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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An anonymous reader shares a report: A group of states is seeking to extend a World Trade Organization agreement to refrain from placing customs duties on digital transmissions, a World Trade Organization document showed on Thursday. The proposal submitted by Barbados on behalf of a group of African, Caribbean and Pacific states proposed to extend the current moratorium -- a key pillar of internet development for decades -- beyond March 2026, when it was set to expire.

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An anonymous reader shares a report: Nintendo has always been a company willing to try just about anything. Cardboard cutout toys that mesh with games? Done. A console called the Wii with a remote-shaped controller? Massive success. Legendary game designer and Nintendo executive Shigeru Miyamoto offered more insight into how the company operates in a recent financial briefing. "Nintendo has always worked with the idea that there are no limits to our efforts," he said. "For example, when we tried our hand at movies with The Super Mario Bros. Movie, its success was compared to the box office revenues of other movies. However, even if the movie topped the rankings, we would think there was more room for growth." Nintendo has been expanding its efforts in Hollywood after The Super Mario Bros. Movie became one of the best-selling films of 2023. The Legend of Zelda movie is now in production, and the Super Mario Galaxy movie is expected sometime in 2026. Miyamoto believes that some Nintendo IPs could see sales numbers "potentially reach beyond the boundaries of entertainment." "My latest theme is that there is no ceiling in the world of entertainment," he said. "In that sense, there are still many markets around the world that can be expanded through Nintendo Switch [...] One thing that is interesting about Nintendo is that it's okay to try anything."

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NextGov: The IRS has notified states that offered the free, government tax filing service known as Direct File in 2025 that the program won't be available next filing season. In an email sent from the IRS to 25 states, the tax agency thanked them for collaborating and noted that "no launch date has been set for the future." "IRS Direct File will not be available in Filing Season 2026," says the Monday email, obtained by Nextgov/FCW and confirmed by multiple sources. It follows reports that the program was ending and Trump's former tax chief, Billy Long, remarking over the summer that the service was "gone." The program, which debuted in 2024, was a big shift from the decades-long IRS policy of not competing with the tax prep industry in offering its own free, online tax filing service for Americans. Many Republicans had opposed Direct File, and tax prep companies also lobbied against it.

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Web-based video games are experiencing an unexpected revival as the broader $189 billion industry stagnates. Sales for browser-based titles like GeoGuessr and chess were expected to triple from 2021 to 2028, reaching $3.09 billion, according to Google and Kantar. Playgama hosted more than 15,000 new web games in the first half of 2025, exceeding the combined total from 2021 through 2023. Websites provide fast and easy access without console boot-ups or app downloads. Game creators sidestep the 30% revenue cuts imposed by Steam and Apple. Poki has doubled its employee count to 70 since 2020 and now serves 100 million monthly active users. A top-ten developer on the platform earns about $1 million in yearly revenue, up from $50,000 in 2020. Consoles cost more than $450, and smartphone gamers are downloading fewer apps. Electronic Arts founder Trip Hawkins predicted web games will be "one of the next waves."

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An anonymous reader shares a report: On the new MacOS 26 (Tahoe), Apple has mandated that all application icons fit into their prescribed squircle. No longer can icons have distinct shapes, nor even any fun frame-breaking accessories. Should an icon be so foolish as to try to have a bit of personality, it will find itself stuffed into a dingy gray icon jail. [...] While Apple had previously urged developers to use squircle icons on our apps, they've now taken things much further to ensure compliance. It's a shame. Apple updated their own app icons on Tahoe, for both the squircle shape as well as the new "Liquid Glass" interface. Mostly, these icons seem dumbed-down, with a loss of detail.

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Last year Brazil saw its biggest drop in emissions since 2009, new data show. The decline comes in the wake of a crackdown on deforestation. From a report: Since returning to power in 2022, President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva has moved to stem illicit clearing of forest by miners, loggers, and farmers, stepping up enforcement that had been weakened under his predecessor, far-right president Jair Bolsonaro. Deforestation of the Brazilian Amazon is now at its lowest level in more than a decade. In Brazil, forests are largely destroyed to create new cropland and pasture, and together, the loss of forest and raising of cattle are its biggest sources of emissions. Lula's crackdown on illegal deforesters has put those emissions in check. According to the Climate Observatory, a green group, Brazilian emissions fell by 16.7 percent last year. "The new data shows the impact of the federal government retaking control over deforestation after a deliberate lack of control between 2019 and 2022," when Bolsonaro held office, the group said in a statement. Lula aims to end illegal deforestation entirely by the end of this decade, but as he makes progress on this goal, Brazil is still facing worsening droughts and fires fueled by warming. Last year, fires accounted for two-thirds of the primary tropical forest lost in Brazil, according to the World Resources Institute. Often small fires used to clear land get out of control, burning through larger, drought-ridden areas.

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U.S. corporate profits have risen to record levels this year as companies eliminated nearly 1 million jobs. Chen Zhao of Alpine Macro calls the disconnect a "jobless boom." Companies typically cut workers when profits decline. Amazon laid off 30,000 employees despite strong earnings. Zhao attributes the pattern to AI adoption boosting productivity across industries while reducing demand for workers. Labor demand has fallen to zero growth or mild contraction. The Federal Reserve lowered interest rates in September and October after Jerome Powell noted concerns about layoff announcements from large employers. The Department of Labor suspended monthly employment reports when the government shutdown began October 1. ADP reported private employers added 42,000 workers in October. The unemployment rate stood at 4.3% in August. The rate has remained stable because the labor pool is contracting due to baby boomer retirements and reduced immigration under Trump administration policies. Art Papas of Bullhorn disputes the AI explanation and argues companies are recalibrating after pandemic overhiring.

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An anonymous reader shares a report: Amazon on Friday expanded the reach of its low-cost ecommerce service to 14 additional markets and will call it Amazon Bazaar, as part of a push to compete with Chinese rivals including Shein and PDD Holding's Temu. The expansion of the service comes at a time when U.S. President Donald Trump's sweeping import tariffs are denting consumer sentiment, especially of lower-income groups, who are on a constant hunt for cheaper deals.

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