An anonymous reader quotes a report from Gizmodo: It appears that Neom -- Saudi Arabia's hugely expensive, architecturally bizarre urban development project -- is floundering and close to collapse. A new report from the Financial Times cites high-level sources within the project to paint a picture of dysfunction and failure at the heart of the quixotic effort. Neom was envisioned as a vast series of fantastical urban developments spread across the coast of the Red Sea. At the center of the project is The Line -- a proposed 105-mile-long city which developers had initially projected could house as many as 9 million people by the year 2030. The Line is defined by bizarre architectural flourishes that, as the story notes, have seemed impossible even to the execs tasked with making them a reality. One such addition is an upside-down building, dubbed "the chandelier," that is supposed to hang over a "gateway" marina to the city: "As architects worked through the plans, the chandelier began to seem implausible. One recalled warning Tarek Qaddumi, The Line's executive director, of the difficulty of suspending a 30-story building upside down from a bridge hundreds of metres in the air. 'You do realize the earth is spinning? And that tall towers sway?' he said. The chandelier, the architect explained, could 'start to move like a pendulum,' then 'pick up speed,' and eventually 'break off,' crashing into the marina below." Yes, that doesn't sound great. Now, according to those sources the FT talked to, the project is looking more and more like a hugely expensive pipe dream that will never come to pass: "Today, with at least $50 billion spent, the desert is pock-marked with piling, and deep trenches stretch across the landscape. But Prince Mohammed, who chairs Neom, has dramatically scaled back the first phase of the plans. Neom told the FT that The Line remained 'a strategic priority' that would ultimately 'provide a new blueprint for humanity by changing the way people live.' But they described it as a 'multi-generational development of unprecedented scale and complexity.'" The outlet interviewed workers on the project who seem to feel that it's only a matter of time before the project is declared DOA: "While Neom employees say that much of The Line might still be technically buildable, they are not convinced anyone is ready to pay for it. Construction work across Neom has slowed, with the desert ski resort Trojena, the intended venue for the 2029 Asian Winter Games, one of the few sites still moving ahead at pace ... one former employee has said that everyone knows the project won't work; it is now just a matter of letting MBS down gently." Chief among the project's problems is the fact that, as Neom's bizarre developments have failed to materialize, it has become increasingly difficult to encourage investors to put up money for the absurdly expensive project. FT notes: "Senior executives were constantly asking for more money, but The Line was competing with other Neom projects. Some wealthy Saudi families put modest sums into the project, but the large investments Riyadh hoped to lure from foreign backers never materialized." The lack of adequate funding coming in has led a senior construction manager to tell FT that he feels the Line will never be built.

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Slashdot reader alternative_right shares an exclusive BBC interview with Vyacheslav "Tank" Penchukov, once a top-tier cyber-crime boss behind Jabber Zeus, IcedID, and major ransomware campaigns. His story traces the evolution of modern cybercrime from early bank-theft malware to today's lucrative ransomware ecosystem, marked by shifting alliances, Russian security-service ties, and the paranoia that ultimately consumes career hackers. Here's an excerpt from the report: In the late 2000s, he and the infamous Jabber Zeus crew used revolutionary cyber-crime tech to steal directly from the bank accounts of small businesses, local authorities and even charities. Victims saw their savings wiped out and balance sheets upended. In the UK alone, there were more than 600 victims, who lost more than $5.2 million in just three months. Between 2018 and 2022, Penchukov set his sights higher, joining the thriving ransomware ecosystem with gangs that targeted international corporations and even a hospital. [...] Penchukov says he did not think about the victims, and he does not seem to do so much now, either. The only sign of remorse in our conversation was when he talked about a ransomware attack on a disabled children's charity. His only real regret seems to be that he became too trusting with his fellow hackers, which ultimately led to him and many other criminals being caught. "You can't make friends in cyber-crime, because the next day, your friends will be arrested and they will become an informant," he says. "Paranoia is a constant friend of hackers," he says. But success leads to mistakes. "If you do cyber-crime long enough you lose your edge," he says, wistfully.

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The European Commission is considering turning its non-binding 2020 guidance on "high-risk vendors" into a legal requirement that would effectively force EU member states to phase out Huawei and ZTE from mobile and fixed-line networks. Bloomberg reports: Commission Vice President Henna Virkkunen wants to convert the European Commission's 2020 recommendation to stop using high-risk vendors in mobile networks into a legal requirement, according to the people, who asked not to be identified because the negotiations are private. While infrastructure decisions rest with national governments, Virkkunen's proposal would compel EU countries to align with the commission's security guidance. The EU is increasingly focused on the risks posed by Chinese telecom equipment makers as trade and political ties with its second-largest trading partner fray. The concern is that handing over control of critical national infrastructure to companies with such close ties to Beijing could compromise national security interests. Virkkunen is examining ways to limit the use of Chinese equipment suppliers in fixed-line networks, as countries push for the rapid deployment of state-of-the-art fiber cables to expand high-speed internet access. The commission is also considering measures to dissuade non-EU countries from relying on Chinese vendors, including by withholding Global Gateway funding from nations that use the grants for projects involving Huawei equipment, according to the people.

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Linux kernel developers are moving toward enabling Microsoft C Extensions (-fms-extensions) by default in Linux 6.19, with Linus Torvalds signaling no objection. While some dislike relying on Microsoft-style behavior, the patches in kbuild-next suggest the project is ready to "bite the bullet" and adopt the extensions system-wide. Phoronix reports: Rasmus Villemoes argued with Kbuild: enable -fms-extensions that would allow for "prettier code" and others have noted in the past the potential for saving stack space and all around being beneficial in being able to leverage the Microsoft C behavior: "Once in a while, it turns out that enabling -fms-extensions could allow some slightly prettier code. But every time it has come up, the code that had to be used instead has been deemed 'not too awful' and not worth introducing another compiler flag for. That's probably true for each individual case, but then it's somewhat of a chicken/egg situation. If we just 'bite the bullet' as Linus says and enable it once and for all, it is available whenever a use case turns up, and no individual case has to justify it..." The second patch is kbuild: Add '-fms-extensions' to areas with dedicated CFLAGS to ensure -fms-extensions is passed for the CPU architectures that rely on their own CFLAGS being set rather than the main KBUILD_CFLAGS. Linus Torvalds chimed in on the prior mailing list discussion and doesn't appear to be against enabling -fms-extensions beginning with the Linux 6.19 kernel.

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An anonymous reader quotes a report from Reuters: Privacy activists say proposed changes to Europe's landmark privacy law, including making it easier for Big Tech to harvest Europeans' personal data for AI training, would flout EU case law and gut the legislation. The changes proposed by the European Commission are part of a drive to simplify a slew of laws adopted in recent years on technology, environmental and financial issues which have in turn faced pushback from companies and the U.S. government. EU antitrust chief Henna Virkkunen will present the Digital Omnibus, in effect proposals to cut red tape and overlapping legislation such as the General Data Protection Regulation, the Artificial Intelligence Act, the e-Privacy Directive and the Data Act, on November 19. According to the plans, Google, Meta Platforms, OpenAI and other tech companies may be allowed to use Europeans' personal data to train their AI models based on legitimate interest. In addition, companies may be exempted from the ban on processing special categories of personal data "in order not to disproportionately hinder the development and operation of AI and taking into account the capabilities of the controller to identify and remove special categories of personal data." [...] The proposals would need to be thrashed out with EU countries and European Parliament in the coming months before they can be implemented. "The draft Digital Omnibus proposes countless changes to many different articles of the GDPR. In combination this amounts to a death by a thousand cuts," Austrian privacy group noyb said in a statement. "This would be a massive downgrading of Europeans' privacy 10 years after the GDPR was adopted," noyb's Max Schrems said. "These proposals would change how the EU protects what happens inside your phone, computer and connected devices," European Digital Rights policy advisor Itxaso Dominguez de Olazabal wrote in a LinkedIn post. "That means access to your device could rely on legitimate interest or broad exemptions like security, fraud detection or audience measurement," she said.

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The PDF Association is adding JPEG XL (JXL) support to the PDF specification, giving the advanced image format a new path to relevance despite Google's decision to declare it obsolete and remove it from Chromium. The Register reports: Peter Wyatt, CTO of the PDF Association, said: "We need to adopt a new image [format] that can support HDR [High Dynamic Range] content ... we have picked JPEG XL as our preferred solution." Wyatt also praised other benefits of JXL including wide gamut images, ultra-high resolution support for images with more than 1 billion pixels, and up to 4099 channels with up to 32 bits per channel. The association is responsible for developing PDF specifications and standards and manages the ISO committee for PDF. JPEG XL is an advanced image format that was designed to be both more efficient and richer in features than JPEG. It was based on a combination of the Free Lossless Image Format (FLIF) from Cloudinary and a Google project called PIK, first released in late 2020, and fully standardized in October 2021 as ISO/IEC 18181. There is a reference implementation called libjxl. A second edition of the ISO standard was published in 2024. JXL appeared to have wide industry support, including experimental implementation in Chrome and Chromium, until it was killed by Google in October 2022 and removed from its web browser engine. The company stated that "there is not enough interest from the entire ecosystem to continue experimenting with JPEG XL." Many in the community disagreed with the decision, including FLIF inventor Jon Sneyers, who perceived it as the outcome of an internal battle between proponents of JXL and a rival format, AVIF. "AVIF proponents within Chrome are essentially being prosecutor, judge and executioner at the same time," he said.

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Meta is retiring Facebook's external Like and Share buttons for third-party websites on February 10, 2026, officially closing the book on a once-dominant traffic driver as usage declines and Facebook's role within Meta continues to shrink.Engadget reports: The blog post from Meta explains that site admins shouldn't have to take any additional steps as a result of the change, although they can choose to remove the plugins before the discontinue date. Any remaining plugins will "gracefully degrade," which sounds much more dramatic than what will actually happen, which is that they'll render as a 0x0 invisible element.

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An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: For years now, Valve has been slowly improving the capabilities of the Proton compatibility layer that lets thousands of Windows games work seamlessly on the Linux-based SteamOS. But Valve's Windows-to-Linux compatibility layer generally only extends back to games written for Direct3D 8, the proprietary Windows graphics API Microsoft released in late 2000. Now, a new open source project is seeking to extend Linux interoperability further back into PC gaming history. The d7vk project describes itself as "a Vulkan-based translation layer for Direct3D 7 [D3D7], which allows running 3D applications on Linux using Wine." The new project isn't the first attempt to get Direct3D 7 games running on Linux. Wine's own built-in WineD3D compatibility layer has supported D3D7 in some form or another for at least two decades now. But the new d7vk project instead branches off the existing dxvk compatibility layer, which is already used by Valve's Proton for SteamOS and which reportedly offers better performance than WineD3D on many games. D7vk project author WinterSnowfall writes that while they don't expect this new project to be upstreamed into the main dxvk in the future, the new version should have "the same level of per application/targeted configuration profiles and fixes that you're used to seeing in dxvk proper." And though d7vk might not perform universally better than the existing alternatives, WinterSnowfall writes that "having more options on the table is a good thing in my book at least." The report notes that the PC Gaming Wiki lists more than 400 games built on the aging D3D7 APIs, spanning mostly early-2000s releases but with a trickle of new titles still appearing through 2022. Notable classics include Escape from Monkey Island and Hitman: Codename 47.

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Wikipedia on Monday laid out a simple plan to ensure its website continues to be supported in the AI era, despite its declining traffic. From a report: In a blog post, the Wikimedia Foundation, the organization that runs the popular online encyclopedia, called on AI developers to use its content "responsibly" by ensuring its contributions are properly attributed and that content is accessed through its paid product, the Wikimedia Enterprise platform. The opt-in, paid product allows companies to use Wikipedia's content at scale without "severely taxing Wikipedia's servers," the Wikimedia Foundation blog post explains. In addition, the product's paid nature allows AI companies to support the organization's nonprofit mission. While the post doesn't go so far as to threaten penalties or any sort of legal action for use of its material through scraping, Wikipedia recently noted that AI bots had been scraping its website while trying to appear human.

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New submitter benramsey writes: The PHP Foundation has launched a search for its next executive director. The Executive Director serves as the operational leader of the PHP Foundation, defining its strategic vision and translating it into reality while managing day-to-day operations and serving as the primary bridge between the Board, staff, community, and sponsors. While the programming language PHP is over 30 years old, the PHP Foundation was only created in 2021. The Executive Director will be responsible for maturing the foundation's internal structure and will play a crucial role in ensuring the foundation can effectively support this vital ecosystem. Interested parties are encouraged to submit a cover letter describing their interest and relevant experience, resume or CV, and a brief vision statement detailing the applicant's understanding of the position, key opportunities and challenges they see for the foundation, and their approach to the role.

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Air passengers departing Singapore will pay a green fuel levy of as much as S$41.60 ($31.95) from next year as the city-state locks in a key step in its effort to cut the aviation industry's emissions. From a report: Travelers flying in economy and premium economy, as well as those on short-haul routes, will be charged far less. Those customers will pay an additional S$1 for trips to Southeast Asia, and S$10.40 for flights to the Americas, the Civil Aviation Authority of Singapore said Monday. Business and first class travelers will pay four times more, it said. [...] The funds collected from passengers will go to the centralized purchase of sustainable aviation fuel -- typically made from waste oils or agricultural feedstock -- as Singapore looks to achieve a SAF adoption rate of 3% to 5% by 2030.

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An anonymous reader shares a report: Apple is delaying the release of next year's version of the iPhone Air, its thinnest smartphone, after the first model sold below expectations, according to three people involved in the project. Although the length of the delay remains uncertain, the product won't be released in fall 2026 as previously planned, they said. Apple has already sharply scaled back production of the first version, according to multiple people with direct knowledge of the matter.

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Human-resources departments in American companies employed 1.3 million professionals in 2024, a 64% increase over ten years. Overall employment grew 14% in the same period. Professional-services and technology firms saw the number of HR workers double since 2014. Similar patterns have emerged in Australia, Britain and Germany. Chief human-resources officers also gained ground financially. Their total compensation, which stood at 40% of the average director's salary in 1992, reached 70% by 2022, according to a Stanford University study. Mary Barra, who runs General Motors, previously held the carmaker's top HR position. The expansion has followed several workplace disruptions, including the Me Too movement, the pandemic's shift to remote work, and the rise of diversity initiatives, Economist reports. Companies also faced more state regulations on employee relations and a jump in workplace complaints. The average number of discrimination or harassment allegations rose from six per 1000 employees in 2021 to 15 last year.

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After more than a decade of planning, the launch of the African Medicines Agency (AMA) is being celebrated in Mombasa, Kenya, this week at the Seventh Biennial Scientific Conference on Medical Products Regulation in Africa. From a report: The agency's establishment marks a pivotal moment in Africa's public health, at a time when the need for biomedical research conducted in Africa, focused on African health problems, has never been greater. Africa holds higher levels of human genetic diversity than anywhere else on Earth, but this diversity has not been adequately studied. And many globally approved treatments and vaccines for diseases such as HIV/AIDS, malaria and tuberculosis are less effective, and can even be harmful in some people of African ancestry. This year, cuts of billions of US dollars in international funding for biomedical research and health services in Africa have left millions of people without access to life-saving treatments or, in the case of researchers and health-care workers, unemployed. This demonstrates the immense vulnerability that comes with relying on funding from external donors. What's more, Africa's phenomenal population growth and pace of urbanization is bringing fresh challenges -- as well as opportunities -- around health and disease. In Africa's cities today, the inhabitants of increasingly affluent neighbourhoods are demanding high-quality medicines and health care. But in low-income areas, high population density, inadequate housing and poor sanitation are facilitating the spread of respiratory and diarrhoeal infections. And everywhere, inadequate diets, air pollution, smoking and physical inactivity are driving increased rates of cardiovascular disease, diabetes and cancer. By 2100, Africa is expected to host 13 of the world's 20 largest cities, and such inequalities are likely to worsen.

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An anonymous reader shares a report: Spotify is the most popular music streaming service in the world. While its algorithmic recommendations aren't necessarily the reason, its reach has meant that hundreds of millions of people are being fed a steady diet of music curated by a machine. Spotify's goal is to keep you listening no matter what. In her book Mood Machine, journalist Liz Pelly recounts a story told to her by a former Spotify employee in which Daniel Ek said, "our only competitor is silence." According to this employee, Spotify leadership didn't see themselves as a music company, but as a time filler. The employee explained that, "the vast majority of music listeners, they're not really interested in listening to music per se. They just need a soundtrack to a moment in their day." Simply providing a soundtrack to your day might seem innocent enough, but it informs how Spotify's algorithm works. Its goal isn't to help you discover new music, its goal is simply to keep you listening for as long as possible. It serves up the safest songs possible to keep you from pressing stop. The company even went so far as to partner with music library services and production companies under a program called Perfect Fit Content, or PFC. This saw the creation of fake or "ghost" artists that flooded Spotify with songs that were specifically designed to be pleasant and ignorable. It's music as content, not art. [...] Artists, especially new ones trying to break through, actually started changing how they composed to play better in the algorithmically driven streaming era. Songs got shorter, albums got longer, and intros went away. The hook got pushed to the front of the song to try to grab listeners' attention immediately, and things like guitar solos all but disappeared from pop music. The palette of sounds artists pulled from got smaller, arrangements became more simplified, pop music flattened.

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Two of the world's biggest data center developers have projects in Nvidia's hometown that may sit empty for years because the local utility isn't ready to supply electricity. From a report: In Santa Clara, California, where the world's biggest supplier of artificial-intelligence chips is based, Digital Realty Trust applied in 2019 to build a data center. Roughly six years later, the development remains an empty shell awaiting full energization. Stack Infrastructure, which was acquired earlier this year by Blue Owl Capital, has a nearby 48-megawatt project that's also vacant, while the city-owned utility, Silicon Valley Power, struggles to upgrade its capacity. The fate of the two facilities highlights a major challenge for the US tech sector and indeed the wider economy. While demand for data centers has never been greater, driven by the boom in cloud computing and AI, access to electricity is emerging as the biggest constraint. That's largely because of aging power infrastructure, a slow build-out of new transmission lines and a variety of regulatory and permitting hurdles. And the pressure on power systems is only going to increase. Electricity requirements from AI computing will likely more than double in the US alone by 2035, based on BloombergNEF projections. Nvidia's Jensen Huang and OpenAI's Sam Altman are among corporate leaders that have predicted trillions of dollars will pour into building new AI infrastructure.

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Tim Berners-Lee thinks AI will help the web, not destroy it. The inventor of the World Wide Web has spent years warning about platform concentration and social media's corrosive effects, but he views AI differently. AI has accomplished what his Semantic Web project could not. The technology extracts structured data from websites regardless of how the information was formatted. Berners-Lee spent decades trying to convince database owners to make their systems machine-readable voluntarily. AI companies simply took the data anyway. They achieved the machine-readable internet through extraction rather than cooperation, but the result is the same. Berners-Lee also weighed in on the growing browser competition in the market. OpenAI released Atlas a few weeks ago. Perplexity has launched Comet. Google has expanded AI features in Chrome. All these browsers run on Chromium, which Berners-Lee acknowledges is not ideal, but conceded that browser engines are expensive to build. He thinks Apple's decision to restrict iPhones to WebKit prevents web apps from competing with native apps.

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Investment in subsea cable projects is expected to reach around $13 billion between 2025 and 2027, almost twice the amount invested between 2022 and 2024, according to telecommunications data provider TeleGeography. Tech giants Meta, Google, Amazon and Microsoft now represent about 50% of the overall market, up from a negligible share a decade ago. The companies are expanding their subsea infrastructure to connect growing networks of data centers needed for AI development. Meta announced Project Waterworth in February, a 50,000-kilometer cable connecting five continents that will be the world's longest subsea cable project. Amazon announced its first wholly-owned subsea cable called Fastnet, connecting Maryland to Ireland. Google has invested in over 30 subsea cables. Over 95% of international data and voice call traffic travels through nearly a million miles of underwater cables.

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An anonymous reader shares a report: Microsoft, eager to boost downloads of its Copilot chatbot, has recruited some of the most popular influencers in America to push a message to young consumers that might be summed up as: Our AI assistant is as cool as ChatGPT. Microsoft could use the help. The company recently said its family of Copilot assistants attracts 150 million active users each month. But OpenAI's ChatGPT claims 800 million weekly active users, and Google's Gemini boasts 650 million a month. Microsoft has an edge with corporate customers, thanks to a long history of selling them software and cloud services. But it has struggled to crack the consumer market -- especially people under 30. "We're a challenger brand in this area, and we're kind of up and coming," Consumer Chief Marketing Officer Yusuf Mehdi said in an interview. Mehdi hopes to persuade key influencers to make Copilot their chatbot of choice and then use their popularity to market the assistant to their millions of followers. He says Microsoft is already getting more bang for the buck with influencers than with traditional media, but didn't provide any metrics. [...] Using non-techies as spokespeople is meant to reinforce Microsoft's campaign to sell its chatbot as a life coach for everyone. Or as Consumer AI chief Mustafa Suleyman wrote in a recent essay, an AI companion that "helps you think, plan and dream."

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Visa and Mastercard are nearing a settlement with merchants that aims to end a 20-year-old legal dispute by lowering fees stores pay and giving them more power to reject certain credit cards, WSJ reports, citing people familiar with the matter. From the report: Under terms being discussed, Visa and Mastercard would lower credit-card interchange fees, which are often between 2% and 2.5%, by an average of around 0.1 percentage point over several years, the people said. They would also loosen rules that require merchants that accept one of a network's credit cards to accept all of them. A deal could be announced soon, the people said, and would require court approval to take effect. If an agreement is finalized, consumers could see big changes at the register. Merchants that accept one kind of Visa credit card wouldn't have to accept all Visa credit cards, for example. Under the current talks, credit-card acceptance would be divided into several categories including rewards credit cards, credit cards with no rewards programs, and commercial cards, the people familiar with the matter said. Some stores might turn away rewards cards, which charge them higher fees and in recent years have become very popular with consumers. But stores that reject those cards would face the risk of declining sales.

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