GoKawiil
Tech News
WhatsApp has extended its parental control system, previously limited to pre-teen accounts, to teen accounts as well. The update lets parents receive alerts about group activity, set rules for Channels and Status visibility, and choose between a standard or 'Limited Content' version of Meta AI for their teen's account.
Tim Cook and his successor as Apple CEO, John Ternus, were missing from a White House gathering of top tech executives convened by President Trump to discuss artificial intelligence. Leaders from Meta, Tesla, Nvidia and other major tech firms attended, but Apple did not respond to questions about why it was left out, and the White House also declined to comment. Cook had attended a state dinner at the White House just days earlier alongside Chinese President Xi Jinping.
The piece traces a long-running kernel design discussion about page tables, starting from Linus Torvalds' 2003 defense of multi-level tree-based page tables over hashed tables for TLB efficiency, and his 1997 thesis noting memory efficiency as a secondary concern. It then describes a 2020 patch from Shakeel Butt adding a page-table usage metric to memory.stat, prompted by cases like zero-copy userspace network drivers where page tables consume unusually large amounts of memory, challenging Roman Gushchin's assumption that page tables are negligible relative to mapped memory.
The Pentagon has begun alerting current and former service members that a personnel database containing records on more than 3 million individuals was breached by hackers. The database reportedly held sensitive information such as Social Security numbers, though the exact number of people whose data was exposed has not been disclosed.
NASA's SpaceX Crew-13 mission is set to launch October 1 at 11:10AM ET from Cape Canaveral, carrying commander Jessica Watkins, pilot Luke Delaney, CSA astronaut Joshua Kutryk and Roscosmos cosmonaut Sergey Teteryatnikov to the ISS. The crew will relieve Crew-12, who briefly sheltered in their capsule in June after an air leak was detected on the station, and NASA says the docking will be the fastest in US space station history at seven hours and 50 minutes.
WhatsApp announced new parental controls that let parents restrict who can see a teen's profile photo, invite them to groups, or message them, along with limits on channels and status updates. The controls also extend to Meta AI's chatbot, offering a restricted mode for younger users, and require a single parent-set PIN to activate. WhatsApp says personal messages and calls remain private even from parents who enable the controls.
Google has been expanding its AI tools into school classrooms, with students and educators reporting both benefits and drawbacks. Some students described AI assistance as slowing their own thinking, while reports point to falling test scores alongside concerns about cognitive and emotional dependence on the technology.
Amazon plans to equip 5,000 delivery drivers with AI smart glasses by the end of 2026, scaling to over 20,000 by 2027, according to a Bloomberg report citing Amazon executive Viraj Chatterjee. The glasses capture frequent static images of everything in a driver's view while on foot, including recipients and bystanders, which are reviewed by Amazon staff and fed into its Wellspring AI mapping platform. Amazon disputes characterizations of the system as surveillance, while confirming no customer opt-out option currently exists.
QR codes were created in 1994 by Denso, a Toyota parts supplier, as a way to speed up factory scanning by packing far more data into a single code than a barcode could hold. Engineer Masahiro Hara led the project, drawing on the board game Go for the grid design and testing printed materials to find a black-to-white ratio that scanners could reliably detect. The format spread slowly through Japanese camera phones before becoming a global fixture in payments, tickets, logins and marketing.
OpenAI President Greg Brockman has reversed a planned $25-million contribution to a political action committee supporting AI-friendly candidates. The reversal follows pushback from OpenAI employees who favor tougher AI regulation.
Micron reported fiscal fourth-quarter revenue of $54.23 billion, up 379% year-over-year and ahead of the $51.07 billion analysts expected, with adjusted earnings per share of $33.42 versus a $31.61 forecast. The company said tight supply conditions for memory chips, driven by AI demand, should persist and even intensify into fiscal 2027.
At last week's American Association for Cancer Research conference on Pancreatic Cancer in San Diego, scientists discussed combining early-detection methods with a strategy called cancer interception, which treats abnormally growing tissue before it becomes cancerous. The meeting followed the FDA's August approval of daraxonrasib (Rasonque), a drug shown to suppress pancreatic tumors, which researchers say has renewed optimism for applying interception to this historically hard-to-treat cancer.