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joshuark shares a report from The Verge: Apple will introduce age verification in the App Store for users in Texas starting on Thursday, June 4th. The move, as spotted by MacRumors, comes just days after a federal appeals court allowed Texas' App Store Accountability Act to go into effect while a lawsuit against it proceeds. People in Texas who are creating a new Apple account will need to verify they're over 18 using a credit card or government ID. Apple may also automatically verify users' ag…

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: UK regulators today ordered (PDF) Google to put clearer attributions and links to publishers' content in its AI-generated search features. The UK's Competition and Markets Authority (CMA) also said Google must give publishers a way to opt out of AI features in search. "In a world first, publishers will now have effective tools to prevent their content being used to power AI features in search, such as AI Overviews," the CMA said today. "Thi…

NASA has officially ended the MAVEN mission after the Mars orbiter stopped responding in December, apparently after an unexpected spin drained its batteries and knocked out communications. Launched in 2013 and orbiting Mars since 2014, MAVEN spent more than a decade studying how the planet lost its atmosphere and helped explain how Mars transformed from a potentially habitable world into the cold, dry planet seen today. The New York Times reports: The NASA spacecraft MAVEN, short for Mars Atmos…

Amazon has reportedly killed its planned new Stargate series despite giving it a series order in 2025. According to Variety, studio executives were worried it would only appeal to longtime fans. ScreenRant reports: Reports of what became Gero's Stargate series started in 2022, after Amazon acquired MGM Studios. Dean Devlin, who co-wrote the 1994 Stargate movie with Emmerich, was another executive producer for the Amazon show, as were Joby Harold and Tory Tunnell via Safehouse Pictures. The proj…

An anonymous reader quotes a report from 404 Media: The secondary market for decades old, low-tech John Deere tractors has been booming for years as farmers have sought reliable tractors that they can actually fix without having to deal with John Deere's repair monopoly. A Canadian company has seen that demand and came up with a radical thought: What if they made a new, repairable, "no-tech" tractor to solve what has become a gigantic pain point for farmers? Alberta's Ursa Ag says that it has b…

BrianFagioli writes: Fedora Linux 43 users upgrading to the latest Dovecot mail server discovered something rather unsettling: some older Microsoft Outlook configurations may have been silently ignoring SSL/TLS settings for POP3 email connections for years. According to a Fedora community blog post, affected Outlook clients reportedly continued using insecure port 110 connections even when encryption was enabled in the application settings. The issue surfaced after Dovecot 2.4 disabled plaintex…

Ancient Slashdot reader whitroth shares a report from Politico, with the caption: "shutting down Microsoft Office for the International Criminal Court (ICC) was clearly a wake-up call." From the report: The EU is moving to counter American dominance in technology by reaching for one of the oldest tools in its arsenal: industrial strategy. As the European Commission unveiled a plan Wednesday to reduce Europe's reliance on the foreign technology providers that underpin the modern economy, it was …

According to supply chain analyst Ming-Chi Kuo, Apple has reportedly doubled 2026 MacBook Neo production from 5 million to 10 million units after stronger-than-expected demand for its $599 budget laptop. MacRumors reports: On an earnings call in late April, Apple's CEO Tim Cook said that customer response to the MacBook Neo was "off the charts," and the popularity of the laptop has reportedly led the company to significantly boost production. [...] Apple was very optimistic about the MacBook Ne…

Google has launched Gemma 4 12B, a 12-billion-parameter open AI model designed to run locally on your laptop without depending entirely on cloud infrastructure. WION reports: According to Google, the new model delivers performance close to much larger AI systems while requiring significantly less memory. The company says Gemma 4 12B can run locally on devices equipped with just 16GB of VRAM, making advanced AI more accessible to developers, researchers and businesses. The launch highlights a gr…

Google has released (PDF) technical specs and 2D CAD drawings for the Fitbit Air to encourage users to make their own accessories. "These CAD drawings include crucial mating dimensions, tolerances, and mating force specifications -- including attach and detach force -- to help you build a high-quality accessory band," Google says on a store page listing. 9to5Google reports: Noting how the "community has already come up with innovative and creative new ideas to make the Fitbit Air [their] own" s…

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: Microsoft's Build developer conference kicked off today, and as with almost everything the company has done in the last few years, Microsoft's opening keynote focused overwhelmingly on AI and other closely related technologies. [...] On the hardware front, we didn't get any updates for existing Surface devices (not counting yesterday's Surface Laptop Ultra announcement), but we did get something new: the Surface RTX Spark Dev Box is "a comp…

Meta is scaling back parts of its employee tracking initiative after staff objected to software that collected mouse movements, clicks, keystrokes, and other actions for AI training data. According to Reuters, the company will now let workers pause collection for up to 30 minutes and request exemptions. Reuters reports: [Stephane Kasriel, a vice president in Meta's AI model-building Superintelligence Labs unit] said the team behind the software had also introduced "several optimizations" to red…

Microsoft says its new Majorana 2 quantum chip is 1,000 times more reliable than its predecessor, with qubits lasting about 20 seconds instead of milliseconds, and claims it could have a commercially useful quantum machine by 2029. The BBC reports: "We will have a quantum machine in 2029 that can solve commercially viable, reasonable problems," said Zulfi Alam, corporate vice president of Microsoft Quantum. That would still require huge further advances as such a device would require millions o…

An anonymous reader quotes a report from 9to5Google: Phone by Google wants to combat the "growing threat of impersonation scams" and protect Android users against "sophisticated, AI-powered deepfake attacks" with fake call detection. [...] Fake call detection requires that both parties are on Android and use the Phone by Google app, while Google Messages and Google Contacts also have to be installed. When a contact calls, their phone "sends a silent confirmation signal in real time to your devi…

fjo3 shares a report from Defense One: A small but growing number of European officials and analysts are saying what four years ago was unthinkable: Ukraine isn't just surviving its grueling war with Russia, it is in some ways thriving and may even be on a path to victory. This isn't yet captured in headlines -- for example, about last weekend's barrage of Russian drones and missiles around Ukraine -- but in the details, like how some 90 percent were intercepted. Several long-term trends have s…