LimeWire, once notorious for fueling online piracy, has acquired the rights to the infamously disastrous Fyre Festival brand. "LimeWire Acquires Fyre Festival Brand -- What Could Possibly Go Wrong?" the company titled its news release.

LimeWire said it would "unveil a reimagined vision for Fyre -- one that expands beyond the digital realm and taps into real-world experiences, community, and surprise." No additional details were announced about the relaunch.

"Fyre became a symbol of hype gone wrong, but it also made history," LimeWire CEO Julian Zehetmayr said. "We're not bringing the festival back -- we're bringing the brand and the meme back to life. This time with real experiences, and without the cheese sandwiches."

Sony has quietly introduced a revised PlayStation 5 Digital Edition that reduces internal storage from 1TB to 825GB while maintaining the same 499 Euro ($590) price point. The CFI-2116 revision has appeared on Amazon listings across Italy, Germany, Spain and France without official announcement from Sony.

The storage downgrade returns the console to its original 825GB capacity last seen in the launch PlayStation 5 before the Slim models increased storage to 1TB. Users lose approximately 175 of usable space in the new revision. Amazon Germany lists October 23 as the delivery date for units already available for purchase. The change affects only the Digital Edition while the disc version remains unchanged at 1TB. The revision follows Sony's September price increase of $50 across PlayStation 5 models citing economic conditions.

Fiverr is laying off 250 employees, or about 30% of its workforce, as it restructures to become an "AI-first" company. "We are launching a transformation for Fiverr, to turn Fiverr into an AI-first company that's leaner, faster, with a modern AI-focused tech infrastructure, a smaller team, each with substantially greater productivity, and far fewer management layers," CEO Micha Kaufman said. Reuters reports: While it isn't clear what kinds of jobs will be impacted, Fiverr operates a self-service digital marketplace where freelancers can connect with businesses or individuals requiring digital services like graphic design, editing or programming. Most processes on the platform take place with minimal employee intervention as ordering, delivery and payments are automated.

The company's name comes from most gigs starting at $5 initially, but as the business grew, the firm has introduced subscription services and raised the bar for service prices. Fiverr said it does not expect the job cuts to materially impact business activities across the marketplace in the near term and plans to reinvest part of the savings in the business.

The Internet Archive has reached a confidential settlement with Universal Music Group and other major labels, "ending a closely watched copyright battle over the nonprofit's effort to digitize and stream historic recordings," reports the San Francisco Chronicle. From the report: The case (PDF), UMG Recordings, Inc. v. Internet Archive, targeted the Archive's Great 78 Project, an initiative to digitize more than 400,000 fragile shellac records from the early 20th century. The collection includes music by artists such as Frank Sinatra, Ella Fitzgerald and Billie Holiday, and has been made available online for free public access. Record labels including Universal, Sony Music Entertainment and Capitol Records had sought $621 million in damages, arguing the Archive's streaming of these recordings constituted copyright infringement.

The Internet Archive, based in San Francisco's Richmond District, describes itself as a digital library dedicated to providing "universal access to all knowledge." Its director of library services, Chris Freeland, acknowledged the settlement in a brief statement. "The parties have reached a confidential resolution of all claims and will have no further public comment on this matter," he wrote.

Lead times for high-capacity hard drives have exceeded 52 weeks as AI workloads drive unprecedented demand for warm storage that sits between fast SSDs and offline tape archives, according to TrendForce. Western Digital notified customers of price increases across its entire hard drive portfolio citing demand for "every capacity" in its product line.

The shortage stems from AI infrastructure requirements including training datasets, model checkpoints and inference logs that consume petabytes of storage space. These files are too large for primary SSD storage but must remain accessible for quick retrieval. Hard drive manufacturers have not significantly expanded production capacity in approximately a decade. Cloud service providers are evaluating QLC SSDs for cold data storage despite costs remaining four to five times higher per gigabyte than mechanical drives. Memory suppliers are developing SSD products specifically for this intermediate storage tier.

"These are the last days of social media as we know it," argues a humanities lecturer from University College Cork exploring where technology and culture intersect, warning they could become lingering derelicts "haunted by bots and the echo of once-human chatter..."

"Whatever remains of genuine, human content is increasingly sidelined by algorithmic prioritization, receiving fewer interactions than the engineered content and AI slop optimized solely for clicks... " In recent years, Facebook and other platforms that facilitate billions of daily interactions have slowly morphed into the internet's largest repositories of AI-generated spam. Research has found what users plainly see: tens of thousands of machine-written posts now flood public groups — pushing scams, chasing clicks — with clickbait headlines, half-coherent listicles and hazy lifestyle images stitched together in AI tools like Midjourney... While content proliferates, engagement is evaporating. Average interaction rates across major platforms are declining fast: Facebook and X posts now scrape an average 0.15% engagement, while Instagram has dropped 24% year-on-year. Even TikTok has begun to plateau. People aren't connecting or conversing on social media like they used to; they're just wading through slop, that is, low-effort, low-quality content produced at scale, often with AI, for engagement.

And much of it is slop: Less than half of American adults now rate the information they see on social media as "mostly reliable" — down from roughly two-thirds in the mid-2010s... Platforms have little incentive to stem the tide. Synthetic accounts are cheap, tireless and lucrative because they never demand wages or unionize. Systems designed to surface peer-to-peer engagement are now systematically filtering out such activity, because what counts as engagement has changed. Engagement is now about raw user attention — time spent, impressions, scroll velocity — and the net effect is an online world in which you are constantly being addressed but never truly spoken to.
"These are the last days of social media, not because we lack content," the article suggests, "but because the attention economy has neared its outer limit — we have exhausted the capacity to care..." Social media giants have stopped growing exponentially, while a significant proportion of 18- to 34-year-olds even took deliberate mental health breaks from social media in 2024, according to an American Psychiatric Association poll.) And "Some creators are quitting, too. Competing with synthetic performers who never sleep, they find the visibility race not merely tiring but absurd."

Yet his 5,000-word essay predicts social media's death rattle "will not be a bang but a shrug," since "the model is splintering, and users are drifting toward smaller, slower, more private spaces, like group chats, Discord servers and federated microblogs — a billion little gardens." Intentional, opt-in micro-communities are rising in their place — like Patreon collectives and Substack newsletters — where creators chase depth over scale, retention over virality. A writer with 10,000 devoted subscribers can potentially earn more and burn out less than one with a million passive followers on Instagram... Even the big platforms sense the turning tide. Instagram has begun emphasizing DMs, X is pushing subscriber-only circles and TikTok is experimenting with private communities. Behind these developments is an implicit acknowledgement that the infinite scroll, stuffed with bots and synthetic sludge, is approaching the limit of what humans will tolerate....

The most radical redesign of social media might be the most familiar: What if we treated these platforms as public utilities rather than private casinos...? Imagine social media platforms with transparent algorithms subject to public audit, user representation on governance boards, revenue models based on public funding or member dues rather than surveillance advertising, mandates to serve democratic discourse rather than maximize engagement, and regular impact assessments that measure not just usage but societal effects... This could take multiple forms, like municipal platforms for local civic engagement, professionally focused networks run by trade associations, and educational spaces managed by public library systems... We need to "rewild the internet," as Maria Farrell and Robin Berjon mentioned in a Noema essay.

We need governance scaffolding, shared institutions that make decentralization viable at scale... [R]eal change will come when platforms are rewarded for serving the public interest. This could mean tying tax breaks or public procurement eligibility to the implementation of transparent, user-controllable algorithms. It could mean funding research into alternative recommender systems and making those tools open-source and interoperable. Most radically, it could involve certifying platforms based on civic impact, rewarding those that prioritize user autonomy and trust over sheer engagement.
"Social media as we know it is dying, but we're not condemned to its ruins. We are capable of building better — smaller, slower, more intentional, more accountable — spaces for digital interaction, spaces..."

"The last days of social media might be the first days of something more human: a web that remembers why we came online in the first place — not to be harvested but to be heard, not to go viral but to find our people, not to scroll but to connect. We built these systems, and we can certainly build better ones."

An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Intercept: The company behind the Proton Mail email service, Proton, describes itself as a "neutral and safe haven for your personal data, committed to defending your freedom." But last month, Proton disabled email accounts belonging to journalists reporting on security breaches of various South Korean government computer systems following a complaint by an unspecified cybersecurity agency. After a public outcry, and multiple weeks, the journalists' accounts were eventually reinstated -- but the reporters and editors involved still want answers on how and why Proton decided to shut down the accounts in the first place.

Martin Shelton, deputy director of digital security at the Freedom of the Press Foundation, highlighted that numerous newsrooms use Proton's services as alternatives to something like Gmail "specifically to avoid situations like this," pointing out that "While it's good to see that Proton is reconsidering account suspensions, journalists are among the users who need these and similar tools most." Newsrooms like The Intercept, the Boston Globe, and the Tampa Bay Times all rely on Proton Mail for emailed tip submissions. Shelton noted that perhaps Proton should "prioritize responding to journalists about account suspensions privately, rather than when they go viral." On Reddit, Proton's official account stated that "Proton did not knowingly block journalists' email accounts" and that the "situation has unfortunately been blown out of proportion."

The two journalists whose accounts were disabled were working on an article published in the August issue of the long-running hacker zine Phrack. The story described how a sophisticated hacking operation -- what's known in cybersecurity parlance as an APT, or advanced persistent threat -- had wormed its way into a number of South Korean computer networks, including those of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and the military Defense Counterintelligence Command, or DCC. The journalists, who published their story under the names Saber and cyb0rg, describe the hack as being consistent with the work of Kimsuky, a notorious North Korean state-backed APT sanctioned by the U.S. Treasury Department in 2023. As they pieced the story together, emails viewed by The Intercept show that the authors followed cybersecurity best practices and conducted what's known as responsible disclosure: notifying affected parties that a vulnerability has been discovered in their systems prior to publicizing the incident. Phrack said the account suspensions created a "real impact to the author. The author was unable to answer media requests about the article." Phrack noted that the co-authors were already working with affected South Korean organizations on responsible disclosure and system fixes. "All this was denied and ruined by Proton," Phrack stated.

Phrack editors said that the incident leaves them "concerned what this means to other whistleblowers or journalists. The community needs assurance that Proton does not disable accounts unless Proton has a court order or the crime (or ToS violation) is apparent."

The Swiss government could soon require service providers with more than 5,000 users to collect government-issued identification, retain subscriber data for six months and, in many cases, disable encryption. From a report: The proposal, which is not subject to parliamentary approval, has alarmed privacy and digital-freedoms advocates worldwide because of how it will destroy anonymity online, including for people located outside of Switzerland. A large number of virtual private network (VPN) companies and other privacy-preserving firms are headquartered in the country because it has historically had liberal digital privacy laws alongside its famously discreet banking ecosystem.

Proton, which offers secure and end-to-end encrypted email along with an ultra-private VPN and cloud storage, announced on July 23 that it is moving most of its physical infrastructure out of Switzerland due to the proposed law. The company is investing more than $117 million in the European Union, the announcement said, and plans to help develop a "sovereign EuroStack for the future of our home continent." Switzerland is not a member of the EU. Proton said the decision was prompted by the Swiss government's attempt to "introduce mass surveillance."

An anonymous reader shares a report: An attempt to ban social media in Nepal ended this week in violent protest with the prime minister ousted, the Parliament in flames and soldiers on the streets of the capital. Now, the very technology the government tried to outlaw is being harnessed to help select the country's next leader, as more than 100,000 citizens are meeting regularly in a virtual chat room to debate the country's future.

More than 30 people were killed in clashes with the police during youth-led protests that convulsed the capital in a paroxysm of outrage over wealth inequality, corruption and plans to ban some social media platforms. After the government's collapse on Tuesday, the military imposed a curfew across the capital, Kathmandu, and restricted large gatherings. With the country in political limbo and no obvious next leader in place, Nepalis have taken to Discord, a platform popularized by video gamers, to enact the digital version of a national convention.

"The Parliament of Nepal right now is Discord," said Sid Ghimiri, 23, a content creator from Kathmandu, describing how the site has become the center of the nation's political decision making. The conversation inside the Discord channel, taking place in a combination of voice, video, and text chats, is so consequential that it is being discussed on national television and live streamed on news sites.

"President Trump's One Big Beautiful Bill Act may have quietly changed the economics of the creator economy," reports the Hollywood Reporter. The Treasury Department has ruled this past week that digital creators, including podcasters, influencers, and streamers, qualify for the U.S. "no tax on tips" policy, allowing them to deduct tipped income up to $25,000. From the report: The change could cause digital creators to rethink how they seek income. Platforms like TikTok, YouTube, Twitch and Snapchat all offer a variety of ways for creators to generate income, be it a share of advertising revenue or creator funding programs, or options to launch subscription tiers for their channels or profiles. But they also give creators the option to turn on tips or gifts. If revenue from user tips or gifts is eligible, while recurring subscription revenue is not, it could shift how streamers, podcasters or influencers ask their followers to support them.

To be sure, there are limitations: The tax deduction is capped at $25,000 per year, and it begins to phase out at $150,000 in income for single filers and $300,000 for married joint filers. The act also provides that tips do not qualify for the deduction if they are received "in the course of certain specified trades or businesses -- including the fields of health, performing arts, and athletics," Treasury says, further limiting the deduction opportunity for some in entertainment-adjacent lines of work.

But by making influencers, Twitch streamers and podcasters eligible, the administration has nonetheless changed the incentive structure for digital creators, and the ramifications could be felt across the creator economy in the name of tax efficiency (Don't be surprised if users are asked to like, subscribe, and tip). Platforms may also develop more ways to more prominently feature tips and gifts, pushing creators to add more opportunities for that income. But the inclusion of digital creators is also a recognition of how the power dynamics have shifted in media.

Snapchat has been accused by a Danish research organisation of leaving an "overwhelming number" of drug dealers to openly operate on Snapchat, making it easy for children to buy substances including cocaine, opioids and MDMA. The Guardian: The social media platform has said it proactively uses technology to filter out profiles selling drugs. However, research by Digitalt Ansvar (Digital Accountability), a Danish research organisation that promotes responsible digital development, has found evidence of a failure to moderate drug-related language in usernames. It also accused Snapchat of failing to respond adequately to reports of profiles openly selling drugs.

Researchers used profiles of 13-year-olds and found a multitude of people selling drugs on Snapchat under usernames featuring keywords such as "coke," "weed" and "molly." When researchers reported 40 of these profiles to Snapchat, the company removed only 10 of them. The other 30 reports were rejected, they said.

Researchers in China have developed a "DNA cassette," a retro-styled plastic tape embedded with synthetic DNA strands that can store up to 36 petabytes of digital data -- enough to hold every song ever recorded. New Scientist reports: Xingyu Jiang at the Southern University of Science and Technology in Guangdong, China, and his colleagues created the cassette by printing synthetic DNA molecules on to a plastic tape. "We can design its sequence so that the order of the DNA bases (A, T, C, G) represents digital information, just like 0s and 1s in a computer," he says. This means it can store any type of digital file, whether text, image, audio or video.

One problem with previous DNA storage techniques is the difficulty in accessing data, so the team then overlaid a series of barcodes on the tape to assist with retrieval. "This process is like finding a book in the library," says Jiang. "We first need to find the shelf corresponding to the book, then find the book on the corresponding shelf."

The tape is also coated in what the researchers describe as "crystal armor" made of zeolitic imidazolate, which prevents the DNA bonds from breaking down. That means the cassette could store data for centuries without deteriorating. While a traditional cassette tape could boast around 12 songs on each side, 100 meters of the new DNA cassette tape can hold more than 3 billion pieces of music, at 10 megabytes a song. The total data storage capacity is 36 petabytes of data -- equivalent to 36,000 terabyte hard drives. The research has been published in the journal Science Advances.

Cindy Cohn, who has led the Electronic Frontier Foundation as Executive Director for the past decade and has been with the organization for over 25 years, will step down by mid-2026. The digital rights group is launching a search for her successor. From a press release: "It's been the honor of my life to help EFF grow and become the strong, effective organization it is today, but it's time to make space for new leadership. I also want to get back into the fight for civil liberties more directly than I can as the executive director of a thriving 125-person organization," Cohn said. "I'm incredibly proud of all that we've built and accomplished. One of our former interns once called EFF the joyful warriors for internet freedom and I have always loved that characterization." "I know EFF's lawyers, activists and technologists will continue standing up for freedom, justice and innovation whether we're fighting trolls, bullies, corporate oligarchs, clueless legislators or outright dictators," she added. [...]

Cohn said she made the decision to step down more than a year ago, and later informed EFF's Board of Directors and executive staff. The Board of Directors has assembled a search committee, which in turn has engaged leadership advisory firm Russell Reynolds Associates to conduct a search for EFF's new executive director. Inquiries about the search can be directed to EFF@russellreynolds.com. The search committee hopes to hire someone next spring, with Cohn planning to remain at EFF for a transition period through early summer.

Four years ago a small Microsoft Research team started creating an analog optical computer. They used commercially available parts like sensors from smartphone cameras, optical lenses, and micro-LED lights finer than a human hair. "As the light passes through the sensor at different intensities, the analog optical computer can add and multiply numbers," explains a Microsoft blog post.

They envision the technology scaling to a computer that for certain problems is 100X faster and 100X more energy efficient — running AI workloads "with a fraction of the energy needed and at much greater speed than the GPUs running today's large language models." The results are described in a paper published in the scientific journal Nature, according to the blog post: At the same time, Microsoft is publicly sharing its "optimization solver" algorithm and the "digital twin" it developed so that researchers from other organizations can investigate this new computing paradigm and propose new problems to solve and new ways to solve them. Francesca Parmigiani, a Microsoft principal research manager who leads the team developing the AOC, explained that the digital twin is a computer-based model that mimics how the real analog optical computer [or "AOC"] behaves; it simulates the same inputs, processes and outputs, but in a digital environment — like a software version of the hardware. This allowed the Microsoft researchers and collaborators to solve optimization problems at a scale that would be useful in real situations. This digital twin will also allow other users to experiment with how problems, either in optimization or in AI, would be mapped and run on the analog optical computer hardware. "To have the kind of success we are dreaming about, we need other researchers to be experimenting and thinking about how this hardware can be used," Parmigiani said.

Hitesh Ballani, who directs research on future AI infrastructure at the Microsoft Research lab in Cambridge, U.K. said he believes the AOC could be a game changer. "We have actually delivered on the hard promise that it can make a big difference in two real-world problems in two domains, banking and healthcare," he said. Further, "we opened up a whole new application domain by showing that exactly the same hardware could serve AI models, too." In the healthcare example described in the Nature paper, the researchers used the digital twin to reconstruct MRI scans with a good degree of accuracy. The research indicates that the device could theoretically cut the time it takes to do those scans from 30 minutes to five. In the banking example, the AOC succeeded in resolving a complex optimization test case with a high degree of accuracy...

As researchers refine the AOC, adding more and more micro-LEDs, it could eventually have millions or even more than a billion weights. At the same time, it should get smaller and smaller as parts are miniaturized, researchers say.

Cybersecurity company ESET thought they'd discovered the first AI-powered ransomware in the wild, which they'd dubbed "PromptLock". But it turned out to be the work of university security researchers...

"Unlike conventional malware, the prototype only requires natural language prompts embedded in the binary," the researchers write in a research paper, calling it "Ransomware 3.0: Self-Composing and LLM-Orchestrated." Their prototype "uses the gpt-oss:20b model from OpenAI locally" (using the Ollama API) to "generate malicious Lua scripts on the fly." Tom's Hardware said that would help PromptLock evade detection: If they had to call an API on [OpenAI's] servers every time they generate one of these scripts, the jig would be up. The pitfalls of vibe coding don't really apply, either, since the scripts are running on someone else's system.
The whole thing was actually an experiment by researchers at NYU's Tandon School of Engineering. So "While it is the first to be AI-powered," the school said in an announcement, "the ransomware prototype is a proof-of-concept that is non-functional outside of the contained lab environment."

An NYU spokesperson told Tom's Hardware a Ransomware 3.0 sample was uploaded to malware-analsys platform VirusTotal, and then picked up by the ESET researchers by mistake: But the malware does work: NYU said "a simulation malicious AI system developed by the Tandon team carried out all four phases of ransomware attacks — mapping systems, identifying valuable files, stealing or encrypting data, and generating ransom notes — across personal computers, enterprise servers, and industrial control systems." Is that worrisome? Absolutely. But there's a significant difference between academic researchers demonstrating a proof-of-concept and legitimate hackers using that same technique in real-world attacks. Now the study will likely inspire the ne'er-do-wells to adopt similar approaches, especially since it seems to be remarkably affordable.

"The economic implications reveal how AI could reshape ransomware operations," the NYU researchers said. "Traditional campaigns require skilled development teams, custom malware creation, and substantial infrastructure investments. The prototype consumed approximately 23,000 AI tokens per complete attack execution, equivalent to roughly $0.70 using commercial API services running flagship models."

As if that weren't enough, the researchers said that "open-source AI models eliminate these costs entirely," so ransomware operators won't even have to shell out the 70 cents needed to work with commercial LLM service providers...
"The study serves as an early warning to help defenders prepare countermeasures," NYU said in an announcement, "before bad actors adopt these AI-powered techniques."

ESET posted on Mastodon that "Nonetheless, our findings remain valid — the discovered samples represent the first known case of AI-powered ransomware."

And the ESET researcher who'd mistakenly thought the ransomware was "in the wild" had warned that looking ahead, ransomware "will likely become more sophisticated, faster spreading, and harder to detect.... This makes cybersecurity awareness, regular backups, and stronger digital hygiene more important than ever."

"A raft of articles have been retracted from publications including Business Insider and Wired in recent month," reports the Washington Post, "with links between them suggesting a possible broader scheme to pass off fake stories that these outlets now suspect were written using artificial intelligence." A Washington Post probe into the retractions found a connection between Onyeka Nwelue, the purported author of one of 38 essays removed this week by Business Insider, and someone using the name Margaux Blanchard, two of whose stories were previously removed by the same outlet. In recent months SFGate, Index on Censorship and Wired also retracted articles under the Blanchard byline, after it was identified as bogus by the British publication Press Gazette...

Business Insider Editor in Chief Jamie Heller explained to staff Tuesday in an email, obtained by The Post, that the report of a phony writer spurred a fuller investigation that turned up dozens of suspicious articles under various bylines. "We recently learned that a freelance contributor misrepresented their identity in two first-person essays written for Business Insider. As soon as this came to light, we took down the essays and began an investigation," Heller said. "As part of this process, we've removed additional first-person essays from the site due to concerns about the authors' identity or veracity. No news articles or videos were found to have this issue." On Tuesday Business Insider removed 38 pieces that had been published under bylines other than Blanchard. Business Insider deleted the author pages of 19 individuals, including Blanchard and Nwelue, and replaced their essays with editor's notes.

The website's investigation involved reviewing "tens of thousands of records," Business Insider spokesperson Ari Isaacman D'Angelo said in a statement to The Post. But it hadn't determined whether artificial intelligence was used to produce the yanked essays, she said, noting that AI-detection tools are often unreliable... Essays under [Nate] Giovanni's byline feature contradictory information. One piece, published in December 2024, refers to the author having two teenage daughters and a two-and-a-half-year-old son. Another, published three months later mentions two sons, aged eight and nine. Pieces that ran in May and July — about house-sitting around the world and applying to PhD programs — make no mention of a family at all...

On Aug. 21, Wired wrote a longer mea culpa about the article it published under Blanchard's name, with the headline "How WIRED Got Rolled by an AI Freelancer." "If anyone should be able to catch an AI scammer, it's WIRED," the publication wrote. ["In fact we do, all the time. Our editors receive transparently AI-generated pitches on a regular basis, and we reject them accordingly..."] "Unfortunately, one got through," referring to a story that ran under Blanchard's byline in May about two people who were married in the video game Minecraft.
The site Index on Censorship also published an article under the Blanchard byline about threats to journalists in Guatemala. "In the age of very intelligent AI it's clear we will have to look at things differently," the site's editor told the Washington Post.

The Post's article notes that one sign the pitches were AI-generated "is that while they sounded interesting, they featured details that were erroneous — including fictitious locales." Reached for a comment, one of the authors told the Post "Don't mention my name in your stupid article," claiming their acocunt was recently "compromised" (though their X.com account had also recently tweeted one of their articles.) But another author emailed the Post from their actual academic email address, saying they had no connection to the Gmail account The Post had been corresponding with. And here's how the person at that Gmail account responded to a follow-up query from the Post.

"What is one to do? With a few savvy prompts, AI could probably generate a 'long-lost' novel by Proust."

In 2016 comedian Dave Chappelle made headlines by requiring concert attendees to lock their cellphones in a pouch to prevent recording.

Nine years later those pouches (made by tech startup Yondr) are required for at least 2.5 million students in America, reports CBS News, "and the company said the number could triple after the 2025 numbers are tallied in about three months... Students in 35 states, including New York, Florida, Texas, California, Massachusetts and Georgia, now contend with laws or rules limiting phones and other electronic devices in school."

For example, The Yonkers School District purchased about 11,000 pouches, according to the article, "to comply with the statewide mandate that bans phones in classrooms." The pouch, which students carry with them, is locked and unlocked using magnets affixed to the entrance of the school and outside the main office... ["Some students have reported long lines and disruption at their schools," the article notes later, "as they wait to open their pouches." But on the first day of school at Yonkers, one student said the lines actually went pretty smoothly, and they ended up having a live conversation with a friend during lunch and "felt human"...] Other students were not so enthralled by the pouch; some reported seeing classmates bypass the Yondr pouch by using their Apple watches, buying "burner" phones and putting them in the pouch, breaking the pouch and other tricks to get to their phones.

[Yondr CEO Graham] Dugoni acknowledged that there will always be some students who can figure out how to get around the restrictions. The purpose of the pouches, he said, was to create a culture change in a school and create an environment conducive to their learning and development. More than 70% of high school teachers in the U.S. say cellphones are a major classroom distraction, according to the Pew Research Center Center.
Yondr CEO Graham Dugoni uses a flip phone, the article points out, and says "Our whole perspective is that it's not taking something away from students, it's giving them something back."

He says his larger mission is to create chances for people "to experience life outside of a fully digital realm" — and that Yondr now has school partners in all 50 U.S. states, and in 45 different countries: The cost of buying the pouches — roughly $25-30 per student — has set off debates around how schools should be spending their limited budgets. It's a particular issue for districts struggling with crumbling infrastructure, limited textbooks and access to other technology needed to learn...Districts in various states have reported spending from $26,000 to over $370,000, with Cincinnati Schools saying they spent $500,000 to provide pouches for students in grades 7-12.

Apple's $3,500 Vision Pro is finding real traction in niche enterprise use, like CAE's pilot training, Lowe's kitchen design visualization, and Dassault's engineering workflows. "Over the last few weeks, I had an opportunity to try out some of those applications, and they are game-changers, albeit within their specific domains," writes Steven Rosenbush via the Wall Street Journal. "Companies should pay attention now to what's going on in these niche markets. Based on what I saw, these systems are having an impact on the way users integrate content development and engineering, which has implications for the way companies approach roles, teams and workflow." From the report: Home-improvement retailer Lowe's has deployed the Vision Pro at five locations in the San Francisco Bay Area and five locations in the Austin, Texas area. Customers use them to visualize how design ideas will look in their actual kitchen. The company plans to scale the effort to 100 of approximately 1,700 stores by the end of the year, eventually ramping up to 400 locations in markets with sufficient scale to justify the investment, Chief Digital and Information Officer Seemantini Godbole told me. [...]

Dassault Systemes, the French industrial software company, has long created virtual worlds for commercial use. Scientists, manufacturing experts, product managers and others use its platforms to design and engineer molecules for drug development, as well as data centers, factories, aircraft and electric cars. The 3DExperience platform was launched more than a decade ago, pulling together a range of Dassault brands including 3DExcite on the premise that "everything is going to become an experience," 3DExcite Chief Executive Tom Acland said. In February, Dassault Systemes and Apple announced a collaboration to produce the 3DLive App, which went live February 7. Users include Hyundai, Virgin Galactic and Deutsche Aircraft, he said.

[...] Canadian aircraft training company CAE is using Vision Pro to provide pilot training that complements full-motion flight simulator experience required for certification and recurrent checks, according to Chief Technology and Product Officer Emmanuel Levitte. The company has employed mixed reality and immersive training for at least 10 years. The Vision Pro has unlocked new capabilities, he said. The display is as sharp and readable as the controls in a real cockpit, which Levitte found not to be the case with other devices. The haptic feedback and audio quality also contribute to a more realistic training experience, he said. Remote crew members will also be able to be co-located virtually, enabling training that was previously only possible when individuals were physically in the same cockpit, according to Levitte.

Uber's Indian arm has started using its app to offer rideshare and delivery drivers the chance to make money by classifying data used by AI systems. From a report: Megha Yethadka, global head of Uber AI Solutions, revealed the new gigs in a Thursday LinkedIn post in which she said drivers sometimes have downtime during the day or might want to make some extra cash after hours. Yethadka said the work can involve reviewing photos, counting objects, classifying text, recording audio, or digitizing receipts.

She said the gigs are "Powering our enterprise customers worldwide for their gen AI models or consumer applications." "Until now, these tasks were completed by independent contractors outside the app," Yethadka wrote. "The early results are very promising, and we're eager to scale this further." In an accompanying video, she mentioned "worldwide" expansion for the offering. Prabhjeet Singh, Uber's president for India and South Asia, said the gigs are available in 12 cities and that "tens of thousands of drivers" are already performing what Uber calls "digital tasks."

A UK government trial of Microsoft's M365 Copilot found no clear productivity gains despite user satisfaction with tasks like summarizing meetings and writing emails. While the tool sped up some routine work, it actually slowed down more complex tasks like Excel analysis and PowerPoint creation, often producing lower-quality results. The Register reports: The Department for Business and Trade received 1,000 licenses for use between October and December 2024, with the majority of these allocated to volunteers and 30 percent to randomly selected participants. Some 300 of these people consented to their data being analyzed. An evaluation of time savings, quality assurance, and productivity was then calculated in the assessment (PDF). Overall, 72 percent of users were satisfied or very satisfied with their digital assistant and voiced disappointment when the test ended. However, the reality of productivity gains was more nuanced than Microsoft's marketing materials might suggest. Around two-thirds of the employees in the trial used M365 at least once a week, and 30 percent used it at least once a day -- which doesn't sound like great value for money. [...]

According to the M365 Copilot monitoring dashboard made available in the trial, an average of 72 M365 Copilot actions were taken per user. "Based on there being 63 working days during the pilot, this is an average of 1.14 M365 Copilot actions taken per user per day," the study says. Word, Teams, and Outlook were the most used, and Loop and OneNote usage rates were described as "very low," less than 1 percent and 3 percent per day, respectively. "PowerPoint and Excel were slightly more popular; both experienced peak activity of 7 percent of license holders using M365 Copilot in a single day within those applications," the study states. The three most popular tasks involved transcribing or summarizing a meeting, writing an email, and summarizing written comms. These also had the highest satisfaction levels, we're told.

Participants were asked to record the time taken for each task with M365 Copilot compared to colleagues not involved in the trial. The assessment report adds: "Observed task sessions showed that M365 Copilot users produced summaries of reports and wrote emails faster and to a higher quality and accuracy than non-users. Time savings observed for writing emails were extremely small. "However, M365 Copilot users completed Excel data analysis more slowly and to a worse quality and accuracy than non-users, conflicting time savings reported in the diary study for data analysis. PowerPoint slides [were] over 7 minutes faster on average, but to a worse quality and accuracy than non-users." This means corrective action was required.

A cross-section of participants was asked questions in an interview -- qualitative findings -- and they claimed routine admin tasks could be carried out with greater efficiency with M365 Copilot, letting them "redirect time towards tasks seen as more strategic or of higher value, while others reported using these time savings to attend training sessions or take a lunchtime walk." Nevertheless, M365 Copilot did not necessarily make them more productive, the assessment found. This is something Microsoft has worked on with customers to quantify the benefits and justify the greater expense of a license for M365 Copilot.