An anonymous reader shares a report: Adobe brought together 10,000 marketers, filmmakers and content creators to its annual conference this week to persuade them that the company's software products are adapting to AI and remain the best tools for their work. But it's Adobe's investors, rather than its users, who are the most skeptical that generative AI technology won't disrupt the company's business as the top seller of software for creative professionals. Despite a strong strategy, Adobe is "at risk of structural AI-driven competitive and pricing pressure," wrote Tyler Radke, an analyst at Citigroup. The company's shares have lost about a quarter of their value this year as AI tools like Google's video-generating model Veo have gained steam. In an interview with Bloomberg Television earlier this week, Adobe Chief Executive Officer Shantanu Narayen said the company is undervalued as the market is focused on semiconductors and the training of AI models.

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A critical security flaw in Chromium's Blink rendering engine can crash billions of browsers within seconds. Security researcher Jose Pino discovered the vulnerability and created a proof-of-concept exploit called Brash to demonstrate the bug affecting Chrome, Edge, OpenAI's ChatGPT Atlas, Brave, Vivaldi, Arc, Dia, Opera and Perplexity Comet. The flaw, reports The Register, exploits the absence of rate limiting on document.title API updates in Chromium versions 143.0.7483.0 and later. The attack injects millions of DOM mutations per second and saturates the main thread. When The Register tested the code on Edge, the browser crashed and the Windows machine locked up after about 30 seconds while consuming 18GB of RAM in one tab. Pino disclosed the bug to the Chromium security team on August 28 and followed up on August 30 but received no response. Google said it is looking into the issue.

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AI "cheating" app Cluely's CEO and cofounder, Chungin "Roy" Lee, said most startups flop because their products don't get seen. From a report: "Engineers just cannot make good content," Lee said during a Wednesday interview at TechCrunch Disrupt 2025 "There's a bunch of shallow replicas, but I challenge you to find one video you think is like, 'Yo, this is as tough as Cluely,'" he told TechCrunch. Every startup needs to focus more on distribution. And most startups flop because they fail to get seen, even if they have product-market fit, Lee said. Cluely launched earlier this year as a tool to help software engineers cheat on their job interviews, among other use cases. The startup earlier this year posted a tongue-in-cheek video of Lee trying to use Cluely to impress a woman on a date, which went viral.

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Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg is getting ready to dump even more AI-generated posts into your social feeds. From a report: During an earnings call on Wednesday, Zuckerberg said the company will "add yet another huge corpus of content" to its recommendations system as AI "makes it easier to create and remix" work that gets shared online. "Social media has gone through two eras so far," Zuckerberg said. "First was when all content was from friends, family, and accounts that you followed directly. The second was when we added all of the Creator content." Though Zuckerberg stops short of calling AI the third era of social media, it's clear that the technology will be heavily involved in what comes next. Zuckerberg said that recommendation systems that "deeply understand" AI-generated posts and "show you the right content" will become "increasingly valuable." The company has already begun embedding AI tools across its apps and is now experimenting with dedicated AI social apps, too.

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An anonymous reader shares a report: The International Criminal Court will switch its internal work environment away from Microsoft Office to Open Desk, a European open source alternative, the institution confirmed to Euractiv. The switch comes amid rising concerns about public bodies being reliant on US tech companies to run their services, which have stepped up sharply since the start of US President Donald Trump's second administration. For the ICC, such concerns are not abstract: Trump has repeatedly lashed out at the court and slapped sanctions on its chief prosecutor, Karim Khan. Earlier this year, the AP also reported that Microsoft had cancelled Khan's email account, a claim the company denies. "We value our relationship with the ICC as a customer and are convinced that nothing impedes our ability to continue providing services to the ICC in the future," a Microsoft spokesperson told Euractiv.

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TypeScript overtook Python and JavaScript in August 2025 to become the most used language on GitHub. The shift marked the most significant language change in more than a decade. The language grew by over 1 million contributors in 2025, a 66% increase year over year, and finished August with 2,636,006 monthly contributors. Nearly every major frontend framework now scaffolds projects in TypeScript by default. Next.js 15, Astro 3, SvelteKit 2, Qwik, SolidStart, Angular 18, and Remix all generate TypeScript codebases when developers create new projects. Type systems reduce ambiguity and catch errors from large language models before production. A 2025 academic study found 94% of LLM-generated compilation errors were type-check failures. Tooling like Vite, ts-node, Bun, and I.D.E. autoconfig hide boilerplate setup. Among new repositories created in the past twelve months, TypeScript accounted for 5,394,256 projects. That represented a 78% increase from the prior year.

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Carmakers in the EU are "days away" from closing production lines, the industry has warned, as a crisis over computer chip supplies from China escalates. From a report: The European Automobile Manufacturers' Association (ACEA) issued an urgent warning on Wednesday saying its members, which include BMW, Fiat, Peugeot and Volkswagen, were now working on "reserve stocks but supplies are dwindling." "Assembly line stoppages might only be days away. We urge all involved to redouble their efforts to find a diplomatic way out of this critical situation," said its director general, Sigrid de Vries. Another ACEA member, Mercedes, is now searching globally for alternative sources of the crucial semiconductors, according to its chief executive, Ola Kallenius. The chip shortage is also causing problems in Japan, where Nissan's chief performance officer, Guillaume Cartier, told reporters at a car show in Tokyo that the company was only "OK to the first week of November" in terms of supply.

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Gallup: After peaking at a record high of 39.9% in 2022, the U.S. adult obesity rate has gradually declined to 37.0% in 2025. This is a statistically meaningful decrease representing an estimated 7.6 million fewer obese adults compared with three years ago. Meanwhile, diagnoses of diabetes -- a lifetime disease that can be managed but not cured -- have now reached an all-time high of 13.8%. Both metrics are part of the ongoing Gallup National Health and Well-Being Index. [...] Over the past year, more Americans have turned to Type 2 antidiabetic GLP-1 drugs such as semaglutide (brand names Ozempic and Wegovy) for weight loss purposes. The percentage of adults who report taking this class of medicine specifically for weight loss has increased to 12.4%, compared with 5.8% in February 2024 when Gallup first measured it. Usage among women (15.2%) continues to outpace men (9.7%), but both groups have more than doubled their use in the past year. These results dovetail with increased awareness of the drugs used for weight loss, which has risen from 80% to 89% nationally in the same period.

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Britain is facing mounting pressure to ban mercury dental fillings, one of the few countries yet to prevent the practice, as new data reveals alarming contamination levels in the nation's fish and shellfish. The Guardian: Mercury is a potent neurotoxin that can harm the nervous, digestive and immune systems, as well as the lungs, kidneys, skin and eyes, even at low levels of exposure. Its organic form, methylmercury, is particularly dangerous to unborn babies and can move through the food chain building up in insects, fish and birds. Britain is lagging behind the rest of the world on phasing out mercury dental fillings, with 43 countries having already banned mercury amalgam, including the EU, Sweden, Norway, Tanzania, Uganda, Indonesia and the Philippines. Northern Ireland will outlaw mercury fillings from 2035 but no such ban is planned in the rest of Britain. According to new analysis by the Rivers Trust and Wildlife and Countryside Link, more than 98% of fish and mussels tested in English rivers and coastal waters contain mercury above safety limits proposed by the EU, with more than half containing more than five times the recommended safe level.

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New submitter hadleyburg writes: President Trump has directed the Department of War to restart nuclear weapons testing. The directive appears to be a counter measure to rival nations catching up with the US. The last US nuclear test was an underground test, on September 23, 1992, in Nevada.

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Google will offer 18-month free access to its Gemini AI service for all 505 million telecom users of India's Reliance Jio, a tie-up that follows similar freebies from rivals including OpenAI to boost adoption in the world's most populous nation. From a report: The move also comes weeks after Google committed to invest $15 billion in AI infrastructure capacity in India, its biggest investment yet in the critical South Asian market. [...] The Gemini offer will give Jio users free access to the advanced model of the AI app, two terabytes of cloud storage, and its image and video generation models, in an 18-month offering that is otherwise priced at 35,100 rupees ($399). The companies on Thursday also announced AI partnerships that targeted Indian businesses.

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More than a half dozen federal departments and agencies have backed a proposal to ban future sales of the most popular home routers in the United States on the grounds that the vendor's ties to mainland China make them a national security risk, Washington Post reported Thursday, citing people briefed on the matter. From the report: The proposal, which arose from a months-long risk assessment, calls for blocking sales of networking devices from TP-Link Systems of Irvine, California, which was spun off from a China-based company, TP-Link Technologies, but owns some of that company's former assets in China. The ban was proposed by the Commerce Department and supported this summer by an interagency process that includes the Departments of Homeland Security, Justice and Defense, the people said. "TP-Link vigorously disputes any allegation that its products present national security risks to the United States," Ricca Silverio, a spokeswoman for TP-Link Systems, said in a statement. "TP-Link is a U.S. company committed to supplying high-quality and secure products to the U.S. market and beyond." If imposed, the ban would be among the largest in consumer history and a possible sign that the East-West divide over tech independence is still deepening amid reports of accelerated Chinese government-supported hacking. Only the legislated ban of Chinese-owned TikTok, which President Donald Trump has averted with executive orders and a pending sale, would impact more U.S. consumers.

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An anonymous reader shares a report: The FCC adopted a notice of proposed rulemaking (NPRM) to rescind and revise certain rules attached to consumer broadband labels. The measure passed on a two-to-one vote, with Commissioner Anna Gomez, the lone Democrat on the FCC, voting no and calling the notice "one of the most anti-consumer items I have seen." The vote was held at the Commission's open meeting for the month of October. As per a draft notice circulated earlier this month, the FCC is looking to roll back several rules, including requirements that service providers read the label to consumers via phone, itemize state and local pass-through fees, and display labels in consumer account portals, among others. Advocates at Public Knowledge urged the Commission to reconsider, saying in a recent filing that "the Commission could create a permission structure for ISPs to continue to act without accountability." In her remarks during Tuesday's open meeting, Commissioner Gomez appeared to concur, depicting the move as "anti-consumer" and counter to the goals of Congress. The FCC was mandated via the 2021 Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act (IIJA) to create rules for implementing consumer broadband labels. After a lengthy rulemaking process and discussions with industry and consumer groups, ISPs were required to start displaying labels in 2024. "I typically vote in favor of notices of proposed rulemaking because I believe in asking balanced questions, even on proposals that I dislike, so that we can encourage fruitful and helpful public comment. Answers to tough questions help us strike the right balance so that our rules can both encourage competition and serve consumers. However, the questions posed in this NPRM are so anti-consumer that I could not bring myself to even agree to them," said Gomez. Gomez stressed that the notice will harm consumers by enabling ISPs to hide add-on fees and stripping people of their ability to access information in their own language. Moreover, added Gomez, it's unclear why the FCC is doing this. "What adds insult to injury is that the FCC does not even explain why this proposal is necessary. Make it make sense," she added.

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Microsoft shipped its first Xbox handheld nearly two weeks ago. The $600 white Xbox Ally cannot reliably sleep, wake, or hold a charge while asleep. Neither Microsoft nor Asus would admit there's a problem or offer a timeline to fix it after repeated requests by The Verge. Asus said it needs more time to test. Installing Bazzite, a Linux-based operating system, solves the problems, the publication reports. The same hardware runs games up to 30% faster than Windows and beats the Steam Deck in all but one benchmark. Steam runs more responsively without Windows bloat. The device can be used like a Nintendo Switch, pausing games with the power button and resuming hours or days later. Bazzite initially had sleep issues but fixed them two days after programmer Antheas Kapenekakis obtained the hardware and consulted with two AMD contacts. The black Xbox Ally X, which doesn't have as many sleep issues, gets a similar speed boost with Bazzite. Two Xbox Ally units tested on Windows repeatedly woke themselves at random intervals. One lost 10% battery after 12 hours of supposed sleep, the other 23%. After another 12 hours, both had only 30% battery remaining. One tried to apply a Windows Update while asleep. Both units refused to wake from sleep at times and required hard resets. Many users have reported similar issues on Reddit with both Xbox Ally versions. Further reading: Microsoft's Next Xbox Will Run Full Windows and Eliminate Multiplayer Paywall, Report Says.

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Nvidia chief executive Jensen Huang said that maintaining the US edge in AI will require a steady approach that ensures China remains hooked on American technology. From a report: The chipmaker is in an "awkward place" as President Donald Trump prepares to meet with his Chinese counterpart Xi Jinping later this week, Huang told reporters Tuesday at a company conference in Washington. The Nvidia chief praised Trump's commitment to winning but urged careful engagement with China because of the country's massive software developer base and its growing technology capabilities. During the meeting, Trump and Xi are expected to finalize an agreement to ease trade tensions between the world's two largest economies. When it comes to those negotiations, Huang said he has "no idea" if GPUs -- the chips central to artificial intelligence capabilities -- will be a topic between Trump and Xi. Huang was careful to leave the negotiating to Trump but encouraged US leadership to think longer term on its overall AI strategy. "A policy that causes America to lose half of the world's developers is not beneficial long-term," Huang said, warning that it was still possible for the US to cede the AI race to China. Keeping US technology in front requires finesse," he said. "It requires balance. It requires long-term thinking."

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An anonymous reader shares a report: The transition to the more-secure HTTPS web protocol has plateaued, according to Google. As of 2020, 95 to 99 percent of navigations in Chrome use HTTPS. To help make it safer for users to click on links, Chrome will enable a setting called Always Use Secure Connections for public sites for all users by default. This will happen in October 2026 with the release of Chrome 154. The change will happen earlier for those who have switched on Enhanced Safe Browsing protections in Chrome. Google will enable Always Use Secure Connections by default in April when Chrome 147 drops. When this setting is on, Chrome will ask for your permission before it first accesses a public website that doesn't use HTTPS.

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Blogger and technologist Anil Dash, writing about OpenAI's recently launched browser, Atlas: When I first got Atlas up and running, I tried giving it the easiest and most obvious tasks I could possibly give it. I looked up "Taylor Swift showgirl" to see if it would give me links to videos or playlists to watch or listen to the most popular music on the charts right now; this has to be just about the easiest possible prompt. The results that came back looked like a web page, but they weren't. Instead, what I got was something closer to a last-minute book report written by a kid who had mostly plagiarized Wikipedia. The response mentioned some basic biographical information and had a few photos. Now we know that AI tools are prone to this kind of confabulation, but this is new, because it felt like I was in a web browser, typing into a search box on the Internet. And here's what was most notable: there was no link to her website. I had typed "Taylor Swift" in a browser, and the response had literally zero links to Taylor Swift's actual website. If you stayed within what Atlas generated, you would have no way of knowing that Taylor Swift has a website at all. Unless you were an expert, you would almost certainly think I had typed in a search box and gotten back a web page with search results. But in reality, I had typed in a prompt box and gotten back a synthesized response that superficially resembles a web page, and it uses some web technologies to display its output. Instead of a list of links to websites that had information about the topic, it had bullet points describing things it thought I should know. There were a few footnotes buried within some of those response, but the clear intent was that I was meant to stay within the AI-generated results, trapped in that walled garden. During its first run, there's a brief warning buried amidst all the other messages that says, "ChatGPT may give you inaccurate information", but nobody is going to think that means "sometimes this tool completely fabricates content, gives me a box that looks like a search box, and shows me the fabricated content in a display that looks like a web page when I type in the fake search box." And it's not like the generated response is even that satisfying.

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YouTube says it will automatically upscale videos uploaded below 1080p (full-HD to higher resolution using AI. The Google-owned platform, however, assured that it will give creators and viewers the option to opt out of the enhancement. The feature will apply only to videos uploaded in resolutions from 240p to 720p and will not affect videos that creators have already remastered to 1080p. Creators will retain control over their original files, and viewers will be able to watch videos in their uploaded resolution through a settings option. YouTube said it plans to support upscaling to 4K in the near future. The company also said it is expanding the video thumbnail size limit from 2MB to 50MB to support 4K images. On videos with tagged products, viewers will soon be able to scan a QR code on TV screens to purchase items directly.

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The best way to innovate in gaming is to have good margins, that's according to Microsoft chief executive Satya Nadella. He made the comments during an interview days after Bloomberg reported that Microsoft has expected unrealistic profit margins from its gaming division, which the report suggested was a likely reason for studio closures, game cancelations and thousands of layoffs at Xbox. Nadella used the word "innovation" at least five times during the interview but never offered specifics about what he meant by it. He said Microsoft needs to "invent, maybe, some new interactive media" because gaming's competition is short-form video rather than other games. The CEO described Microsoft's new gaming strategy as being "everywhere, on every platform" after comparing the company's game publishing business to Microsoft Office. He said "the biggest gaming business is the Windows business" and added that he is looking forward to "the next console, the next PC gaming."

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Hedge fund Apollo has reached a deal to sell AOL to Italian tech holding group Bending Spoons in a deal valued at roughly $1.5 billion, Axios reported Wednesday From the report: AOL still drives hundreds of millions of dollars of free cash flow. Bending Spoons CEO Luca Ferrari said AOL has around 30 million monthly active users across its email and web content properties. That "incredibly loyal user base," as he called it, could be better served with greater investments in AOL's product and user experience, he noted. [...] Bending Spoons is a privately held Italian holding company that acquires assets with large user bases and invests in their turnaround with technology improvements. The company tends to sit on their investments long term after acquiring them. Some of the other companies Bending Spoons has acquired include Vimeo, Evernote, WeTransfer, Brightcove.

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