Murena has launched the Murena Pixel Tablet, a de-Googled version of the Pixel Tablet that removes Google's apps and services to enhance user privacy. Priced at $549, it offers /e/OS, an alternative app store, and privacy-focused productivity tools, but lacks Google's speaker dock and direct access to the Play Store. The Verge reports: First announced last December, the Murena Pixel Tablet is available now through the company's online store for $549. That's a steep premium given Google currently sells the same 128GB version of the Pixel Tablet for $399, or $479 as part of a bundle with the charging speaker dock that Murena isn't including. Part of Murena's de-Googling of the Pixel Tablet includes the removal of the Google Play Store. You can still download apps through /e/OS' App Lounge which acts as a front-end for the Play Store allowing you to browse and get free apps anonymously without Google knowing who you are. However, downloading paid apps requires a login to a Google account. Google's various productivity apps aren't included, but the Murena Pixel Tablet comes with privacy-minded alternatives for messaging, email, maps, browsing the web, calendar, contacts, notes, and even voice recordings. In 2022, Murena launched its first smartphone with no Google apps, Google Play Services, or even the Google Assistant.

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Valve has made Team Fortress 2's full client and server code public, allowing fans to modify, extend, or rewrite the game as long as their projects remain non-commercial. Game Rant reports: Valve has made Team Fortress 2's server and client code fully public, with the studio encouraging fans to explore the game's files and make it what they want. The game's code is now available thanks to a new update to the Source SDK, which dropped earlier this week. Fans have already been creating TF2 mods for years, but what this essentially means is that fans can make brand-new games. However, there's one catch: any and all TF2 mods must be released for free. "The majority of items in the game now are thanks to the hard work of the TF2 community." Valve wrote. "To respect that, we're asking TF2 mod makers to continue to respect that connection and not to make mods that have the purpose of trying to profit off Workshop contributors' efforts." "TF2 mods may be published on the Steam Store, and after publication will appear as new games in the Steam game list," Valve continued. The new SDK update also includes new 64-bit binary support and fixes for multiplayer Source games like Half-Life 2: Deathmatch, Counter-Strike: Source, and Day of Defeat: Source. Time will only tell what fans come up with as they dig deep into the inner workings of the game, but given how passionate and talented the Team Fortress 2 community has proven to be, players can expect to see some incredible creations.

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A recently patched Palo Alto Networks vulnerability (CVE-2025-0108) is being actively exploited alongside two older flaws (CVE-2024-9474 and CVE-2025-0111), allowing attackers to gain root access to unpatched firewalls. The Register reports: This story starts with CVE-2024-9474, a 6.9-rated privilege escalation vulnerability in Palo Alto Networks PAN-OS software that allowed an OS administrator with access to the management web interface to perform actions on the firewall with root privileges. The company patched it in November 2024. Dark web intelligence services vendor Searchlight Cyber's Assetnote team investigated the patch for CVE-2024-9474 and found another authentication bypass. Palo Alto (PAN) last week fixed that problem, CVE-2025-0108, and rated it a highest urgency patch as the 8.8/10 flaw addressed an access control issue in PAN-OS's web management interface that allowed an unauthenticated attacker with network access to the management web interface to bypass authentication "and invoke certain PHP scripts." Those scripts could "negatively impact integrity and confidentiality of PAN-OS." The third flaw is CVE-2025-0111 a 7.1-rated mess also patched last week to stop authenticated attackers with network access to PAN-OS machines using their web interface to read files accessible to the "nobody" user. On Tuesday, US time, Palo A lot updated its advisory for CVE-2025-0108 with news that it's observed exploit attempts chaining CVE-2024-9474 and CVE-2025-0111 on unpatched and unsecured PAN-OS web management interfaces. The vendor's not explained how the three flaws are chained but we understand doing so allows an attacker to gain more powerful privileges and gain full root access to the firewall. PAN is urging users to upgrade their PAN-OS operating systems to versions 10.1, 10.2, 11.0, 11.1, and 11.2. A general hotfix is expected by Thursday or sooner, notes the Register.

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An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: For a while now, many AI researchers have been working to integrate a so-called "world model" into their systems. Ideally, these models could infer a simulated understanding of how in-game objects and characters should behave based on video footage alone, then create fully interactive video that instantly simulates new playable worlds based on that understanding. Microsoft Research's new World and Human Action Model (WHAM), revealed today in a paper published in the journal Nature, shows how quickly those models have advanced in a short time. But it also shows how much further we have to go before the dream of AI crafting complete, playable gameplay footage from just some basic prompts and sample video footage becomes a reality. Much like Google's Genie model before it, WHAM starts by training on "ground truth" gameplay video and input data provided by actual players. In this case, that data comes from Bleeding Edge, a four-on-four online brawler released in 2020 by Microsoft subsidiary Ninja Theory. By collecting actual player footage since launch (as allowed under the game's user agreement), Microsoft gathered the equivalent of seven player-years' worth of gameplay video paired with real player inputs. Early in that training process, Microsoft Research's Katja Hoffman said the model would get easily confused, generating inconsistent clips that would "deteriorate [into] these blocks of color." After 1 million training updates, though, the WHAM model started showing basic understanding of complex gameplay interactions, such as a power cell item exploding after three hits from the player or the movements of a specific character's flight abilities. The results continued to improve as the researchers threw more computing resources and larger models at the problem, according to the Nature paper. To see just how well the WHAM model generated new gameplay sequences, Microsoft tested the model by giving it up to one second's worth of real gameplay footage and asking it to generate what subsequent frames would look like based on new simulated inputs. To test the model's consistency, Microsoft used actual human input strings to generate up to two minutes of new AI-generated footage, which was then compared to actual gameplay results using the Frechet Video Distance metric. Microsoft boasts that WHAM's outputs can stay broadly consistent for up to two minutes without falling apart, with simulated footage lining up well with actual footage even as items and environments come in and out of view. That's an improvement over even the "long horizon memory" of Google's Genie 2 model, which topped out at a minute of consistent footage. Microsoft also tested WHAM's ability to respond to a diverse set of randomized inputs not found in its training data. These tests showed broadly appropriate responses to many different input sequences based on human annotations of the resulting footage, even as the best models fell a bit short of the "human-to-human baseline." The most interesting result of Microsoft's WHAM tests, though, might be in the persistence of in-game objects. Microsoft provided examples of developers inserting images of new in-game objects or characters into pre-existing gameplay footage. The WHAM model could then incorporate that new image into its subsequent generated frames, with appropriate responses to player input or camera movements. With just five edited frames, the new object "persisted" appropriately in subsequent frames anywhere from 85 to 98 percent of the time, according to the Nature paper.

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Cameron John Wagenius pleaded guilty to hacking AT&T and Verizon and stealing a massive trove of phone records from the companies, according to court records filed on Wednesday. From a report: Wagenius, who was a U.S. Army soldier, pleaded guilty to two counts of "unlawful transfer of confidential phone records information" on an online forum and via an online communications platform. According to a document filed by Wagenius' lawyer, he faces a maximum fine of $250,000 and prison time of up to 10 years for each of the two counts. Wagenius was arrested and indicted last year. In January, U.S. prosecutors confirmed that the charges brought against Wagenius were linked to the indictment of Connor Moucka and John Binns, two alleged hackers whom the U.S. government accused of several data breaches against cloud computing services company Snowflake, which were among the worst hacks of 2024.

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France has upped the ante in the quest for fusion power by maintaining a plasma reaction for over 22 minutes -- a new record. From a report: The milestone was reached on February 12 at the Commissariat a lenergie atomique et aux energies alternatives (CEA) WEST Tokamak reactor. Achieving the dream of commercial fusion power is the Holy Grail of engineering and has been for 80 years. With a single gram of hydrogen isotopes yielding the energy equivalent of 11 tonnes of coal, a practical fusion reactor would hold the promise of unlimited, clean energy for humanity until the end of time. Small wonder that billions have been invested by both government and industry in the quest to make fusion power a reality. However, while fusion is relatively easy to achieve in the heart of the sun or in a hydrogen bomb, creating a practical reactor that produces more energy than is put into it is another matter entirely.

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Nikola, the hydrogen-truck maker that briefly sported a market value comparable to Ford Motor, has filed for bankruptcy with plans to wind down its business. From a report: Nikola on Wednesday said that it made the chapter 11 filing with the U.S. Bankruptcy Court in Delaware and that it plans to conduct a court-supervised auction of its assets. The Phoenix company said it worked for months with its financial and legal advisers to find a way to sustain its operations before determining that a structured sale process was the best way to maximize the value of its assets.

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Apple has launched the iPhone 16E, featuring a 6.1-inch OLED display, Face ID, an A18 chipset, USB-C, 48MP camera, and support for Apple Intelligence. Gone but not forgotten: the home button, Touch ID and 64GB of base storage. The Verge reports: The 16E includes the customizable Action Button, but not the new Camera Control you'll find on the 16 series. It does swap its Lightning port for USB-C, now a requirement for the phone to be sold in the EU. On the inside, there's an A18 chipset, the same chip as the iPhone 16. That makes the 16E powerful enough to run Apple Intelligence, the suite of AI tools that includes notification summaries. Even the non-Pro iPhone 15 can't do that, so the 16E is one of the most capable iPhones out there. Apple has previously confirmed that 8GB RAM was the minimum to get Apple Intelligence support in the iPhone 16 series, so it's likely that the 16E also boasts at least that much memory. It's also been bumped to a baseline of 128GB of storage, meaning there's no longer a 64GB iPhone. There's only a single 48-megapixel rear camera; the lack of additional cameras is the biggest downgrade compared to the company's other handsets. With support for wireless charging and a water-resistant IP rating, there's little you have to give up elsewhere. The iPhone 16E is also the first iPhone to include a modem developed by Apple itself. The company has spent years trying to move away from modems developed by Qualcomm, and we're finally seeing the fruits of that labor. The big questions now are how well the new modem performs and whether Apple is ready to roll out its own connectivity components in the iPhone 17 line later this year. It's available for Friday starting at $599 with 128GB of storage.

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After two decades of quantum computing research, Microsoft has unveiled its first quantum chip: the Majorana 1. CNBC reports: Microsoft's quantum chip employs eight topological qubits using indium arsenide, which is a semiconductor, and aluminum, which is a superconductor. A new paper in the journal Nature describes the chip in detail. Microsoft won't be allowing clients to use its Majorana 1 chip through the company's Azure public cloud, as it plans to do with its custom artificial intelligence chip, Maia 100. Instead, Majorana 1 is a step toward a goal of a million qubits on a chip, following extensive physics research. Rather than rely on Taiwan Semiconductor or another company for fabrication, Microsoft is manufacturing the components of Majorana 1 itself in the U.S. That's possible because the work is unfolding at a small scale. "We want to get to a few hundred qubits before we start talking about commercial reliability," Jason Zander, a Microsoft executive vice president, told CNBC. In the meantime, the company will engage with national laboratories and universities on research using Majorana 1.

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AI hardware startup Humane -- which has been acquired by HP -- has given its users just ten days notice that their Pins will be disconnected. From a report: In a note to its customers, the company said AI Pins will "continue to function normally" until 12PM PT on February 28. On that date, users will lose access to essentially all of their device's features, including but not limited to calling, messaging, AI queries and cloud access. The FAQ does note that you'll still be able to check on your battery life, though. Humane is encouraging its users to download any stored data before February 28, as it plans on permanently deleting "all remaining customer data" at the same time as switching its servers off.

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Microsoft has placed its new AI-powered text rewrite feature in Notepad behind a subscription paywall, requiring users to have a Microsoft 365 Personal or Family plan to access the functionality. While the core text editor remains free and accessible without a Microsoft account, the AI feature requires users to sign in and have sufficient "AI credits" included in their subscription.Users can disable the feature and hide its icon if they choose not to subscribe.

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Apple has told Britain's competition regulator that some of the remedy options proposed by the watchdog to address concerns in the mobile browser market would impact the iPhone maker's incentive to innovate. From a report: The responses from Apple and Google to the regulator's investigation in the supply of mobile browsers and browser engines and the distribution of cloud gaming services through app stores on mobile devices in the country were published on the government website on Wednesday.

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Google has built an AI laboratory assistant to help scientists accelerate biomedical research [non-paywalled source], as companies race to create specialised applications from the cutting-edge technology. From a report: The US tech group's so-called co-scientist tool helps researchers identify gaps in their knowledge and propose new ideas that could speed up scientific discovery. "What we're trying to do with our project is see whether technology like the AI co-scientist can give these researchers superpowers," said Alan Karthikesalingam, a senior staff clinician scientist at Google. [...] Early tests of Google's new tool with experts from Stanford University, Imperial College London and Houston Methodist hospital found it was able to generate scientific hypotheses that showed promising results. The tool was able to reach the same conclusions -- for a novel gene transfer mechanism that helps scientists understand the spread of antimicrobial resistance -- as a new breakthrough from researchers at Imperial. Imperial's results were not in the public domain as they were being peer-reviewed in a top scientific journal. This showed that Google's co-scientist tool was able to reach the same hypothesis using AI reasoning in a matter of just days, compared with the years the university team spent researching the problem.

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Leading AI models can fix broken code, but they're nowhere near ready to replace human software engineers, according to extensive testing [PDF] by OpenAI researchers. The company's latest study put AI models and systems through their paces on real-world programming tasks, with even the most advanced models solving only a quarter of typical engineering challenges. The research team created a test called SWE-Lancer, drawing from 1,488 actual software fixes made to Expensify's codebase, representing $1 million worth of freelance engineering work. When faced with these everyday programming tasks, the best AI model â" Claude 3.5 Sonnet -- managed to complete just 26.2% of hands-on coding tasks and 44.9% of technical management decisions. Though the AI systems proved adept at quickly finding relevant code sections, they stumbled when it came to understanding how different parts of software interact. The models often suggested surface-level fixes without grasping the deeper implications of their changes. The research, to be sure, used a set of complex methodologies to test the AI coding abilities. Instead of relying on simplified programming puzzles, OpenAI's benchmark uses complete software engineering tasks that range from quick $50 bug fixes to complex $32,000 feature implementations. Each solution was verified through rigorous end-to-end testing that simulated real user interactions, the researchers said.

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An anonymous reader quotes a report from Bloomberg: Niantic, the company behind the 2016 hit Pokemon Go, is in talks to sell its video-game business to Saudi Arabia-owned Scopely, according to several people familiar with the discussions. A deal could be announced in coming weeks. The price being discussed is about $3.5 billion, according to one of the people. Any agreement would involve the Pokemon title as well as other mobile games, according to the people, who asked not to be identified because the discussions are private. There's no assurance an agreement will be reached.

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Microsoft is reminding IT administrators that WSUS driver synchronization will be deprecated on April 18, 2025, urging them to transition to cloud-based update solutions like Windows Autopatch, Azure Update Manager, and Microsoft Intune. "For on-premises contexts, drivers will be available on the Microsoft Update catalog, but you won't be able to import them into WSUS," the company said in a Windows message center update on Tuesday. "You'll need to use any of the available alternative solutions, such as Device Driver Packages, or transition to cloud-based driver services for your organization, such as Microsoft Intune and Windows Autopatch." BleepingComputer reports: This reminder follows two other warnings issued since June 2024, announcing the deprecation of WSUS driver synchronization and encouraging customers to adopt Redmond's newer cloud-based driver services. The company also revealed in September 2024 that WSUS had been deprecated, but Microsoft added that it plans to keep publishing updates through the channel and maintain all existing capabilities. This announcement came after WSUS was listed on August 13 as one of the "features removed or no longer developed starting with Windows Server 2025." "Specifically, this means that we are no longer investing in new capabilities, nor are we accepting new feature requests for WSUS," Microsoft's Nir Froimovici said at the time. "However, we are preserving current functionality and will continue to publish updates through the WSUS channel. We will also support any content already published through the WSUS channel."

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Late Tuesday afternoon, the White House confirmed that it would not proceed with laying off more than 1,000 probationary employees at NASA. "NASA had sought exemptions for all of these employees, who comprise about 6 percent of NASA's workforce," notes Ars Technica. "The Trump administration has sought to fire federal employees at several federal agencies who are in the 'probationary' period of their employment. This includes new hires within the last one or two years or long-time employees who have moved into or been promoted into a new position." From the report: It was not immediately clear why. A NASA spokesperson in Washington, DC, offered no comment on the updated guidance. Two sources indicated that it was plausible that private astronaut Jared Isaacman, whom President Trump has nominated to lead the space agency, asked for the cuts to be put on hold. Although this could not be confirmed, it seems reasonable that Isaacman would want to retain some control over where cuts at the agency are made. Firing all probationary employees -- which is the most expedient way to reduce the size of government -- is a blunt instrument. It whacks new hires that the agency may have recruited for key positions, as well as high performers who earned promotions. The reprieve in these terminations does not necessarily signal that NASA will escape significant budget or employment cuts in the coming months. The administration could still seek to terminate probationary employees. In addition, Ars reported earlier that directors at the agency's field centers have been told to prepare options for a "significant" reduction in force in the coming months. The scope of these cuts has not been defined, and it's likely they would need to be negotiated with Congress.

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Greg was fighting with an academic CMS, and discovered that a file called write_helper.js was included on every page. It contained this single function:

function document_write(s) { document.write(s); }

Now, setting aside the fact that document.write is one of those "you probably shouldn't use this" functions, and is deprecated, one has to wonder what the point of this function is. Did someone really not like object-oriented style code? Did someone break the "." on their keyboard and just wanted to not have to copy/paste existing "."s?

It's the kind of function you expect to see that someone wrote but that isn't invoked anywhere, and you'd almost be correct. This function, in a file included on every page, is called once and only once.

More like the wrong helper, if we're being honest.

[Advertisement] Picking up NuGet is easy. Getting good at it takes time. Download our guide to learn the best practice of NuGet for the Enterprise.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: Astronomers have detected over 5,800 confirmed exoplanets. One extreme class is ultra-hot Jupiters, of particular interest because they can provide a unique window into planetary atmospheric dynamics. According to a new paper published in the journal Nature, astronomers have mapped the 3D structure of the layered atmosphere of one such ultra-hot Jupiter-size exoplanet, revealing powerful winds that create intricate weather patterns across that atmosphere. A companion paper published in the journal Astronomy and Astrophysics (PDF) reported on the unexpected identification of titanium in the exoplanet's atmosphere as well. [...] This latest research relied on observational data collected by the European South Observatory's (ESO) Very Large Telescope, specifically, a spectroscopic instrument called ESPRESSO that can process light collected from the four largest VLT telescope units into one signal. The target exoplanet, WASP-121b -- aka Tylos -- is located in the Puppis constellation about 900 light-years from Earth. One year on Tylos is equivalent to just 30 hours on Earth, thanks to the exoplanet's close proximity to its host star. Since one side is always facing the star, it is always scorching, while the exoplanet's other side is significantly colder. Those extreme temperature contrasts make it challenging to figure out how energy is distributed in the atmospheric system, and mapping out the 3D structure can help, particularly with determining the vertical circulation patterns that are not easily replicated in our current crop of global circulation models, per the authors. For their analysis, they combined archival ESPRESSO data collected on November 30, 2018, with new data collected on September 23, 2023. They focused on three distinct chemical signatures to probe the deep atmosphere (iron), mid-atmosphere (sodium), and shallow atmosphere (hydrogen). "What we found was surprising: A jet stream rotates material around the planet's equator, while a separate flow at lower levels of the atmosphere moves gas from the hot side to the cooler side. This kind of climate has never been seen before on any planet," said Julia Victoria Seidel of the European Southern Observatory (ESO) in Chile and the Observatoire de la Cote d'Azur in France. "This planet's atmosphere behaves in ways that challenge our understanding of how weather works -- not just on Earth, but on all planets. It feels like something out of science fiction."

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Nvidia has confirmed on its forums that the RTX 50 series GPUs no longer support 32-bit PhysX. Tom's Hardware reports: As far as we know, there are no 64-bit games with integrated PhysX technology, thus terminating the tech entirely on RTX 50 series GPUs and newer. RTX 40 series and older will still be able to run 32-bit CUDA applications and thus PhysX, but regardless, the technology is now officially retired, starting with Blackwell. [...] The only way now to run PhysX on RTX 50 series GPUs (or newer) is to install a secondary RTX 40 series or older graphics card and slave it to PhysX duty in the Nvidia control panel. As far as we are aware, Nvidia has not disabled this sort of functionality. But the writing is on the wall for PhysX, and we doubt there will be any future games that attempt to use the API.

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