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Tech News
A PYMNTS Intelligence study found that 36% of Gen Z shoppers abandoned an online purchase in the past 30 days because their preferred payment method wasn't offered at checkout, compared with 31% of millennials, 15% of Gen X and 8.3% of boomers and seniors. The study estimates 40 million Gen Z and millennial consumers abandoned carts for this reason in a single month.
Google will limit which Gemini models are available based on subscription tier beginning October 9. Free users will only get Flash-Lite, losing access to Flash and Pro, while AI Plus subscribers ($4.99/month) keep Flash-Lite and Flash but lose Pro access. AI Pro and AI Ultra subscribers see no cutbacks and instead gain the Deep Think reasoning option previously reserved for pricier tiers.
Valve's Steam Hardware Survey shows Linux usage dropped 0.85 percentage points to 3.05% for September, down from a March peak of 5.33%. The same survey recorded a 7.42-point jump in Simplified Chinese language use to 31.39% of all Steam users, a shift that historically correlates with Windows gains and Linux declines. Within the Linux segment, CachyOS rose 2.65 points to 18.12%, edging past SteamOS Holo's 17.37%, while AMD chips remain dominant among Linux gamers.
A Microsoft software engineer who became an EMT in 2024 published a ranked list of 21 reasons he had delayed pursuing the certification for years. He cites concerns including the time commitment of a 28-day accelerated NOLS Wilderness EMT course, fears about fraternity-like culture in EMS, and worries about fitting in with younger or less tech-oriented classmates and coworkers.
A developer who already used Home Assistant to track bin collection schedules built a new project called BinRange to detect whether bins had actually been moved. The system uses a fixed ultra-wideband radio anchor, six battery-powered tags attached to wheelie bins, a 3D-printed enclosure, custom firmware with wireless updates, and integration with Home Assistant to combine location data with collection schedules. The build followed an earlier, less successful attempt using Bluetooth tags and a proxy, and was developed with heavy use of AI coding tools including Codex and Astra.
A partially unsealed court filing from a class-action lawsuit over a January ICE operation in Maine alleges that DHS agents compiled dossiers on people who observed or protested ICE activity, storing photos and license plate numbers in Palantir's Investigative Case Management database. The filing claims agents labeled some individuals 'Threat to Law Enforcement, Professional Protestor' and, in one instance, warned a plaintiff's spouse by phone that such activity could lead to inclusion on a domestic terrorism watchlist. DHS told Wired the lawsuit is 'meritless' and denied any database tracking people as domestic terrorists.
Researcher Dr Ning Xu's winning entry in the Nikon Small World in Motion competition, depicting lung cilia movement, is under investigation after scientists flagged inconsistencies such as structures appearing and disappearing unnaturally. A watermark check using Google Gemini reportedly detected Google's SynthID marker, suggesting AI involvement in the footage. Nikon says it is reviewing technical documentation submitted by Xu, who has acknowledged using AI for post-processing but denies violating competition rules.
Disney has struck a licensing agreement allowing Netflix to stream a batch of its content, including the Ice Age franchise and the Percy Jackson and the Olympians series, alongside other Disney and Pixar titles. The deal lets these properties appear on Netflix for a period of time under the terms of the agreement.
Milt Windler, one of four Mission Control flight directors during the Apollo 13 crisis in 1970, has died at age 94, according to a family notice posted online. He joined NASA as a flight director in 1968, leading shifts for Apollo 8's lunar orbit, Apollo 10, the Apollo 12, 14 and 15 moon landings, and all three crewed Skylab missions.
Apple TV is offering free access to this weekend's Bahrain Grand Prix, normally a paid subscription offering, for US viewers. The race is being held at Sepang, Malaysia, after the Bahrain GP was relocated due to the ongoing Iran war. Coverage begins at 1:50 AM Eastern Time with the race starting at 3 AM, and Max Verstappen took pole position ahead of Lewis Hamilton and Kim Antonelli.
Cloudflare is inviting developers to build a next-generation code collaboration platform on top of Artifacts, its versioned filesystem that speaks Git and can scale to millions of repositories, now in open beta. The company is framing this as infrastructure for coordinating large numbers of AI coding agents working simultaneously on the same codebase, rather than human-centric workflows like branches and pull requests. Entrants would use Cloudflare Workers and Artifacts as the underlying primitives, while building the coordination, review and merge layer themselves.
U.S. District Judge Sara Hill ruled that a Tulsa County sheriff's deputy violated the Fourth Amendment by searching Flock Safety's license-plate database without a warrant, based solely on a vehicle having California plates. Because the search lacked justification, Hill ordered evidence from the resulting car search—including an alleged 91 pounds of methamphetamine—suppressed as 'fruit of the poisonous tree.' Hill also described Flock's camera network as a form of 'indiscriminate mass surveillance' that tracks all vehicles passing its cameras.