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Adding public transport data to Transitous

I had mentioned a number of new Transitous features in a previous post. As those largely depend on the corresponding data being available, here’s an overview of how you can help to find, add and improve that data. Transitous Transitous is a community-run public transport routing service build on top of the MOTIS routing engine and thousands of datasets from all over the world. Transitous backs public transport related features in applications like GNOME Maps, KDE Itinerary or Träwelling. Just

Zoomcar discloses security breach impacting 8.4 million users

Zoomcar Holdings (Zoomcar) has disclosed that unauthorized accessed its system led to a data breach impacting 8.4 million users. The incident was detected on June 9, after a threat actor emailed company employees alerting them of a cyberattack. Although there has been no material disruption to services, the company’s internal investigation confirmed that sensitive data belonging to a subset of its customers has been compromised. Zoomcar is an Indian peer-to-peer car-sharing marketplace that c

Salesforce study finds LLM agents flunk CRM and confidentiality tests

A new benchmark developed by academics shows that LLM-based AI agents perform below par on standard CRM tests and fail to understand the need for customer confidentiality. A team led by Kung-Hsiang Huang, a Salesforce AI researcher, showed that using a new benchmark relying on synthetic data, LLM agents achieve around a 58 percent success rate on tasks that can be completed in a single step without needing follow-up actions or more information. Using the benchmark tool CRMArena-Pro, the team a

WhatsApp is officially getting ads

is a news writer who covers the streaming wars, consumer tech, crypto, social media, and much more. Previously, she was a writer and editor at MUO. WhatsApp is rolling out ads. In an update on Monday, Meta announced that it will now show ads from businesses through its Stories-like status feature. The status feature lives within WhatsApp’s “Updates” tab and allows users to share disappearing text, photo, voice notes, or video messages. But now, you might see sponsored content in addition to th

Meta is finally bringing ads to WhatsApp

It took 11 years since Facebook acquired it for $19 billion, but Meta is finally bringing ads to WhatsApp, marking a major change for an app whose founders shunned advertising. Meta announced Monday that businesses will now be able to run so-called status ads on WhatsApp that prompt users to interact with the advertisers via the app's messaging features. The ads will only be shown to users within WhatsApp's "Updates" tab to separate the promotions from people's personal conversations. Additiona

How AI can help make cities work better for residents

Shortly after joining MIT in 2012, Williams created the Civic Data Design Lab to bridge that divide. Over the years, she and her colleagues have pushed the narrative and expository bounds of urban planning data using the latest technologies available—making numbers vivid and accessible through human stories and striking graphics. One project she was involved in, on rates of incarceration in New York City by neighborhood, is now in the permanent collection of the Museum of Modern Art in New York.

Microsoft: June Windows Server security updates cause DHCP issues

Microsoft acknowledged a new issue caused by the June 2025 security updates, causing the DHCP service to freeze on some Windows Server systems. On Windows Server systems, the Dynamic Host Configuration Protocol (DHCP) Server service automates assigning IP addresses and other network configurations, reducing network administration and ensuring reliable IP address configuration in Windows networks. In affected environments, the new DHCP known issue confirmed by Microsoft over the weekend prevent

Yet another European government is ditching Microsoft for Linux - here's why

querbeet/Getty Images "We're done with Teams!" declared Digitalisation Minister Dirk Schrödter, speaking via an open-source video platform, in his announcement that the German state of Schleswig-Holstein will phase out all Microsoft software from government workplaces. The goal is to fully transition from Microsoft programs to Linux and open-source programs within the next three months. Also: I found a Linux distro that combines the best parts of other operating systems (and it works) The dec

Hyperspectral scans of historical pigments and painting reconstructions

Painting Tools and Dataset Processed paint samples, using the Kubelka-Munk model to compute reflection and the painting_tools package to display the RGB values. See the corresponding notebook to understand how these parameters were estimated. This repository contains code and links to data for painting analysis using hyperspectral data. This data can be used in technical art history and computer graphics applications, for example for pigment mapping and spectral upsampling. Code and data for t

From Outer Space to Your Router: Here's How Satellite Internet Works

While it's not the fastest, satellite internet is the only internet connection type available in all 50 states, making it a top contender for rural households with limited internet options. Despite the popularity of Starlinkand the growing power of its 7,000 satellites, satellite internet is commonly viewed as a last resort for home internet. So what makes satellite internet so great? What should you be mindful about before signing up? Let's take a closer look at how satellite internet works --

The WIRED Guide to Protecting Yourself From Government Surveillance

The Trump administration has ordered Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents to carry out sweeping raids, deporting thousands of immigrants, often without due process. It has targeted left-leaning foreign students and entire universities, canceling visas and threatening to withhold federal funding. United States Supreme Court appointments from the previous Trump administration have resulted in decisions that enabled roughly half of US states to severely restrict or ban abortions. And Trump’s

Can You Trust the Data in a Privacy-First World?

Online advertising powers much of the internet economy, but collecting user data across platforms raises significant privacy concerns. Researchers from TikTok Inc., Duke University, and Penn State University have developed a solution that balances measurement accuracy with privacy protection. In their paper “Click Without Compromise: Online Advertising Measurement via Per User Differential Privacy,” Yingtai Xiao, Jian Du, Shikun Zhang, Wanrong Zhang, Qian Yang, Danfeng Zhang, and Daniel Kifer i

What Deep Learning Reveals About Consumer Engagement

Predicting how users will engage with ads can be challenging. Traditionally, advertising companies use cookies and embedded monitoring codes that produce a record of how users engage with ad content. But when it comes to predicting user engagement ahead of time, a novel approach is needed. Zhong Ding of Xinjiang University and Xing Feng Fan of Sichuan International Studies University demonstrated a new, unique approach to predicting user engagement in a paper written for the 2024 International

Topics: ad ads data ding fan

Simplest C++ Callback, from SumatraPDF

SumatraPDF is a Windows GUI application for viewing PDF, ePub and comic books written in C++. A common need in GUI programs is a callback. E.g. when a button is clicked we need to call a function with some data identifying which button was clicked. Callback is therefore a combo of function and data and we need to call the function with data as an argument. In programming language lingo, code + data combo is called a closure. C++ has std::function<> and lambdas (i.e. closures). Lambdas convert

SQLite Date and Time Functions (2007)

The document describes default date and time functions in SQLite. This document is a supplement to the function documentation found on the SQL Expression Syntax page. Function Overview Five date and time functions are available, as follows: date( timestring, modifier, modifier, ...) time( timestring, modifier, modifier, ...) datetime( timestring, modifier, modifier, ...) julianday( timestring, modifier, modifier, ...) strftime( format, timestring, modifier, modifier, ...) All five functions

Topics: date day mm modifier time

Datalog in miniKanren

A browser with Wasm GC and tail call support is required for this demo. We recommend using either Mozilla Firefox or Google Chrome. Datalog in miniKanren Having access to an embedded logical programming language makes some tasks really easy. One prerequisite for RealTalk is some form of Datalog, and I built one in Scheme using miniKanren so that I had access to all of the internals. This page explains the naive Datalog implementation I did before modifying some of it to fit my version of Dynam

Notes on the History of the Map Tile

Notes on the history of the map tile Web map tiles—the storing of geospatial data at different zoom levels in x/y/z indexed squares of raster (and later, vector) data for efficient storage and transmission of digital maps—are, despite their seeming simplicity, I think one of the most significant developments in geospatial software history. Tiling transformed the user experience of digital maps from one of tedious clicks-and-reloads to one of fluid, dynamic exploration. It made digital maps feel

Topics: data map maps patent prc

Show HN: Meow – An Image File Format I made because PNGs and JPEGs suck for AI

MEOW The most Purr-fect Image File Format for your AI workflows Wait- What? You Can Just Make File Formats? Well- yes, but no, I'll come to that bit later, but before that, let me geek out about what this project is MEOW (Metadata Encoded Optimized Webfile) is a Python-based image file format designed to be efficient, practical, and cross-platform compatible. With support for RGBA transparency, metadata, and fast rendering capabilities, MEOW provides a modern alternative for image storage and

Topics: ai data file meow png

Q-learning is not yet scalable

Does RL scale? Over the past few years, we've seen that next-token prediction scales, denoising diffusion scales, contrastive learning scales, and so on, all the way to the point where we can train models with billions of parameters with a scalable objective that can eat up as much data as we can throw at it. Then, what about reinforcement learning (RL)? Does RL also scale like all the other objectives? Apparently, it does. In 2016, RL achieved superhuman-level performance in games like Go and C

Rethinking AI: DeepSeek’s playbook shakes up the high-spend, high-compute paradigm

Join the event trusted by enterprise leaders for nearly two decades. VB Transform brings together the people building real enterprise AI strategy. Learn more When DeepSeek released its R1 model this January, it wasn’t just another AI announcement. It was a watershed moment that sent shockwaves through the tech industry, forcing industry leaders to reconsider their fundamental approaches to AI development. What makes DeepSeek’s accomplishment remarkable isn’t that the company developed novel ca

RFK Jr. Orders HHS to Give Undocumented Migrants’ Medicaid Data to DHS

With demonstrations ramping up against the Trump administration, this week was all about protests. With President Donald Trump taking the historic step to deploy US Marines and the National Guard to Los Angeles, we dove into the “long-term dangers” of sending troops to LA, as well as what those troops are permitted to do while they’re there. Of course, it’s not just the military getting involved in the LA protests against the heavy crackdowns by Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE). There’

Model Once, Represent Everywhere: UDA (Unified Data Architecture) at Netflix

Model Once, Represent Everywhere: UDA (Unified Data Architecture) at Netflix Netflix Technology Blog Follow 15 min read · 2 days ago 2 days ago -- 8 Listen Share By Alex Hutter, Alexandre Bertails, Claire Wang, Haoyuan He, Kishore Banala, Peter Royal, Shervin Afshar As Netflix’s offerings grow — across films, series, games, live events, and ads — so does the complexity of the systems that support it. Core business concepts like ‘actor’ or ‘movie’ are modeled in many places: in our Enterprise G

The Hidden Cost of the Internet: Why the Web's Environmental Impact Matters Now More Than Ever

Diagnosing the environmental sustainability of the internet might seem, at first, like trying to figure out where the molecules of water in your morning cup of coffee originated. Water is constantly evolving, cycling through our environments and often carrying the secrets of the places it last passed through. The internet, in all its complexity, appears to operate in a similar fashion. Every time we log online, we step foot into an incredibly intricate stream of data, often cycled, reused and e

ChatGPT Glossary: 52 AI Terms Everyone Should Know

AI is now a part of our everyday lives. From the massive popularity of ChatGPT to Google cramming AI summaries at the top of its search results, AI is completely taking over the internet. With AI, you can get instant answers to pretty much any question. It can feel like talking to someone who has a Ph.D. in everything. But that aspect of AI chatbots is only one part of the AI landscape. Sure, having ChatGPT help do your homework or having Midjourney create fascinating images of mechs based on c

Anne Wojcicki’s nonprofit reaches deal to acquire 23andMe

Beleaguered genetic testing company 23andMe announced Friday that it has reached an agreement to sell itself to a nonprofit led by the company’s co-founder and former CEO Anne Wojcicki. Following a massive cyberattack in 2023 and a related lawsuit settlement, 23andMe filed for bankruptcy in March, with Wojcicki resigning in order to become an independent bidder for the company. But pharmaceutical company Regeneron was announced as the company’s acquirer with a $256 million bid. According to th

How to clear your Android phone's cache and make it feel like new

Elyse Betters Picaro / ZDNET Google recently released Android 16 to Pixel devices and select OEMs, bringing performance improvements, new Material You changes, and more upgrades. If you want to try this update but are hesitant because you've noticed your Android phone or tablet already feels too sluggish, clearing app and browser caches can give it a fresh boost and free up some storage space. Over time, cached data can accumulate, become corrupted, or simply get outdated, which may slow down

AI Isn't Magic, It's Maths

So much Hype…. Everyone’s talking about artificial intelligence these days. ChatGPT can whip up an essay or answer your questions like it reads your mind. Midjourney conjures up stunning art from a simple prompt. It almost feels magical. But here at Zero Fluff, we don’t do magic – we do reality. And the reality is: AI isn’t magic at all. It’s math. These AI systems are incredibly sophisticated, but they run on cold, hard calculations, not wizardry. In this no-nonsense guide, we’ll demystify AI

Topics: ai data gpt like math

23andMe founder Anne Wojcicki will regain control of embattled DNA company after all

In a surprise twist, 23andMe founder and former CEO Anne Wojcicki is set to regain control of the DNA company's assets, according to a press release from 23andMe. In May, a company called Regeneron bought 23andMe for $256 million in a bankruptcy auction, but Wojcicki's nonprofit, TTAM Research Institute, was able to reopen bidding with an "unsolicited offer" of $305 million, The Wall Street Journal reports. A bankruptcy judge agreed to reopen bidding on 23andMe under the condition that Regenero

Siri's Big AI Upgrade Is Coming but Reportedly Not Until Spring 2026

Apple appears to be making progress on a major update to its Siri software that would expand its capabilities and incorporate more AI features. According to a report from Bloomberg's Mark Gurman, the delayed update for Siri now has an internal release window of spring 2026. The update, which could arrive with iOS version 26.4, would make good on features and updates Apple introduced at 2024's WWDC. Since then, the updates to Siri that were supposed to incorporate many of the company's Apple Int

Topics: ai apple says siri update

How a Cyberattack at a Company You've Never Heard of Nearly Derailed My Anniversary Carrot Cake

Every year since we got married, my husband and I have celebrated our anniversary with a carrot cake. Some years it was from the amazing bakery in our old neighborhood, while others it was a questionably fresh effort picked up at a train station shop on the way home from the office, but often I would bake my own. The funny thing is, neither of us really likes carrot cake. It just somehow ended up being the top layer of our wedding cake, so we have one every year. That's tradition for you. This