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IT sector unemployment "increased to 3.8% in April from 3.6% in March," reports the Wall Street Journal. But they add that the increase reflects "an ongoing uncertainty in tech as AI continues to play havoc with hiring. That's according to analysis from consulting firm Janco Associates, which bases its findings on data from the U.S. Labor Department." On Friday, the department said the economy added 115,000 jobs, buoyed by gains in industries including retail, transportation and warehousing and…

An anonymous reader shared this report from Futurism: In November, Amazon leaders sent an internal memo to employees, pushing them to use its in-house code generating tool, Kiro, over third-party alternatives from competitors. "While we continue to support existing tools in use today, we do not plan to support additional third party, AI development tools," the memo read, as quoted by Reuters at the time. "As part of our builder community, you all play a critical role shaping these products and …

For just the first three months of 2026, Rocket Lab's launch business reports $63.7 million in revenue, reports CNBC — plus another $136.7 million from its space systems business. Besides beating Wall Street's expectations, Rocket Lab also announced that its backlog has more than doubled from a year ago to $2.2 billion, and that it's buying space robotics company Motiv Space Systems. Friday its stock price shot up 34% in one day... Rocket Lab's stock has more than quadrupled over the past year,…

CNBC reports: The European Union is considering rules that would restrict its member governments' use of U.S. cloud providers to handle sensitive data, sources familiar with the talks told CNBC. The European Commission — the EU's executive branch — is expected to present its "Tech Sovereignty Package" on May 27, which will include a range of measures aimed at bolstering the bloc's strategic autonomy in key digital areas. As part of preparations for that package, discussions are taking place wit…

"Meta's embrace of AI is making its employees miserable," reports the New York Times. And "After Meta said late last month that it would start tracking employees' computer use, hundreds of workers spoke up." (One employee even told Meta's CTO in an internal post, "Your callousness to the concerns of your own employees is concerning." In an internal post last month, Meta told its U.S. employees that it was making a change that would affect tens of thousands of them. What employees typed into the…

While Nvidia has dominated the "infrastructure boom" since 2022's launch of ChatGPT and "the generative AI craze," CNBC writes that "This week offered the starkest illustration yet of what MIzuho analyst Jordan Klein said could be a 'changing of the guard in AI.'" Chipmakers Advanced Micro Devices and Intel notched gains of about 25%, while memory maker Micron jumped more than 37% and fiber-optic cable maker Corning climbed about 18%. All four of those companies have more than doubled in value …

Under the nonprofit Linux Foundation, "a new Sustaining Package Registries Working Group will seek to identify concrete funding, governance, and security practices," reports ZDNet, "to keep code flowing as download counts grow.... Because software builds, continuous integration pipelines, and AI systems hammer registries at machine speed rather than human speed, the sites can't keep up. "That growth has brought a surge in bot traffic, automated publishing, security reports, and outright abuse, …

To upgrade its grid for data centers, PJM Interconnection (which serves 13 states) plans to spend $22 billion — and charge nearly $2 billion of that to customers in Maryland, argues Maryland's Office of People's Counsel. The money "will be recovered in rates for decades" and "drive up Maryland customer bills by $1.6 billion over the next ten years alone," they said Friday, announcing an official complaint filed with America's Federal Energy Regulatory Commission. Extra demand is expected from O…

NASA's $500 million Neil Gehrels Swift space observatory was launched in 2004. But it's now "at risk of falling back through the atmosphere and burning up without intervention," reports Spaceflight Now. Fortunately, a mission to prevent that "just passed a notable prelaunch testing milestone." On Friday, NASA announced that the Link spacecraft, manufactured by Katalyst Space Technologies to intervene before Swift's fate is sealed, completed its slate of environmental testing at the agency's God…

September 2025? January 2026? Delivery dates keep slipping for the Trump Organization's "Trump Phone" — a gold-coloured Android smartphone priced at $499 (£370). But in March the Verge spotted signs the phone was moving forward: FCC listings for a smartphone with the trade name "T1" show that it was tested late last year, and granted certification by the FCC in January... [T]he phone was submitted for testing by another company entirely: Smart Gadgets Global, LLC... Smart Gadgets Global's websi…

"Plant seeds can sense the vibrations generated by falling raindrops," reports ScienceAlert, "and respond by waking from their state of dormancy to welcome the water, new research shows.... to germinate in 'anticipation' of the coming deluge." The finding, discovered by MIT mechanical engineers Nicholas Makris and Cadine Navarro, offers the first direct evidence that seeds and seedlings can sense and respond to sounds in nature... "The energy of the rain sound is enough to accelerate a seed's g…

Cisco has released an open-source tool "to trace the origins of AI models," reports SC World, "and compare model similarities for great visibility into the AI supply chain." [Cisco's Model Provenance Kit] is a Python toolkit and command-line interface (CLI) that looks at signals such as metadata and weights to create a "fingerprint" for AI models that can then be compared to other model fingerprints to determine potential shared origins. "Think of Model Provenance Kit as a DNA test for AI model…

All 20 of America's state-run healthcare marketplace sites "include advertising trackers that share information with Big Tech companies," reports Gizmodo, citing a report from Bloomberg: Per the report, seven million Americans bought their health insurance through state exchanges in 2026, and many of them may have had personal information shared with companies, including Meta, TikTok, Snap, Google, Nextdoor, and LinkedIn, among others. Some of the data collected and shared with those companies …

CNN reports on a "sudden surge of claimed sightings" of "unidentified figures averaging 8 feet tall in wooded areas" along Ohio's Mahoning River. "And it stopped just as quickly as it started," says Jeremiah Byron, host of the Bigfoot Society Podcast, which collected and mapped the reports .... Byron doesn't take every report at face value, making sure he talks to people directly before publicizing their claims. Once word got out about the reports in Ohio, so did the obvious fakes. "I started t…

A chain of 30 U.S. newspapers including the Sacramento Bee, the Miami Herald and the Idaho Statesman "has started to use a new AI tool that can summarize traditional articles and spit out different versions for different audiences," reports the New York Times. And the chain's reporters "are not happy about it." Journalists in many of the company's newsrooms are now withholding their bylines from articles created by the new tool, meaning that those articles will run with a generic credit rather …