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Tech News
US electricity demand climbed about 1.7% annually from 2020 to 2025, more than ten times the growth rate utilities saw in the prior fifteen years, driven by data centers, EV charging stations and reshored manufacturing. Much of the transmission network carrying that load dates to the 1950s-1980s, causing sagging lines, overheating transformers and voltage drops as usage climbs.
RhinoShield and Sent Into Space sent an iPhone 17 Pro fitted with RhinoShield's AirX case up on a high-altitude balloon from Kiruna, Sweden, then released it from over 30,600 meters. After a 25-minute fall through temperatures as low as minus 60 degrees Celsius, the phone landed intact in remote terrain and was later recovered, powered on, and used to make calls and take photos. Guinness World Records confirmed the feat as the highest drop of a phone in a case onto natural landforms.
A new Use.AI survey of over 15,000 respondents found that 53% now verify explanations from doctors, teachers, and other professionals using AI before accepting them, while 46% say professional credentials carry less weight than before. Use.AI calls this shift an 'expertise recession,' describing a decline in automatic trust toward trained professionals as AI tools let people independently investigate claims.
Microsoft has released the KB5120998 preview cumulative update for Windows 11 24H2 and 25H2, bundling 35 changes centered on taskbar positioning, a compact taskbar mode, and new Start menu size and layout options. The optional update also begins rolling out Administrator Protection, a feature using just-in-time privileges to limit elevation-of-privilege attacks, though it remains off by default and needs Intune or Group Policy to enable.
US District Judge Rita Lin ruled that the Defense Department's labeling of Anthropic as a supply chain risk was illegal and unconstitutional, blocking certain federal agencies from enforcing Trump's directive to stop using the company's Claude AI tools. The conflict began after Anthropic refused Pentagon pressure to remove safeguards preventing Claude from being used for mass surveillance or autonomous weapons, leading Trump to order a government-wide phase-out of Anthropic products. Anthropic had sued in two federal courts over separate bans, and this ruling resolves one of those cases in its favor.
Hugging Face, the widely used repository for open-source AI models and developer tools, is reportedly the target of a potential investment or acquisition move by Nvidia. The platform is a central hub where developers share, download and test AI models, giving it outsized influence over the open model ecosystem despite limited public name recognition.
Reports indicate that widespread adoption of ChatGPT is subtly changing how people write, with certain AI-favored words and phrasing patterns appearing more frequently in everyday communication. The trend suggests that heavy exposure to AI-generated text is influencing human writing habits beyond just those who use the tool directly.
OpenAI has begun showing advertisements to users on its free tier and the 399-rupee ($4) Go plan in India, one of its biggest markets by user activity. The feature, already active in 38 countries including the US, Japan, South Korea and much of Europe, excludes users who are or are predicted to be under 18.
At the FOSSY conference held this year at the University of British Columbia, developer Timothy Sample presented on bootstrappable builds, a lesser-known cousin of reproducible builds. He explained the concept as a chain of increasingly capable compilers that starts from a tiny, fully auditable seed program and eventually builds an entire modern Linux user space. Sample traced his own decade-long involvement in the effort back to his early use of GNU Guix, a functional package manager similar to Nix.
A San Francisco federal judge ruled that the Department of Defense acted unconstitutionally when it labeled Anthropic a supply chain risk in March, a designation that barred defense contractors from using its Claude AI models. Judge Rita Lin found the move stemmed from the Pentagon's frustration with Anthropic's public criticism rather than any legitimate security concern, violating the company's First Amendment rights. The dispute arose after talks collapsed over how the military could deploy Claude, with Anthropic refusing to allow its technology to be used for autonomous weapons or domestic surveillance.
A developer released IndexFlow, an open-source infrastructure project built in Rust that provides libraries for parsing XML sitemaps and analyzing technical SEO issues like canonical tags, robots directives, and metadata. The project is structured as modular components, including indexflow-sitemap and indexflow-seo, meant to serve as building blocks for a future commercial platform.
A federal judge determined that the Trump administration's designation of AI company Anthropic as a supply-chain risk was unlawful retaliation against the company. The ruling found the government's action violated Anthropic's First Amendment rights.