Spain's Second Section of the Intellectual Property Commission, part of the Ministry of Culture, has ordered internet providers to block access to Archive.today and several of its mirror domains. Users attempting to visit the site are redirected to a government notice labeling it an illegal website that facilitates unauthorized access to copyrighted content, and warning that continuing to try to access it constitutes participation in criminal activity.
Flock Safety, a surveillance camera and license-plate reader company, is offering employees voluntary buyout packages instead of conducting layoffs as it faces a decline in customers. The move suggests the company is trying to cut costs while avoiding the reputational and morale hit of forced job cuts.
A recent technical blog post surveys five software-based approaches for representing numbers beyond standard binary floating point, including decimal floating point (used in Python's decimal and Java's BigDecimal), fraction-based arithmetic, symbolic computation as in Mathematica or sympy, interval arithmetic, and binary-coded decimal. The author notes these methods are implemented purely in software, making them slower than native floating point, and that support varies widely across programming languages.
Apple has released iOS 27 to all users, highlighting more than 30 specific speed improvements across the operating system. These range from photo loading and app launches up to 30% faster, to AirDrop transfers up to 80% faster, plus quicker performance in Safari, Mail, Music, Health, and HomeKit.
Data center technicians spend their shifts walking miles of server rows, sniffing for burning smells, and checking equipment for damage—including from birds—as they keep facilities powering the AI build-out running smoothly. The work combines physical inspection routines with constant vigilance for small warning signs that could signal bigger equipment failures.
Testing from Polling Rate Test shows Microsoft's Xbox controllers report input at roughly the same 125Hz rate whether connected via USB cable or the proprietary Xbox Wireless Adapter, translating to about eight milliseconds of potential delay in either case. Bluetooth connections, by contrast, add an extra four to eight milliseconds of lag, varying with interference from nearby wireless devices.
Robot vacuums lack arms and can't move objects out of their path, leaving them stuck on cables, socks, or lightweight rugs. While pricier models use infrared, LiDAR, or AI cameras to navigate around obstacles more intelligently than basic bump-sensor units, most still can't physically clear a room the way a human cleaner can.
President Trump announced plans for a new federal body he calls an 'AI Force' to oversee artificial intelligence development, responding to mounting public unease about the technology's rapid growth. The move follows warnings from industry figures about AI's risks and comes as polling shows increasing voter wariness toward unchecked AI expansion.
An analysis of 32,455 words examined whether choosing 'a' or 'an' can be reliably determined just by checking a word's first letter versus its actual pronunciation. The author built visualizations and a trie-based tool to identify exceptions, finding that only 129 words—like 'unicorn' and 'hour'—require checking pronunciation rather than spelling.
Marvel has finally worked Miracleman, a character it acquired publishing rights to years ago but rarely used, into its main comics continuity. The character appears as part of the 'Avengers: Armageddon' crossover event, though not in the manner most longtime fans anticipated.
OONI Probe is a tool that, once run, automatically submits its test results in near real-time to a public database. This allows anyone running it to contribute to a growing, open record of internet censorship observed across different networks and regions.
OONI distributes a free tool called OONI Probe that individuals can run to test whether websites and services are being blocked or throttled on their network. Results are automatically published in near real-time, feeding into what OONI describes as the world's largest open dataset on internet censorship.