Stay updated with the latest in technology, AI, cybersecurity, and more
2019-09-10 MPG Sources on GitHub The sources for Modeling and Programming with Gecode are now available on GitHub. 2019-04-12 Gecode 6.2.0 Gecode 6.2.0 has been released on April 12th, 2019 (Changelog). 2019-02-14 Gecode 6.1.1 Gecode 6.1.1 has been released on February 14th, 2019 (Changelog). 2018-10-19 Gecode 6.1.0 Gecode 6.1.0 has been released on October 19th, 2018 (Changelog).
AI Kirk Despite being stumped by simple children's games and uncontrollably hallucinating, AI models could perform surprisingly well when put in charge of navigating space inside a simulated spacecraft, researchers have found. As Live Science reports, a team of scientists from MIT and the Universidad Politécnica de Madrid, Spain, instructed OpenAI's blockbuster AI chatbot ChatGPT to "operate as an autonomous agent controlling a pursuit spacecraft." To their amazement, as detailed in a paper s
Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella speaks at the Axel Springer building in Berlin on Oct. 17, 2023. He received the annual Axel Springer Award. Among the thousands of Microsoft employees who lost their jobs in the cutbacks announced this week were 830 staffers in the company's home state of Washington. Nearly a dozen game design workers in the state were part of the layoffs, along with three audio designers, two mechanical engineers, one optical engineer and one lab technician, according to a documen
The U.S. government has rescinded its export restrictions on chip-design software to China, three of the largest players in the space announced on Thursday. In separate statements, semiconductor software designers Siemens AG, Synopsys, and Cadence all said they received letters from the U.S. Department of Commerce informing them that the controls had been lifted. While Siemens is based in Germany, its chip design software subsidiary, Siemens EDA, is based in Oregon, U.S. As a result of export
The days of "fast food" being "cheap food" are long gone, and prices seem to always be increasing. We can blame that phenomenon on rising inflation, and while a trip to a McDonald's drive-thru is still cheaper than settling in for a meal at your favorite steakhouse, it's far from inexpensive. In fact, prices soared in 2024 as some of the most well-known fast food chains hiked prices to make our favorite treats more costly than ever. Not all fast food is created equal, and one restaurant has inc
Expensive and erratic, in-flight Wi-Fi has been more of a punchline than a pipeline over the past decade. But 2025 has marked a sea change for the skies: the rollout of fast, and free, connectivity on most of the world’s major airlines. Satellite technology has enabled leaps in speed and bandwidth. SpaceX’s Starlink network of low Earth orbit satellites, for example, can deliver a connection capable of downloading more than 200 megabits per second—twice as fast as most basic home internet plans
The latest version of U.S. President Donald Trump's "big beautiful bill" could make it cheaper for semiconductor manufacturers to build plants in the U.S. as Washington continues its efforts to strengthen its domestic chip supply chain. Under the bill, passed by the Senate Tuesday, tax credits for those semiconductor firms would rise to 35% from 25%. That's more than the 30% increase that had made it into a draft version of the bill. Companies eligible for the credits could include chipmakers
The selection of fragments contained many of those pigments already noted in the extensive analytical work conducted elsewhere in Europe7,8,9,10,11,12,13,14, such as azurite, red lead, vermilion, orpiment, and copper-based greens. Even though these fragment pages might appear rather simple in terms of their colour scheme, the analysis has shown a greater variation and complexity than first meets the eye. This observation will be further elaborated below where findings are listed by colour. A sum
Hackers working on behalf of the Iranian government are likely to target industrial control systems used at water treatment plants and other critical infrastructure to retaliate against recent military strikes by Israel and the US, federal government agencies are warning. One cybersecurity company says many US-based targets aren't adequately protected against the threat. “Based on the current geopolitical environment, Iranian-affiliated cyber actors may target US devices and networks for near-t
Disposable diapers are a massive environmental offender. Roughly 300,000 of them are sent to landfills or incinerated every minute, according to the World Economic Forum, and they take hundreds of years to decompose. It's a $60 billion business. One alternative approach has been compostable diapers, which can be made out of wood pulp or bamboo. But composting services aren't universally available and some of the products are less absorbent than normal nappies, critics say. A growing number of
On November 14, 2003, astronomers spotted what was at the time the most distant known object orbiting the Sun. They called it Sedna after the Inuit goddess of the ocean. It’s a cold, reddish dwarf planet that drifts billions of miles away from the Sun during its 10,000-year orbit before coming in for a relatively close approach to our star. Its next perihelion is happening in July 2076, and astronomers want to take advantage of this rare encounter by flying a mission to the mysterious object. A
Hi HN — we're the team behind Arch ( https://github.com/katanemo/archgw ), an open-source proxy for LLMs written in Rust. Today we're releasing Arch-Router ( https://huggingface.co/katanemo/Arch-Router-1.5B ), a 1.5B router model for preference-based routing, now integrated into the proxy. As teams integrate multiple LLMs - each with different strengths, styles, or cost/latency profiles — routing the right prompt to the right model becomes a critical part of the application design. But it's stil
Commuters in and around San Francisco rode into work for free on Tuesday morning due to an outage in the Clipper card system, which is used to handle payments for train, bus and ferry rides. "ATTENTION: The Clipper system is experiencing an outage on all operators this morning," the Bay Area Clipper account wrote in a post on X. "Please be prepared to pay your fare with another form of payment if required by your transit agency." Many buses were waving commuters on without asking for payment,
The Mexican Sinaloa cartel hired a hacker to track and surveil the FBI, then used that information to intimidate and even kill witnesses against drug lord Joaquín "El Chapo" Guzmán, according to a Justice Department report spotted by Ars Technica. The hacker used relatively sophisticated data collection techniques and weaknesses in the FBI's cybersecurity to identify the witnesses, the report states. According to the highly redacted report, which is based in part on testimony from an "individua
In Brief Elon Musk’s AI company, xAI, has raised $10 billion in debt and equity, Morgan Stanley confirmed on Monday. In a post on X, the financial giant said xAI had raised $5 billion in debt and another $5 billion in a separate strategic equity transaction. “The combination of debt and equity reduces the overall cost of capital and substantially expands pools of capital available to xAI. The proceeds will support xAI’s continued development of cutting-edge AI solutions, including one of the
Beware! Buying used camera gear is addictive. Photography can be an expensive hobby and finding out how easy it is to get great gear at a reasonable price only leads to buying even more gear at a "reasonable" price. Trust me, I've done it a lot. Finding the lens or camera you want at a lower price is great, but even better is finding older, discontinued models that can give that retro look with no editing required. While eBay is the obvious answer for finding anything used, that's only one opti
Last year, I discovered that the Kosinski compression format is actually LZEXE, which was used for compressing DOS executables back in the 90s and the late 80s. Its developer catalogues three versions on his website: v0.90, v0.91, and v0.91e. While only binaries of v0.91 and v0.91e can be found on the website, v0.90 can be found mirrored on various other websites. I got in touch with LZEXE’s developer, Fabrice Bellard, and he was able to release LZEXE’s source code, untouched since 1990! It i
Last year, I discovered that the Kosinski compression format is actually LZEXE, which was used for compressing DOS executables back in the 90s and the late 80s. Its developer catalogues three versions on his website: v0.90, v0.91, and v0.91e. While only binaries of v0.91 and v0.91e can be found on the website, v0.90 can be found mirrored on various other websites. I got in touch with LZEXE’s developer, Fabrice Bellard, and he was able to release LZEXE’s source code, untouched since 1990! It i
We are an intense, tightly-knit team based in the heart of San Francisco. Our customers range from fast-growing startups to established enterprise companies, and we obsess over listening to each of them and helping them succeed. Our development pillars are security, reliability and performance, combined with pragmatism to always find working solutions and be ultra-responsive to customer feedback and requests. Working both at the infrastructure and product level, we strive to build correct, futur
In Brief Tinder is requiring new users in California to use facial recognition technology to verify their profiles, Axios reported on Monday. The new “Face Check” feature aims to reduce impersonation on the dating app and ensure that people aren’t being connected to bots or fake accounts. Face Check requires users to take a short video selfie when they’re signing up for the app. The scan confirms the person is real, checks if their face matches their profile photos, and also detects if the sam
Octelium Table of Contents What is Octelium? Octelium is a free and open source, self-hosted, unified platform for zero trust resource access that is primarily meant to be a modern alternative to remote access VPNs and similar tools. It is built to be generic enough to not only operate as a zero-config remote access VPN (i.e. alternative to OpenVPN Access Server, Twingate, Tailscale, etc...), a ZTNA platform (i.e. alternative to Cloudflare Access, Teleport, Google BeyondCorp, etc...), a sca
Did you know your favorite website can detect when you’re browsing it in public transport and when you scroll it laying in your bed? Today we’ll learn how they can do it and how this info is used to fight bots. I gave this talk at Google Developer Student Club Žilina, and CodeBeer in Bratislava last year. To be honest, I had already forgotten about it, but recently I found it in my notes, and damn, this stuff is interesting! So after a bit of editing and updates, here it is as an article. A sm
When piecing together the cultural practices of ancient humans, traditional archaeologists rely on clues from artifacts such as tools, bones, and pottery. Experimental archaeologists, however, go a step further—recreating past behaviors to experience how people once lived. That’s precisely what a team of researchers recently did to investigate how Stone Age communities in northeastern Europe extracted animal teeth to produce accessories. Led by Aija Macāne, a visiting scholar in the Department
This article is part of VentureBeat’s special issue, “The Real Cost of AI: Performance, Efficiency and ROI at Scale.” Read more from this special issue. For the last two decades, enterprises have had a choice between open-source and closed proprietary technologies. The original choice for enterprises was primarily centered on operating systems, with Linux offering an open-source alternative to Microsoft Windows. In the developer realm, open-source languages like Python and JavaScript dominate,
Researchers from the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab), UC Irvine, and the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign (UIUC), have used biology to convert human urine into a valuable product. The team genetically modified yeast to take the elements present in urine and create hydroxyapatite – a calcium and phosphorus-based mineral naturally produced by humans and other animals to build bones and teeth. Commercially manufactured hydroxyapatite is used in surgery and dentistry to
About a third of American adults say they've used the generative AI tool ChatGPT, while one in five say they've never heard of it, according to new survey results released this week by the Pew Research Center. The 34% who said they have used the gen AI tool from OpenAI include 58% of adults under 30, the largest share among any age cohort. The share of ChatGPT users drops with age: 41% of those 30 to 49, 25% of those 50 to 64 and 10% of those 65 and older. There is also a correlation with educa
Welcome to Startups Weekly — your weekly recap of everything you can’t miss from the world of startups. Want it in your inbox every Friday? Sign up here. Before this newsletter takes a break for the Fourth of July next week, here are the startup stories and funding rounds that caught our eye over the last few days, which have been quite busy. Most interesting startup stories from the week Image Credits:SOPA Images / Contributor / Getty Images This week brought us lawsuit updates, M&As, and a
Back in the 90s, when I was in school, education was like a uniform everyone had to wear—the same textbooks, the same blackboard, and the same hurried lessons for all. If you fell behind, your only lifeline was to awkwardly raise your hand in the middle of class or spend hours in the library after school, rifling through reference books. Fast forward 30 years, and it’s fascinating how far we’ve come. Today, thanks to AI/ML, we have adaptive learning systems—tailored to each student based on thei
Capture and care of moths Bogong moths (A. infusa) of both sexes were caught in the wild during their autumn and spring migrations (2019 and 2018) using a LepiLED insect light (www.gunnarbrehm.de), or a vertical beam search light (model GT175, Ammon Luminaire Company), placed in front of a white sheet suspended between two trees. Almost all of the animals were caught near the Mount Selwyn Snowfields (southeast New South Wales, Australia: 35.914° S, 148.444° E; elevation, 1,600 m), which is appr
For the second time in two weeks, a study has been published that suggests that people who use AI may display less cognitive ability than those who don’t rely on it. The studies have bolstered critics’ accusations that AI makes you stupid. The most recent study was conducted by the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School and looked at a sample size of over 4,500 participants. The study, which looked at the cognitive differences between people who used LLMs like ChatGPT to do research and th