Tech

Fox Corporation has agreed to acquire Roku for approximately $22 billion, merging one of the largest content libraries in television with the leading streaming operating system in a deal that reshapes the streaming landscape (The Verge; CNBC; Fox press release). Roku shareholders will receive $160 per share, composed of $96 in cash and 0.9693 shares […]

A new generation of solid-state air conditioning technology promises to eliminate refrigerants and compressors from cooling, but researchers warn that the gap between lab demonstrations and real-world performance remains wide (MIT Technology Review). Solid-state cooling relies on physical principles that cause materials to heat up or cool down when exposed to electric fields, magnetic fields, […]

The curl project will not accept vulnerability reports for the entire month of July, its maintainers announced Monday, calling the break a “summer of bliss” aimed at escaping the relentless pressure of AI-generated security submissions (Daniel Stenberg blog; LWN.net). The HackerOne submission form will be paused starting July 1. The project’s security email address will […]

UK Prime Minister Keir Starmer announced Monday a sweeping ban on social media access for children under 16, going further than any other democratic nation in restricting how young people interact with platforms like TikTok, Instagram, Snapchat, and X (TechCrunch; BBC; The Guardian). The policy, described by the government as “Australia-plus,” builds on Australia’s world-first […]

Mark Zuckerberg’s plan for a mandatory company-wide AI hackathon has triggered an open revolt inside Meta, with employees calling the three-day event “performative” and demanding to know when they are supposed to find the time between layoffs, forced reassignments, and an ever-tightening performance culture (Wired). The hackathon, scheduled for July 14-16 and focused “exclusively on […]

The White House imposed export controls on Anthropic’s flagship Mythos AI model partly over suspicions that a China-linked group had accessed it, according to a Semafor report published June 13 that adds a significant new dimension to an already dramatic week for the company (The Verge; Semafor). The Trump administration on Friday directed Anthropic to […]

A coalition of 42 US state attorneys general has opened a coordinated investigation into OpenAI, serving the company with a subpoena on June 12 that demands records across nearly every dimension of its business and product safety. The probe arrives just four days after OpenAI confidentially filed paperwork with the Securities and Exchange Commission for […]

Every major LLM vendor has played the same game for the past two years: announce a bigger context window. Google’s Gemini hit 1 million tokens. Anthropic’s Claude pushed past 200K. Various open-source models claim 128K, 256K, even 2 million. The numbers grow, the press releases flow, and developers build tools that assume the advertised number […]

UK Police Officer Investigated for Using AI to Fabricate Evidence in Multiple Cases A Derbyshire police officer is under criminal investigation for allegedly using artificial intelligence to create evidential material in multiple cases, in what is believed to be the first known instance of a UK law enforcement officer accused of fabricating evidence with generative […]

I Read the Fine Print on At-Home DNA Tests – the Privacy Risks Are Worse Than You Think The box arrives in cheerful packaging. Swab. Spit. Mail it back. In a few weeks, you’ll learn something about your hormones, your cancer risk, your predisposition to Alzheimer’s, or your entire genome. At-home DNA testing has become […]