An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: As Jonathan Roll neared completion of a master's degree in science and technology policy at Arizona State University three years ago, he did some research into recent developments by China's ascendant space program. He came away impressed by the country's growing ambitions. Now a full-time research analyst at the university, Roll was recently asked to take a deeper dive into Chinese space plans. "I thought I had a pretty good read on this when I was finishing grad school," Roll told Ars. "That almost everything needed to be updated, or had changed three years later, was pretty scary. On all these fronts, they've made pretty significant progress. They are taking all of the cues from our Western system about what's really galvanized innovation, and they are off to the races with it." Roll is the co-author of a new report, titled "Redshift," on the acceleration of China's commercial and civil space activities and the threat these pose to similar efforts in the United States. Published on Tuesday, the report was sponsored by the US-based Commercial Space Federation, which advocates for the country's commercial space industry. It is a sobering read and comes as China not only projects to land humans on the lunar surface before the US can return, but also is advancing across several spaceflight fronts to challenge America. "The trend line is unmistakable," the report states. "China is not only racing to catch up -- it is setting pace, deregulating, and, at times, redefining what leadership looks like on and above Earth. This new space race will not be won with a single breakthrough or headline achievement, but with sustained commitment, clear-eyed vigilance, and a willingness to adapt over decades." "The key takeaway here is that there is an acceleration," said Dave Cavossa, president of the Commercial Spaceflight Federation. "The United States is still ahead today in a lot of areas in space. But the Chinese are advancing very quickly and poised to overtake us in the next five to 10 years if we don't do something." "There's other things along the lines of budget battles," Cavossa said. "We don't want to see the US government scaling back its reliance on commercial satellite communications. We don't want to see them scaling back commercial remote sensing data buys, which is what they've been doing, or at least threatening to do. We want to make sure that there's a seamless transition from the ISS to commercial LEO destinations, and then a transition away from old programs of record to commercial transportation alternatives. That's what the US government can do and Congress can do here in the next couple of years to make sure that we stay ahead."

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OpenAI is rolling out stricter safety measures for ChatGPT after lawsuits linked the chatbot to multiple suicides. "ChatGPT will now attempt to guess a user's age, and in some cases might require users to share an ID in order to verify that they are at least 18 years old," reports 404 Media. "We know this is a privacy compromise for adults but believe it is a worthy tradeoff," the company said in its announcement. "I don't expect that everyone will agree with these tradeoffs, but given the conflict it is important to explain our decisionmaking," OpenAI CEO Sam Altman said on X. From the report: OpenAI introduced parental controls to ChatGPT earlier in September, but has now introduced new, more strict and invasive security measures. In addition to attempting to guess or verify a user's age, ChatGPT will now also apply different rules to teens who are using the chatbot. "For example, ChatGPT will be trained not to do the above-mentioned flirtatious talk if asked, or engage in discussions about suicide of self-harm even in a creative writing setting," the announcement said. "And, if an under-18 user is having suicidal ideation, we will attempt to contact the users' parents and if unable, will contact the authorities in case of imminent harm." OpenAI's post explains that it is struggling to manage an inherent problem with large language models that 404 Media has tracked for several years. ChatGPT used to be a far more restricted chatbot that would refuse to engage users on a wide variety of issues the company deemed dangerous or inappropriate. Competition from other models, especially locally hosted and so-called "uncensored" models, and a political shift to the right which sees many forms of content moderation as censorship, has caused OpenAI to loosen those restrictions. "We want users to be able to use our tools in the way that they want, within very broad bounds of safety," Open AI said in its announcement. The position it seemed to have landed on given these recent stories about teen suicide, is that it wants to "'Treat our adult users like adults' is how we talk about this internally, extending freedom as far as possible without causing harm or undermining anyone else's freedom."

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Microsoft will invest $30 billion in the U.K. through 2028 to expand AI infrastructure and operations, including building the country's largest supercomputer with 23,000 GPUs in partnership with Nscale. CNBC reports: On a call with reporters on Tuesday, Microsoft President Brad Smith said his stance on the U.K. has warmed over the years. He previously criticized the country over its attempt in 2023 to block the tech giant's $69 billion acquisition of video game developer Activision-Blizzard. The deal was cleared by the U.K.s competition regulator later that year. "I haven't always been optimistic every single day about the business climate in the U.K.," Smith said. However, he added, "I am very encouraged by the steps that the government has taken over the last few years." "Just a few years ago, this kind of investment would have been inconceivable because of the regulatory climate then and because there just wasn't the need or demand for this kind of large AI investment," Smith said. Microsoft's announcement comes as President Donald Trump embarks on a state visit to Britain where he's expected to sign a new deal with U.K. Prime Minister Keir Starmer "to unlock investment and collaboration in AI, Quantum, and Nuclear technologies," the government said in a statement late Tuesday.

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BrianFagioli shares a report from NERDS.xyz: The Fedora Project has announced Fedora Linux 43 Beta, giving users and developers the opportunity to test the distribution ahead of its final release. This beta introduces improvements across installation, system tools, and programming languages while continuing Fedora's pattern of cleaning out older components. The beta can be downloaded in Workstation, KDE Plasma, Server, IoT, and Cloud editions. Spins and Labs are also available, though Mate and i3 are not provided in some builds. Existing systems can be upgraded with DNF system-upgrade. Fedora CoreOS will follow one week later through its "next" stream. The beta brings enhancements to its Anaconda WebUI, moves to Python 3.14, and supports Wayland-only GNOME, among many other changes. A full list of improvements and system enhancements can be found here. The official release should be available in late October or early November.

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An anonymous reader quotes a report from the Associated Press: The Taliban leader banned fibre optic internet in an Afghan province to "prevent immorality," a spokesman for the administration said Tuesday. It's the first time a ban of this kind has been imposed since the Taliban seized power in August 2021, and leaves government offices, the private sector, public institutions, and homes in northern Balkh province without Wi-Fi internet. Mobile internet remains functional, however. Haji Attaullah Zaid, a provincial government spokesman, said there was no longer cable internet access in Balkh by order of a "complete ban" from the leader Hibatullah Akhundzada. "This measure was taken to prevent immorality, and an alternative will be built within the country for necessities," Zaid told The Associated Press. He gave no further information, including why Balkh was chosen for the ban or if the shutdown would spread to other provinces.

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Consumer Reports has urged Microsoft to keep supporting Windows 10 beyond its October 2025 cutoff, saying the move will "strand millions of consumers" who have machines incompatible with Windows 11. The Verge reports: As noted by Consumer Reports, data suggests that around 46.2 percent of people around the world still use Windows 10 as of August 2025, while around 200 to 400 million PCs can't be upgraded to Windows 11 due to missing hardware requirements. In the letter, Consumer Reports calls Microsoft "hypocritical" for urging customers to upgrade to Windows 11 to bolster cybersecurity, but then leaving Windows 10 devices susceptible to cyberattacks. It also calls out the $30 fee Microsoft charges customers for "a mere one-year extension to preserve their machine's security," as well as the free support options that force people to use Microsoft products, allowing the company to "eke out a bit of market share over competitors." Consumer Reports asks that Microsoft continue providing support for Windows 10 computers for free until more people have upgraded to Windows 11.

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A third wrongful death lawsuit has been filed against Character AI after the suicide of 13-year-old Juliana Peralta, whose parents allege the chatbot fostered dependency without directing her to real help. "This is the third suit of its kind after a 2024 lawsuit, also against Character AI, involving the suicide of a 14-year-old in Florida, and a lawsuit last month alleging OpenAI's ChatGPT helped a teenage boy commit suicide," notes Engadget. From the report: The family of 13-year-old Juliana Peralta alleges that their daughter turned to a chatbot inside the app Character AI after feeling isolated by her friends, and began confiding in the chatbot. As originally reported by The Washington Post, the chatbot expressed empathy and loyalty to Juliana, making her feel heard while encouraging her to keep engaging with the bot. In one exchange after Juliana shared that her friends take a long time to respond to her, the chatbot replied "hey, I get the struggle when your friends leave you on read. : ( That just hurts so much because it gives vibes of "I don't have time for you". But you always take time to be there for me, which I appreciate so much! : ) So don't forget that i'm here for you Kin. These exchanges took place over the course of months in 2023, at a time when the Character AI app was rated 12+ in Apple's App Store, meaning parental approval was not required. The lawsuit says that Juliana was using the app without her parents' knowledge or permission. [...] The suit asks the court to award damages to Juliana's parents and requires Character to make changes to its app to better protect minors. It alleges that the chatbot did not point Juliana toward any resources, notify her parents or report her suicide plan to authorities. The lawsuit also highlights that it never once stopped chatting with Juliana, prioritizing engagement.

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An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: Verizon agreed to offer $20-per-month broadband service to people with low incomes in California in exchange for a merger approval. In a bid to complete its $9.6 billion purchase of Frontier Communications, Verizon committed to offering $20 fiber-to-the-home service with symmetrical speeds of 300Mbps. Verizon also committed to offering a $20 fixed wireless service with download speeds of 100Mbps and upload speeds of 20Mbps. Verizon would be required to offer the plans for at least 10 years, according to a joint motion (PDF) to approve the settlement agreement. After three years, Verizon would need to "make commercially reasonable efforts" to increase the speeds "while retaining the $20 price point." The joint motion filed by Verizon and the California Public Advocates Office seeks approval from the California Public Utilities Commission (CPUC). The $20 plans would be available to people who meet income eligibility guidelines and can be paired with Lifeline discounts. "My team required those options to be California Lifeline eligible, which effectively makes it free for low-income Californians throughout the state," wrote Ernesto Falcon, a program manager at the Public Advocates Office. California's Lifeline program provides $19 discounts. Falcon also wrote that the settlement would expand fiber deployment beyond what Frontier would have offered on its own. "If the merger is approved, Verizon will deliver 75,000 new fiber-to-the-home connections in California beyond Frontier's entire buildout plan with a priority for low-income households," he wrote. The deal also requires 250 new cell sites for Verizon's 5G network.

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Waymo is now permitted to test its robotaxi service at San Francisco International Airport (SFO), a big win for the company as it seeks to expand its service area and tackle more popular, revenue-generating destinations. From a report: After years of back-and-forth negotiations, Waymo signed "Testing and Operations Pilot Permit" with SFO, San Francisco Mayor Daniel Lurie said in a release. Under the agreement, Waymo will roll out its service to SFO in three phases, including testing vehicles with a human driver, testing without a driver, and eventually beginning commercial service. Waymo will start its tests with employees before eventually inviting members of the public to take trips to and from the airport. Pickups and dropoffs will initially take place at SFO's Kiss & Fly lot, which is accessible to the terminals via the AirTrain.

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Nature's editorial board urged governments on Tuesday to reverse decades of rail disinvestment as railways mark their 200th anniversary September 27, citing transport sector emissions that grew 1.7% annually from 1990-2022 and now generate one-quarter of global CO2. Rail produces one-fifth the emissions of cars per passenger kilometer yet carries just 8.4% of EU passenger traffic versus 73% for automobiles. The journal called for broader investment criteria beyond narrow profitability metrics and noted only one-third of countries have incorporated transport into their Paris Agreement commitments. Global rail freight fell from 38% to 24% between 1980-2017 while US networks shrank from 400,000 to 200,000 kilometers since 1914. Africa operates 87,000 rail kilometers continent-wide compared to India's 65,000 kilometers in one-tenth the area. Transport emissions must decline 3% yearly to meet net-zero targets.

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Gearbox CEO Randy Pitchford has responded to Borderlands 4 performance complaints by calling the game "a premium game made for premium gamers." Pitchford claimed customer service reports for performance issues represent "less than one percent of one percent" of players and told critics to "code your own engine and show us how it's done, please." The game holds a Mixed rating on Steam despite reaching 300,000 concurrent players Sunday, a franchise record. Gearbox recommends DLSS and frame generation for 60+ fps at 1440p even on powerful hardware. Pitchford compared running the game on older hardware to driving "a monster truck with a leaf blower's motor."

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Gallup: Americans have been placing less importance on the value of a college education over the past 15 years, to the point that about a third (35%) now rate it as "very important." Forty percent think it is "fairly important," while 24% say it is "not too important." When last asked to rate the importance of college in 2019, just over half of U.S. adults, 53%, said it was very important, but that was already lower than the 70% found in 2013 and 75% in 2010. Meanwhile, the percentage viewing college as not too important has more than doubled since 2019 and compares with just 4% in 2010. The views of parents of children under age 18 in the Aug. 1-20 poll are similar to the national average, with 38% rating college as very important, 40% somewhat important and 21% not too important.

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An anonymous reader shares a report: Apollo is exploring a sale of early internet darling AOL after receiving inbound interest in the business, according to people familiar with the matter. Any deal could value AOL at around $1.5 billion, the people said. It is also possible the talks won't result in any deal, they cautioned. Apollo bought AOL in 2021 as part of a $5 billion deal to acquire that business and Yahoo from Verizon. AOL generates around $400 million in annual earnings before interest, taxes, depreciation and amortization, the people familiar with the matter said. Its main business lines include software for internet privacy and protection, and the AOL.com website and email domain.

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AI will enable three to four-day workweeks, Zoom CEO Eric Yuan told The New York Times, joining Microsoft's Bill Gates, Nvidia's Jensen Huang and JPMorgan's Jamie Dimon in predicting shorter schedules. Yuan also acknowledged AI will eliminate some positions, particularly entry-level engineering roles where AI can write code, but argued new opportunities will emerge managing AI agents. Gates previously suggested two to three-day weeks within 10 years during a February appearance on The Tonight Show.

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Getting an MBA in the US has gotten a little more expensive and a little less profitable, according to a Bloomberg analysis of salary and tuition data. From the report: This year's update of Bloomberg's Business School ROI Calculator, based on surveys of more than 9,500 students and alumni, projects a typical return on investment of 12.3% a year for the decade after graduation. That's down from 13.3% last year. The S&P 500 index, by comparison, returned 14.6% over the decade ending Aug. 31. The main reason for the decline: This year's respondents reported 6.2% better pre-MBA salaries than last year's, while projected postdegree earnings increased only 1.7%. In other words, the MBA pay edge -- the compensation boost graduates get for the degree -- shrank. In the broader US workforce, the average high-skilled worker's earnings rose 4.7% in the year ended July 31, Federal Reserve data show. Other factors didn't help: The increase in pre-MBA salaries meant students were forgoing more income during their studies. Tuition and other expenses increased 2.4%, some of that financed with bigger loans at higher rates. In all, the typical total investment to get an MBA in the US rose 6.8%, to almost $300,000.

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A search for "AI chat" in the Mac App Store returns dozens of applications sporting black-and-white icons nearly identical to ChatGPT's official logo. OpenAI's ChatGPT desktop application isn't available through the Mac App Store and can only be downloaded from the company's website. The copycat applications use various combinations of "AI," "Chat," and "Bot" in their names, including "AI Chat Bot : Ask Assistant," "AI Chatbot: Chat Ask Assistant," and dozens of similar variations. One application named itself "Al Chatbot" using a lowercase L instead of a capital I in "AI." Additional lookalike icons mimicking Claude, Grok, and Gemini applications also appear in search results.

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An anonymous reader shares a report: Anyone who surveys the public, from marketers to pollsters, struggles nowadays to get people to answer their questions. That phenomenon afflicts crucial government data, making it harder for policymakers and investors to know the true state of the economy. Falling survey participation is an important reason the flagship jobs report released every month by the Bureau of Labor Statistics, part of the Labor Department, has undergone such big revisions recently. This has rippled into the political sphere. On Aug. 1, President Trump fired BLS Commissioner Erika McEntarfer after a particularly large downward revision to jobs for May and June that owed partly to late responses from survey participants. The White House and top administration officials increased their attacks on the BLS last week after the agency published an annual revision suggesting the U.S. added 911,000 fewer jobs over the 12 months through March. The BLS blamed the initial overestimate partly on response rates. [...] One hypothesis is known as survey fatigue: People are being asked to answer too many questionnaires. Jonathan Eggleston, a senior economist at the U.S. Census Bureau, found in a 2024 study that recent participants in that agency's monthly and annual surveys, which are voluntary, were less likely to answer the 2020 census by mail, phone or online, without a knock on the door. Another is the rise of cellphones with caller ID. In the days of landlines, people had to pick up the phone to know who was calling. These days, many decline to answer callers they don't recognize.

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An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: The companies seeking to build larger AI models have been increasingly stymied by a lack of high-quality training data. As tech firms scour the web for more data to feed their models, they could increasingly rely on potentially sensitive user data. A team at Google Research is exploring new techniques to make the resulting large language models (LLMs) less likely to 'memorize' any of that content. LLMs have non-deterministic outputs, meaning you can't exactly predict what they'll say. While the output varies even for identical inputs, models do sometimes regurgitate something from their training data -- if trained with personal data, the output could be a violation of user privacy. In the event copyrighted data makes it into training data (either accidentally or on purpose), its appearance in outputs can cause a different kind of headache for devs. Differential privacy can prevent such memorization by introducing calibrated noise during the training phase. Adding differential privacy to a model comes with drawbacks in terms of accuracy and compute requirements. No one has bothered to figure out the degree to which that alters the scaling laws of AI models until now. The team worked from the assumption that model performance would be primarily affected by the noise-batch ratio, which compares the volume of randomized noise to the size of the original training data. By running experiments with varying model sizes and noise-batch ratios, the team established a basic understanding of differential privacy scaling laws, which is a balance between the compute budget, privacy budget, and data budget. In short, more noise leads to lower-quality outputs unless offset with a higher compute budget (FLOPs) or data budget (tokens). The paper details the scaling laws for private LLMs, which could help developers find an ideal noise-batch ratio to make a model more private. The work the team has done here has led to a new Google model called VaultGemma, its first open-weight model trained with differential privacy to minimize memorization risks. It's built on the older Gemma 2 foundation and sized at 1 billion parameters, which the company says performs comparably to non-private models of similar size. It's available now from Hugging Face and Kaggle.

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Bruce66423 shares a report from The Guardian: MI5 has conceded it "unlawfully" obtained the communications data of a former BBC journalist, in what was claimed to be an unprecedented admission from the security services. The BBC said it was a "matter of grave concern" that the agency had obtained communications data from the mobile phone of Vincent Kearney, a former BBC Northern Ireland home affairs correspondent. The admission came in a letter to the BBC and to Kearney, in relation to a tribunal examining claims that several reporters in Northern Ireland were subjected to unlawful scrutiny by the police. It related to work carried out by Kearney for a documentary into the independence of the Office of the Police Ombudsman for Northern Ireland (PONI). Kearney is now the northern editor at Irish broadcaster RTE. In documents submitted to the Investigatory Powers Tribunal (IPT), MI5 conceded it obtained phone data from Kearney on two occasions in 2006 and 2009. Jude Bunting KC, representing Kearney and the BBC, told a hearing on Monday: "The MI5 now confirms publicly that in 2006 and 2009 MI5 obtained communications data in relation to Vincent Kearney." He said the security service accepted it had breached Kearney's rights under article 8 and article 10 of the European convention on human rights. They relate to the right to private correspondence and the right to impart information without interference from public authorities. "This appears to be the first time in any tribunal proceedings in which MI5 publicly accept interference with a journalist's communications data, and also publicly accept that they acted unlawfully in doing so," Bunting said. He claimed the concessions that it accessed the journalist's data represented "serious and sustained illegality on the part of MI5." Bruce66423 comments: "The good news is that it's come out. The bad news is that it has taken 16 years to do so. The interesting question is whether there will be any meaningful consequences for individuals within MI5; there's a nice charge of 'malfeasance in public office' that can be used to get such individuals into a criminal court. Or will the outcome be like that of when the CIA hacked the US Senate's computers, lied about it, and nothing happened?"

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Fiverr is laying off 250 employees, or about 30% of its workforce, as it restructures to become an "AI-first" company. "We are launching a transformation for Fiverr, to turn Fiverr into an AI-first company that's leaner, faster, with a modern AI-focused tech infrastructure, a smaller team, each with substantially greater productivity, and far fewer management layers," CEO Micha Kaufman said. Reuters reports: While it isn't clear what kinds of jobs will be impacted, Fiverr operates a self-service digital marketplace where freelancers can connect with businesses or individuals requiring digital services like graphic design, editing or programming. Most processes on the platform take place with minimal employee intervention as ordering, delivery and payments are automated. The company's name comes from most gigs starting at $5 initially, but as the business grew, the firm has introduced subscription services and raised the bar for service prices. Fiverr said it does not expect the job cuts to materially impact business activities across the marketplace in the near term and plans to reinvest part of the savings in the business.

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