California's Assembly passed Bill 1856, amending the Digital Age Assurance Act to exclude operating systems and software meant to be freely copied, redistributed or modified from mandatory age-verification requirements. This shields most Linux distributions, though derivative projects with proprietary layers like Valve's SteamOS may still need to comply. The bill also fixes the DAAA's overly broad definition of 'user' and restricts sharing of age data to law enforcement requests.
President Trump shared two AI-generated clips on Truth Social depicting explosions on Kharg Island, Iran's key oil export hub, without disclosing that the footage was fabricated. A US official later confirmed no such attack had occurred, even as real US strikes hit Iran's Larak Island the same night, prompting an Iranian missile response against American bases in Jordan. Vice President JD Vance defended the posts, saying Trump was 'sending a message' to Iran.
Weibo leaker Fixed Focus Digital claims iPhone 18 Pro will launch in three colors: Dark Cherry/Burgundy, Sky Blue, and Black, with Silver unlikely to appear. This would mean Apple drops every iPhone 17 Pro color for an entirely new lineup ahead of next week's Apple event.
President Trump signed an executive order renaming Lake Ontario as 'Lake America,' prompting the Seneca Nation's president to argue the move breaches a treaty dating back 232 years. The dispute has spilled onto social media, where users are also criticizing mapping services like Google Maps for potentially adopting the new name.
Archaeologists led by Petr Krištuf of the University of West Bohemia have studied a circular earthwork near Chleby in the Czech Republic, roughly 230 meters wide with a deep ditch and twelve entrances. Analysis of the entrance positions shows they align with key solar and lunar events, including the summer and winter solstices and the moon's 18-year cycle, mirroring the astronomical design later seen at Stonehenge but built over a thousand years earlier. Bull skulls and horns found near the ditch entrances point to ritual activity at the site.
Cloudflare built a prototype called Cache Transcoding, developed during an intern project, that compresses eligible cached assets with Zstandard before writing them to disk inside its Pingora proxy. Assets stay compressed while stored and while moving between data centers via Tiered Cache, then get decoded only when served to the client. Early tests show this shrinks eligible assets to about a third of their original size with only a small CPU overhead.
Huawei has introduced its updated MatePad Pro 12-inch tablet alongside new smartwatches and earbuds. The device drops to 454g and 4.7mm thick, slightly smaller than last year's 12.2-inch model, while featuring a flexible OLED PaperMatte display with 3K resolution and 1,600 nits peak brightness. It also packs a 50MP rear camera, 12GB RAM, up to 512GB storage, and AI tools like speech-to-text and handwriting enhancement.
An analysis compares using televisions versus dedicated monitors for computer use, focusing on refresh rates, input latency, and color depth. It finds monitors generally offer higher refresh rates, lower latency (1-4ms vs 9-12ms on TVs), and better color support at lower price points than comparable TVs.
T-Mobile is offering an unadvertised 'Super Essentials Saver' plan priced at $25 per month with AutoPay (or $30 without) for up to two lines. The plan is only available in person at Walmart locations and limited to customers opening new T-Mobile accounts, with no listing on the carrier's website or app.
Google switched the Pixel 11 series from Samsung's Exynos modem to a MediaTek chip to fix years of connectivity complaints, but a subset of owners are now reporting 5G icons with no data, Wi-Fi dropouts, slow speeds, and network switching issues shortly after purchase. Reports have surfaced on Reddit from multiple Pixel 11 and Pixel 11 Pro XL owners, though many other buyers say their devices work fine.
A new open-source project called ExactTeX extends LaTeX with optional annotations that let authors mark specific objects—like tables or figures—for verification before compiling to PDF. Unannotated content passes through unchanged as ordinary LaTeX, and a browser-based editor called Vitela runs the same compiler via WebAssembly for local checking without a server. The toolchain includes a command-line compiler, a language server for editor integration, and a test suite ensuring consistent behavior across all three interfaces.
A throwaway pull request to add readahead to Turso's io_uring backend became a case study in I/O performance. Without readahead, Turso issues one io_uring read at a time and waits for each to complete before requesting the next page; with a 32-page prefetch window enabled via PRAGMA, it submits many reads concurrently. On a TPC-H full-table scan, this dropped actual device requests from about 196,000 to roughly 16,300, while average request size grew more than tenfold and request-merging jumped from near zero to over 90%.
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