UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres says it is now clear that efforts to cap global warming at 1.5C above pre-industrial levels will fail in the short term. AFP: Before next month's COP30 climate summit in Brazil, Guterres said going beyond 1.5C would result in "devastating" yet predictable impacts. "One thing is already clear: we will not be able to contain the global warming below 1.5C in the next few years," Guterres said at the UN's World Meteorological Organisation (WMO) weather and climate agency in Geneva. "Overshooting is now inevitable. Which means that we're going to have a period, bigger or smaller, with higher or lower intensity, above 1.5C in the years to come." However, if leaders start taking the problem seriously by driving towards net zero greenhouse gas emissions, "the 1.5 still remains -- according to all the scientists I met -- possible before the end of the century."

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An anonymous reader shares a report: With gingko "memory-boost tinctures," fennel "tummy-soothing syrups" and "citrus-immune gummies," AI "slop" has come for herbalism, a study published by a leading AI-detection company has found. Originality.ai, which offers its tools to universities and businesses, says it scanned 558 titles published in Amazon's herbal remedies subcategory between January and September this year, and found 82% of the books "were likely written" by AI. "This is a damning revelation of the sheer scope of unlabelled, unverified, unchecked, likely AI content that has completely invaded [Amazon's] platform," wrote Michael Fraiman, author of the study. "There's a huge amount of herbal research out there right now that's absolutely rubbish," said Sue Sprung, a medical herbalist in Liverpool. "AI won't know how to sift through all the dross, all the rubbish, that's of absolutely no consequence. It would lead people astray."

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An anonymous reader writes: Gboard has introduced some significant changes to the app over the past few weeks, making typing on the app much easier than ever before. You can now resize the keyboard to your desired size, and there's even something in the works that will make adding apostrophes to your text even more seamless. If all of that wasn't enough, the app is now introducing a feature that some will find peculiar, which will allow users to remove the period and common punctuation keys from Gboard. This news comes to us from 9to5Google, sharing that this is now an option with the latest version of the app.

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Fujitsu has released a new laptop in Japan with a built-in Blu-ray drive. The FMV Note A A77-K3 includes a BDXL-compatible optical drive that can read and burn discs. Most laptop manufacturers globally stopped including optical drives in the second half of the 2010s. The Japanese market has refused to follow that trend. Shops in Tokyo's Akihabara district recently experienced a spike in demand for optical drives and systems capable of reading Blu-ray discs, Tom's Hardware reports. Fujitsu sells two additional models in the FMV Note A line using Intel thirteenth-generation chips. Those systems include DVD drives instead of Blu-ray capability. Some other Japanese manufacturers also released optical-drive-equipped laptops earlier in 2025.

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Millions of tons of discarded electronics from the United States are being shipped overseas, much of it to developing countries in Southeast Asia unprepared to safely handle hazardous waste, according to a new report by an environmental watchdog. AP: The Seattle-based Basel Action Network, or BAN, said a two-year investigation found at least 10 U.S. companies exporting used electronics to Asia and the Middle East, in what it says is a "hidden tsunami" of electronic waste. "This new, almost invisible tsunami of e-waste, is taking place ... padding already lucrative profit margins of the electronics recycling sector while allowing a major portion of the American public's and corporate IT equipment to be surreptitiously exported to and processed under harmful conditions in Southeast Asia," the report said. Electronic waste, or e-waste, includes discarded devices like phones and computers containing both valuable materials and toxic metals like lead, cadmium and mercury. As gadgets are replaced faster, global e-waste is growing five times quicker than it's formally recycled. The world produced a record 62 million metric tons in 2022. That's expected to climb to 82 million by 2030, according to the United Nations' International Telecommunication Union and its research arm, UNITAR.

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Microsoft has set a 30% profit margin goal for its Xbox gaming division, Bloomberg reported Thursday, well above the video game industry's average of 17% to 22%. The target, implemented in fall 2023 by CFO Amy Hood, represents a sharp departure from Xbox's previous approach of allowing developers to focus on making quality games without specific financial constraints. Xbox historically maintained profit margins between 10% and 20% and reported a 12% margin for the first nine months of Microsoft's 2022 fiscal year. The division has responded by canceling several projects that had been in development for more than seven years, including Everwild, Perfect Dark and Project Blackbird. It has also eliminated thousands of jobs and raised prices. In 2024, Xbox began releasing most of its games on rival Nintendo and Sony platforms. The heightened scrutiny comes as Microsoft prioritizes investment in generative AI while overseeing a gaming division that has struggled despite spending $76.5 billion on acquisitions.

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An anonymous reader quotes a report from 9to5Mac: Apple has been working on a new framework called AppMigrationKit, which will be compatible with devices running iOS 26.1 and later, as well as iPadOS 26.1 and later. Like iOS and iPadOS 26.1, the framework is currently in beta and will allow developers to include their app's data during the migration process between Apple and non-Apple devices (which, for now, essentially means Android). Interestingly, Apple notes that this framework is not intended for data migration between iOS and iPadOS, but rather exclusively to and from non-Apple devices: "AppMigrationKit only supports migration to and from non-Apple platforms, such as Android. The system doesn't use the framework for migration between iOS or iPadOS devices. The framework also has no functionality in iOS apps running in visionOS or in macOS on Apple silicon. The framework ignores calls from Mac apps built with Mac Catalyst." The AppMigrationKit documentation can be found here.

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SpaceX has deactivated over 2,500 Starlink terminals allegedly used by scam operations in Myanmar, where the service isn't licensed but was reportedly enabling large-scale cybercrime networks tied to human trafficking and fraud. Ars Technica reports: Lauren Dreyer, vice president of Starlink business operations, described the action in an X post last night after reports that Myanmar's military shut down a major scam operation: "SpaceX complies with local laws in all 150+ markets where Starlink is licensed to operate," Dreyer wrote. "SpaceX continually works to identify violations of our Acceptable Use Policy and applicable law... On the rare occasion we identify a violation, we take appropriate action, including working with law enforcement agencies around the world. In Myanmar, for example, SpaceX proactively identified and disabled over 2,500 Starlink Kits in the vicinity of suspected 'scam centers.'" Starlink is not licensed to operate in Myanmar. While Dreyer didn't say how the terminals were disabled, it's known that Starlink can disable individual terminals based on their ID numbers or use geofencing to block areas from receiving signals. On Monday, Myanmar state media reported that "Myanmar's military has shut down a major online scam operation near the border with Thailand, detaining more than 2,000 people and seizing dozens of Starlink satellite Internet terminals," according to an Associated Press article. The army reportedly raided a cybercrime center known as KK Park as part of operations that began in early September. The operations reportedly targeted 260 unregistered buildings and resulted in seizure of 30 Starlink terminals and detention of 2,198 people. "Maj. Gen. Zaw Min Tun, the spokesperson for the military government, charged in a statement Monday night that the top leaders of the Karen National Union, an armed ethnic organization opposed to army rule, were involved in the scam projects at KK Park," the AP wrote. The Karen National Union is "part of the larger armed resistance movement in Myanmar's civil war" and "deny any involvement in the scams."

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An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Drive: This week, a reader wrote to us sharing that the infotainment in their 2020 Audi A4 had been "rebooting every five minutes all year." It looks like the problem was caused by a compatibility issue with a SiriusXM app update. Audi tells us the situation's been rectified, but it illustrates a serious pain point in modern cars -- myriad apps interacting with a diverse population of in-car software systems. Our reader was not the only Audi owner affected. "Randomly restarting" Audi infotainment screens have been discussed on Reddit, the Audiworld forum, and elsewhere, going back many months. Audi's recall notice and related service action only went out this summer. It looks like this particular problem was caused when the satellite radio app pushed an update that was supposed to work on the latest version of Audi's infotainment software, but not all cars were running that. Then SiriusXM reverted, which, I guess, did not solve the problem for every owner. Audi now states that the problem has been fixed and originated with the SiriusXM app, but really, the automaker bears more than a little blame, too. [...] I dropped our own contacts at Audi a note about how and why this might have happened, and they added this clarification: "At the beginning of the year, SiriusXM did a programming update which was addressed via a software update to the MMI. However, as not all customers had their cars updated and SiriusXM then reverted back to the previous category numbering. Nonetheless, a MMI update is recommended as the two versions do seem to cause the issue."

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Meta is laying off about 600 employees from its AI division as part of a restructuring to streamline operations and solidify Alexandr Wang's leadership over the company's AI strategy. "Workers across Meta's AI infrastructure units, Fundamental Artificial Intelligence Research unit (FAIR) and other product-related positions will be impacted," notes CNBC. "However, the cuts did not impact employees within TBD Labs, which includes many of the top-tier AI hires brought into the social media company this summer." From the report: Those employees, overseen by Wang, were spared by the layoffs, underscoring Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg's bet on his expensive hires versus the legacy employees, the people said. Within Meta, the AI unit was considered to be bloated, with teams like FAIR and more product-oriented groups often vying for computing resources, the people said. When the company's new hires joined the company to create Superintelligence Labs, it inherited the oversized Meta AI unit, they said. The layoffs are an attempt by Meta to continue trim the department and further cement Wang's role in steering the company's AI strategy. Following the cuts, Meta's Superintelligence Labs' workforce now sits at just under 3,000, the people said.

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As it nears its 30th anniversary, Pitchfork is testing user reviews and comments in a major shift from its long-standing critic-only model. The site will now let readers rate albums and leave comments, combining those into an aggregated "reader score" alongside the official Pitchfork score. The Verge reports: Pitchfork has historically been a one-sided affair. While it ran the occasional reader poll, there was no way for readers to directly voice their opinion on the site. If you thought that Jet's Shine On deserved better than a 0.0 (first off, you're wrong), there was no way to let the author know other than shouting into the void of this new thing at the time called Twitter. Now the site is considering letting users comment directly on reviews and give albums scores of their own. And then those scores will be averaged up into a single reader score for each album.

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Google is migrating all its internal workloads to run on both x86 and its custom Axion Arm chips, with major services like YouTube, Gmail, and BigQuery already running on both architectures. The Register reports: The search and ads giant documented its move in a preprint paper published last week, titled "Instruction Set Migration at Warehouse Scale," and in a Wednesday post that reveals YouTube, Gmail, and BigQuery already run on both x86 and its Axion Arm CPUs -- as do around 30,000 more applications. Both documents explain Google's migration process, which engineering fellow Parthasarathy Ranganathan and developer relations engineer Wolff Dobson said started with an assumption "that we would be spending time on architectural differences such as floating point drift, concurrency, intrinsics such as platform-specific operators, and performance." [...] The post and paper detail work on 30,000 applications, a collection of code sufficiently large that Google pressed its existing automation tools into service -- and then built a new AI tool called "CogniPort" to do things its other tools could not. [...] Google found the agent succeeded about 30 percent of the time under certain conditions, and did best on test fixes, platform-specific conditionals, and data representation fixes. That's not an enormous success rate, but Google has at least another 70,000 packages to port. The company's aim is to finish the job so its famed Borg cluster manager -- the basis of Kubernetes -- can allocate internal workloads in ways that efficiently utilize Arm servers. Doing so will likely save money, because Google claims its Axion-powered machines deliver up to 65 percent better price-performance than x86 instances, and can be 60 percent more energy-efficient. Those numbers, and the scale of Google's code migration project, suggest the web giant will need fewer x86 processors in years to come.

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An anonymous reader quotes a report from the BBC: New research coordinated by the European Broadcasting Union (EBU) and led by the BBC has found that AI assistants -- already a daily information gateway for millions of people -- routinely misrepresent news content no matter which language, territory, or AI platform is tested. The intensive international study of unprecedented scope and scale was launched at the EBU News Assembly, in Naples. Involving 22 public service media (PSM) organizations in 18 countries working in 14 languages, it identified multiple systemic issues across four leading AI tools. Professional journalists from participating PSM evaluated more than 3,000 responses from ChatGPT, Copilot, Gemini, and Perplexity against key criteria, including accuracy, sourcing, distinguishing opinion from fact, and providing context. Key findings: - 45% of all AI answers had at least one significant issue. - 31% of responses showed serious sourcing problems - missing, misleading, or incorrect attributions. - 20% contained major accuracy issues, including hallucinated details and outdated information. - Gemini performed worst with significant issues in 76% of responses, more than double the other assistants, largely due to its poor sourcing performance. - Comparison between the BBC's results earlier this year and this study show some improvements but still high levels of errors. The team has released a News Integrity in AI Assistants Toolkit to help develop solutions to these problems and boost users' media literacy. They're also urging regulators to enforce laws on information integrity and continue independent monitoring of AI assistants.

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OpenBSD 7.8 has been released, adding Raspberry Pi 5 support, enhanced AMD Secure Encrypted Virtualization (SEV-ES) capabilities, and expanded hardware compatibility including new Qualcomm, Rockchip, and Apple ARM drivers. Phoronix reports: OpenBSD 7.8 also brings multiple improvements around enabling AMD Secure Encrypted Virtualization (AMD SEV) support with support for the PSP ioctl for encrypting and measuring state for SEV-ES, a new VMD option to run guests in SEV-ES mode, and other enablement work pertaining to that AMD SEV work in SEV-ES form at this point as a precursor to SEV-SNP. AMD SEV-ES should be working to start confidential virtual machines (VMs) when using the VMM/VMD hypervisor and the OpenBSD guests with KVM/QEMU. OpenBSD 7.8 also improves compatibility of the FUSE file-system support with the Linux implementation, suspend/hibernate improvements, SMP improvements, updating to the Linux 6.12.50 DRM graphics drivers, several new Rockchip drivers, Raspberry Pi RP1 drivers, H.264 video support for the uvideo driver, and many network driver improvements. The changelog and download page can be found via OpenBSD.org.

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Samsung has officially launched the Galaxy XR, the first Android headset powered by Google's new Android XR platform. Priced at $1,800 without controllers, the device features dual 4.3K Micro-OLED displays, a Snapdragon XR2+ Gen 2 chip, extensive camera tracking, and deep Gemini AI integration. Ars Technica reports: Galaxy XR is a fully enclosed headset with passthrough video. It looks similar to the Apple Vision Pro, right down to the battery pack at the end of a cable. It packs solid hardware, including 16GB of RAM, 256GB of storage, and a Snapdragon XR2+ Gen 2 processor. That's a slightly newer version of the chip powering Meta's Quest 3 headset, featuring six CPU cores and an Adreno GPU that supports up to dual 4.3K displays. The new headset has a pair of 3,552 x 3,840 Micro-OLED displays with a 109-degree field of view. That's marginally more pixels than the Vision Pro and almost three times as many as the Quest 3. The displays can refresh at up to 90Hz, but the default is 72Hz to save power. Like other XR (extended reality) devices, the Galaxy XR is covered with cameras. There are two 6.5 MP stereoscopic cameras that stream your surroundings to the high-quality screens, allowing the software to add virtual elements on top. There are six more outward-facing cameras for headset positioning and hand tracking. Four more cameras are on the inside for eye-tracking, and they can scan your iris for secure unlocking and password fill (in select apps). Samsung says the Galaxy XR has enough juice for two hours of general use or two and a half hours of video. That's not terribly long, but you may not want to wear the 545 grams (1.2 pounds) headset for even two hours. That's even a little heavier than the Quest 3, which has an integrated battery. However, both pale in comparison to the 800 g (1.7 pounds) second-generation Vision Pro.

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An anonymous reader quotes a report from Reuters: The hack of Jaguar Land Rover, owned by India's Tata Motors, cost the British economy an estimated $2.55 billion and affected over 5,000 organizations, an independent cybersecurity body said in a report published on Wednesday. The report was produced by the Cyber Monitoring Centre, an independent, not for profit organization made up of industry specialists, including the former head of Britain's National Cyber Security Centre. It said losses could be higher if there were unexpected delays to the restoration of production at the vehicle manufacturer to levels before the hack took place in August. "This incident appears to be the most economically damaging cyber event to hit the UK, with the vast majority of the financial impact being due to the loss of manufacturing output at JLR and its suppliers," the report said. JLR will report its financial results in November, according to the company's website. A spokesperson for JLR declined to comment on the report. [...] JLR, which analysts estimated was losing around 50 million pounds per week from the shutdown, was provided with a 1.5 billion pound loan guarantee by the British government in late September to help it support suppliers.

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Coal use hit a record high around the world last year despite efforts to switch to clean energy, imperilling the world's attempts to rein in global heating. From a report: The share of coal in electricity generation dropped as renewable energy surged ahead. But the general increase in power demand meant that more coal was used overall, according to the annual State of Climate Action report, published on Wednesday. The report painted a grim picture of the world's chances of avoiding increasingly severe impacts from the climate crisis. Countries are falling behind the targets they have set for reducing greenhouse gas emissions, which have continued to rise, albeit at a lower rate than before. Clea Schumer, a research associate at the World Resources Institute thinktank, which led the report, said: "There's no doubt that we are largely doing the right things. We are just not moving fast enough. One of the most concerning findings from our assessment is that for the fifth report in our series in a row, efforts to phase out coal are well off track."

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YouTube has added a new Shorts feature that makes it easier to manage how much time you're spending watching videos. From a report: Mobile users can now set a customizable daily limit that restricts how long they can scroll Shorts feeds, aiming to help viewers better manage their time instead of endlessly scrolling. When a user reaches their time limit, they will receive a notification saying Shorts has been paused for the day. This notification is dismissible, however, so it's on the user to honor these self-imposed restrictions.

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Air pollution in New Delhi hit a five-year high this week, as Diwali fireworks combined with farming fires to shroud the city in a toxic haze. From a report: The annual spike has become something of a tradition in the megalopolis, with some parts of the city this week recording an air-quality index reading of 1,800 -- 20 times higher than levels the World Health Organization deems healthy. The news points to the challenge facing Indian authorities as they look to combat pollution and cut carbon emissions: The country has made huge progress in deploying renewable energy, but will still need up to $21 trillion in new investments in order to meet its 2070 net-zero target, according to government plans reported by Bloomberg.

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Google and Apple face enforced changes to how they operate their mobile phone platforms, after the UK's competition watchdog ruled the companies require tougher regulatory oversight. From a report: The Competition and Markets Authority has conferred "strategic market status" (SMS) on the tech firms after investigating their mobile operating systems, app stores and browsers. It means Apple and Google will be subjected to tailormade guidelines to regulate their behaviour in the mobile market. The CMA said the two companies have "substantial, entrenched" market power, with UK mobile phone owners using either Google or Apple's platforms and unlikely to switch between them. The regulator flagged the importance of their platforms to the UK economy and said they could be a bottleneck for businesses. [...] Changes under consideration by the CMA include allowing users to be "steered" out of app stores to make purchases elsewhere, like on a company's own website. App developers have long taken issue with Apple and Google taking a cut from purchases made via apps. The CMA also wants both companies to ensure users have a "genuine choice" over the services they use on their devices, like digital wallets on Apple.

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