive at Google Search. "Do what we say, say what we do, but carefully." "It's a little bit damning," said Paul Bannister, the chief strategy officer at Raptive, which represents online creators. "It pretty clearly shows that they knew there was a range of options and they pretty much chose the most conservative, most protective of them -- the option that didn't give publishers any controls at all." For its part, Google said in a statement to Bloomberg: "Publishers have always controlled how their content is made available to Google as AI models have been built into Search for many years, helping surface relevant sites and driving traffic to them. This document is an early-stage list of options in an evolving space and doesn't reflect feasibility or actual decisions." They added that Google continually updates its product documentation for search online.

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Google has launched the NotebookLM app for Android and iOS, offering a native mobile experience with offline support, audio overviews, and integration into the system share sheet for adding sources like PDFs and YouTube videos. 9to5Google reports: This native experience starts on a homepage of your notebooks with filters at the top for Recent, Shared, Title, and Downloaded. The app features a light and dark mode based on your device's system theme with no manual toggle. Each colorful card features the notebook name, emoji, number of sources, and date, as well as a play button for Audio Overviews. There's background playback and offline support for the podcast-style experience (the fullscreen player has a nice glow), while you can "Join" the AI hosts (in beta) to ask follow-up questions. You get a "Create new" button at the bottom of the list to add PDFs, websites, YouTube videos, and text. Notably, the NotebookLM app will appear in the Android and iOS share sheet to quickly add sources. When you open a notebook, there's a bottom bar for the list of Sources, Chat Q&A, and Studio. It's similar to the current mobile website, with the native client letting users ditch the Progressive Web App. Out of the gate, there are phone and (straightforward) tablet interfaces. You can download the app for iOS and Android using their respective links.

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Regeneron Pharmaceuticals is acquiring most of 23andMe's assets for $256 million. The sale includes 23andMe's Personal Genome Service, Total Health and Research Services business lines. What's not included is 23andMe's telehealth unit, Lemonaid Health, which the company acquired for around $400 million in 2021. It'll be shut down, but all staffers will remain employed. CNBC reports: The deal is still subject to approval by the U.S. Bankruptcy Court for the Eastern District of Missouri. Pending approval, it's expected to close in the third quarter of this year, according to the release. In its bankruptcy proceedings, 23andMe required all bidders to comply with its privacy policies, and a court-appointed, independent "Consumer Privacy Ombudsman" will assess the deal, the companies said. Several lawmakers and officials, including the Federal Trade Commission, had expressed concerns about the safety of consumers' genetic data through 23andMe's sale process. The privacy ombudsman will present a report on the acquisition to the court by June 10. "We are pleased to have reached a transaction that maximizes the value of the business and enables the mission of 23andMe to live on, while maintaining critical protections around customer privacy, choice and consent with respect to their genetic data," Mark Jensen, 23andMe's board chair, said in a statement. "At its peak, 23andMe was valued at around $6 billion," notes the report.

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An anonymous reader quotes a report from TechCrunch: Microsoft on Monday became one of the first hyperscalers to provide managed access to Grok, the AI model developed by billionaire Elon Musk's AI startup, xAI. Available through Microsoft's Azure AI Foundry platform, Grok -- specifically Grok 3 and Grok 3 mini -- will "have all the service-level agreements Azure customers expect from any Microsoft product," says Microsoft. They'll also be billed directly by Microsoft, as is the case with the other models hosted in Azure AI Foundry. [...] The Grok 3 and Grok 3 mini models in Azure AI Foundry are decidedly more locked down than the Grok models on X. They also come with additional data integration, customization, and governance capabilities not necessarily offered by xAI through its API.

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Chatbots are more persuasive in online debates than people -- especially when they are able to personalize their arguments using information about their opponent. From a report: The finding, published in Nature Human Behaviour on 19 May, highlights how large language models (LLMs) could be used to influence people's opinions, for example in political campaigns or targeted advertising. "Obviously as soon as people see that you can persuade people more with LLMs, they're going to start using them," says study co-author Francesco Salvi, a computational scientist at the Swiss Federal Technology Institute of Lausanne (EPFL). "I find it both fascinating and terrifying." Research has already shown that artificial intelligence (AI) chatbots can make people change their minds, even about conspiracy theories, but it hasn't been clear how persuasive they are in comparison to humans. GPT-4 was 64.4% more persuasive than humans in one-to-one debates, the study found.

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An anonymous reader shares a report: European "green" funds holding more than $33 billion of investments in major oil and gas companies have been revealed by an investigation, despite fossil fuels being the root cause of the climate crisis. Some of these investment funds used branding such as Sustainable Global Stars and Europe Climate Pathway. Over $18 billion was invested in the five biggest polluters: TotalEnergies, Shell, ExxonMobil, Chevron and BP. These topped a 2023 Carbon Majors ranking for oil and gas production among shareholder-owned firms. Other investments by funds following EU sustainable finance disclosure regulations (SFDR) included those in US fracking company Devon Energy and Canadian tar sands company Suncor, the investigation by Voxeurop and the Guardian found. Investors claim that holding a stake in a company allows them to influence the firm's pursuit of climate goals. However, no major oil and gas producer has plans consistent with international climate targets and many companies have weakened their plans in the last year, according to a report from Carbon Tracker in April. The investment firms with the biggest stakes in fossil companies in their green funds were JP Morgan, BlackRock and DWS in Germany.

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Microsoft unveiled "Edit on Windows," a new command-line text editor, at its Build conference today. The open-source tool allows developers to edit files directly in the command line without switching to another app, similar to vim but designed to be more user-friendly. Accessible by typing "edit" in a command prompt, the lightweight editor (less than 250KB) includes features like multiple file support via ctrl + P shortcuts, find and replace functionality, and regular expression support. "What motivated us to build Edit was the need for a default CLI text editor in 64-bit versions of Windows," said Christopher Nguyen, product manager of Windows Terminal, noting that 32-bit Windows versions already ship with MS-DOS Edit. Microsoft also wanted to avoid the notorious "how do I exit vim?" problem by creating a modeless editor, The Verge writes. The tool will be available to Windows Insiders in the coming months.

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AI is eroding entry-level positions across multiple industries, threatening the traditional career ladder for young professionals, LinkedIn's chief economic opportunity officer warned Monday. College graduate unemployment has risen 30% since September 2022, compared to 18% for workers overall, according to LinkedIn data. The company's research shows Generation Z workers expressing greater pessimism about their futures than any other age group. "Breaking first is the bottom rung of the career ladder," wrote Aneesh Raman in a New York Times column, citing examples across technology, law, and retail where AI is replacing tasks traditionally assigned to junior workers. A LinkedIn survey of 3,000 executives found 63% believe AI will eventually handle mundane entry-level tasks, with professionals holding advanced degrees likely facing greater disruption than those without. Some firms are adapting by redesigning roles. KPMG now assigns recent graduates tax work previously reserved for more experienced employees, while Macfarlanes has early-career lawyers interpreting complex contracts once handled by senior colleagues. Though economic uncertainty also impacts hiring, Raman warned that delayed career entry can cost young workers approximately $22,000 in earnings over a decade.

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Microsoft has announced NLWeb, an open protocol designed to democratize AI-powered search capabilities for websites and apps. Developed by Microsoft technical fellow Ramanathan V. Guha, who previously created RSS and Schema.org, NLWeb allows site owners to implement ChatGPT-style natural language search with minimal code. The protocol enables websites to process complex queries like "spicy and crunchy appetizers for Diwali" or "jackets warm enough for Quebec," requiring only an AI model, some code, and the site's own data. During his demonstration to news outlet The Verge, Guha showed how NLWeb remembers user preferences, such as dietary restrictions, for future interactions. "It's a protocol, and the protocol is a way of asking a natural-language question, and the answer comes back in structured form," explained Guha, who argues the approach is significantly cheaper than traditional search methods that require extensive web crawling and indexing. Microsoft is partnering with publishers and companies including TripAdvisor, Eventbrite, and Shopify to implement NLWeb, though Guha acknowledges the challenge of achieving widespread adoption in a web that historically tends toward centralization.

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Windows Subsystem for Linux (WSL) is now open source, Microsoft said Monday. The tool, which allows developers to run Linux distributions directly in Windows, is available for download, modification, and contribution. "We want Windows to be a great dev box," said Pavan Davuluri, corporate VP at Microsoft. "Having great WSL performance and capabilities" allows developers "to live in the Windows-native experience and take advantage of all they need in Linux." First launched in 2016 with an emulated Linux kernel, WSL switched to using the actual Linux kernel in 2019 with WSL 2, improving compatibility. The system has since gained support for GPUs, graphical applications, and systemd. Microsoft significantly refactored core Windows components to make WSL a standalone system before open sourcing it.

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An anonymous reader shares a report: Germany has dropped its long-held opposition to nuclear power, in the first concrete sign of rapprochement with France by Berlin's new government led by conservative Chancellor Friedrich Merz. Berlin has signalled to Paris it will no longer block French efforts to ensure nuclear power is treated on par with renewable energy in EU legislation, according to French and German officials. The move resolves a major dispute between the two countries that has delayed decisions on EU energy policy, including during the crisis that followed Russiaâ(TM)s full-scale invasion of Ukraine.

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Miami-Dade County Public Schools, the nation's third-largest school district, is now deploying Google's Gemini chatbots to more than 105,000 high school students -- marking the largest U.S. school district AI deployment to date. This represents a dramatic reversal from just two years ago when the district blocked such tools over cheating and misinformation concerns. The initiative follows President Trump's recent executive order promoting AI integration "in all subject areas" from kindergarten through 12th grade. District officials spent months testing various chatbots for accuracy, privacy, and safety before selecting Google's platform.

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New submitter optical_phiber writes: In March 2025, the New South Wales (NSW) Department of Education discovered that Microsoft Teams had begun collecting students' voice and facial biometric data without their prior knowledge. This occurred after Microsoft enabled a Teams feature called 'voice and face enrollment' by default, which creates biometric profiles to enhance meeting experiences and transcriptions via its CoPilot AI tool. The NSW department learned of the data collection a month after it began and promptly disabled the feature and deleted the data within 24 hours. However, the department did not disclose how many individuals were affected or whether they were notified. Despite Microsoft's policy of retaining data only while the user is enrolled and deleting it within 90 days of account deletion, privacy experts have raised serious concerns. Rys Farthing of Reset Tech Australia criticized the unnecessary collection of children's data, warning of the long-term risks and calling for stronger protections.

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Abstract of a paper featured on NBER: This year marks the 40th anniversary of the NBER Macro Annual Conference, founded in 1986. This paper reviews the evolution of mainstream macroeconomics since then. It presents my views, informed by a survey of a number of researchers who have made important contributions to the field. I develop two main arguments. The first is that, starting from strikingly different positions, there has been substantial convergence, in terms of methodology, architecture, and main mechanisms. Methodology: Explicit micro foundations, explicit treatment of distortions, with, at the same time, an increased willingness to deviate from rational expectations, neoclassical utility and profit maximization. Architecture: The wide acceptance of nominal rigidities as an essential distortion, although with mixed feelings. Mechanisms: The wide nature of the shocks to both the demand and the supply side. The second is that this convergence has been, for the most part, good convergence, i.e. the creation of a generally accepted conceptual and analytical structure, a core to which additional distortions can be added, allowing for discussions and integration of new ideas and evidence, rather than fights about basic methodology. Not everything is right however, with too much emphasis on general equilibrium implications from the start, rather than, first, on partial equilibrium analysis of the phenomenon at hand.

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"The Danish government plans to evaluate the prospect of beginning a nuclear power programme," reports the Telegraph, noting that this week Denmark lifted a nuclear power ban imposed 40 years ago. Unlike its neighbours in Sweden and Germany, Denmark has never had a civil nuclear power programme. It has only ever had three small research reactors, the last of which closed in 2001. Most of the renewed interest in nuclear seen around the world stems from the expected growth in electricity demand from AI data centres, but Denmark is different. The Danes are concerned about possible blackouts similar to the one that struck Iberia recently. Like Spain and Portugal, Denmark is heavily dependent on weather-based renewable energy which is not very compatible with the way power grids operate... ["The spinning turbines found in fossil-fuelled energy systems provide inertia and act as a shock absorber to stabilise the grid during sudden changes in supply or demand," explains a diagram in the article, while solar and wind energy provide no inertia.] The Danish government is worried about how it will continue to decarbonise its power grid if it closes all of its fossil fuel generators leaving minimal inertia. There are only three realistic routes to decarbonisation that maintain physical inertia on the grid: hydropower, geothermal energy and nuclear. Hydro and geothermal depend on geographic and geological features that not every country possesses. While renewable energy proponents argue that new types of inverters could provide synthetic inertia, trials have so far not been particularly successful and there are economic challenges that are difficult to resolve. Denmark is realising that in the absence of large-scale hydroelectric or geothermal energy, it may have little choice other than to re-visit nuclear power if it is to maintain a stable, low carbon electricity grid. Thanks to long-time Slashdot reader schwit1 for sharing the news.

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"Despite many obstacles — and what you may read elsewhere — electric-vehicle sales continue to grow at a healthy pace in the U.S. market," Cox Automotive reported this week. "Roughly 7.5% of total new-vehicle sales in the first quarter were electric vehicles, an increase from 7% a year earlier." An anonymous reader shared this analysis from Autoweek: "Despite a cloud of uncertainty around future EV interest and potential economic headwinds hanging over the automotive industry, consumer demand for electric vehicles has remained stable," according to the J.D. Power 2025 US Electric Vehicle Consideration Study released yesterday. Specifically, the study showed that 24% of vehicle shoppers in the U.S. say they are "very likely" to consider purchasing an EV and 35% say they are "somewhat likely," both of which figures remain unchanged from a year ago... Globally the numbers are even more pro-EV. Electric car sales exceeded 17 million globally in 2024, reaching a sales share of more than 20%, according to a report issued this week by the International Energy Agency. "Just the additional 3.5 million electric cars sold in 2024 compared with the previous year is more than the total number of electric cars sold worldwide in 2020," the IEA said. China, which has mandated increases in EV sales, is the leader in getting electric vehicles on the road, with electric cars accounting for almost half of all Chinese car sales in 2024, the IEA said. "The over 11 million electric cars sold in China last year were more than global sales just 2 years earlier. As a result of continued strong growth, 1 in 10 cars on Chinese roads is now electric." Interesting figures on U.S. EV sales from the article: 2024 EV sales rose 7.3% from 2023, according to Cox Automotive data. "Last year American consumers purchased 1.3 million electric vehicles, which was a new record, according to data from KBB. "Sales have never stopped growing, and the percentage of new cars sold powered purely by gasoline continues to slip.

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TechCrunch reports: The world's only net-positive fusion experiment has been steadily ramping up the amount of power it produces, TechCrunch has learned. In recent attempts, the team at the U.S. Department of Energy's National Ignition Facility (NIF) increased the yield of the experiment, first to 5.2 megajoules and then again to 8.6 megajoules, according to a source with knowledge of the experiment. The new results are significant improvements over the historic experiment in 2022, which was the first controlled fusion reaction to generate more energy than the it consumed. The 2022 shot generated 3.15 megajoules, a small bump over the 2.05 megajoules that the lasers delivered to the BB-sized fuel pellet. None of the shots to date have been effective enough to feed electrons back into the grid, let alone to offset the energy required to power the entire facility — the facility wasn't designed to do that. The first net-positive shot, for example, required 300 megajoules to power the laser system alone. But they are continued proof that controlled nuclear fusion is more than hypothetical.

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OpenAI CEO and Sam Altman believe Artificial General Intelligence could arrive within the next few years. But the speculations of some technologists "are getting ahead of reality," writes the New York Times, adding that many scientists "say no one will reach AGI without a new idea — something beyond the powerful neural networks that merely find patterns in data. That new idea could arrive tomorrow. But even then, the industry would need years to develop it." "The technology we're building today is not sufficient to get there," said Nick Frosst, a founder of the AI startup Cohere who previously worked as a researcher at Google and studied under the most revered AI researcher of the last 50 years. "What we are building now are things that take in words and predict the next most likely word, or they take in pixels and predict the next most likely pixel. That's very different from what you and I do." In a recent survey of the Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence, a 40-year-old academic society that includes some of the most respected researchers in the field, more than three-quarters of respondents said the methods used to build today's technology were unlikely to lead to AGI. Opinions differ in part because scientists cannot even agree on a way of defining human intelligence, arguing endlessly over the merits and flaws of IQ tests and other benchmarks. Comparing our own brains to machines is even more subjective. This means that identifying AGI is essentially a matter of opinion.... And scientists have no hard evidence that today's technologies are capable of performing even some of the simpler things the brain can do, like recognizing irony or feeling empathy. Claims of AGI's imminent arrival are based on statistical extrapolations — and wishful thinking. According to various benchmark tests, today's technologies are improving at a consistent rate in some notable areas, like math and computer programming. But these tests describe only a small part of what people can do. Humans know how to deal with a chaotic and constantly changing world. Machines struggle to master the unexpected — the challenges, small and large, that do not look like what has happened in the past. Humans can dream up ideas that the world has never seen. Machines typically repeat or enhance what they have seen before. That is why Frosst and other sceptics say pushing machines to human-level intelligence will require at least one big idea that the world's technologists have not yet dreamed up. There is no way of knowing how long that will take. "A system that's better than humans in one way will not necessarily be better in other ways," Harvard University cognitive scientist Steven Pinker said. "There's just no such thing as an automatic, omniscient, omnipotent solver of every problem, including ones we haven't even thought of yet. There's a temptation to engage in a kind of magical thinking. But these systems are not miracles. They are very impressive gadgets." While Google's AlphaGo could be humans in a game with "a small, limited set of rules," the article points out that tthe real world "is bounded only by the laws of physics. Modelling the entirety of the real world is well beyond today's machines, so how can anyone be sure that AGI — let alone superintelligence — is just around the corner?" And they offer this alternative perspective from Matteo Pasquinelli, a professor of the philosophy of science at Ca' Foscari University in Venice, Italy. "AI needs us: living beings, producing constantly, feeding the machine. It needs the originality of our ideas and our lives."

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