It was 60 years ago when William Shatner — born in 1931 — portrayed Captain Kirk in the TV series Star Trek. Shatner turns 95 today — and celebrated by posting a picture of himself smoking a cigar.

"At 95, I'm still smokin'!" Shatner joked, adding that in life he'd learned two things. "Never waste a good cigar. Never trust anyone who says you should 'act your age.'"

For more celebrations, Paramount's free/ad-supported streaming platform Pluto TV announced a "Trek TV takeover birthday celebration" that will run through April 3rd, according to TrekMovie.com, with marathon of Star Trek movies and TV shows — and even that time he was roasted on Comedy Central. ("Freeâ½ My favorite price!" Shatner quipped on X.com.)

Shatner still remains a popular celebrity, even travelling to space five years ago on a Blue Origin flight past the Kármán line. Since then he's led a cruise to Antarctica — and even performed an alternate take of Captain Kirk's final scene on the Jimmy Fallon show.

And this week Shatner (along with hundreds of thousands attendees) appeared at Orlando's MegaCon — and shared stories about his life with Orlando Weekly: Shatner: Last month, I was on board a cruise ship, and they said the only thing I had to do over the next three days, "before we let you go home," is sing "Rocket Man." So I thought, "I'm not going to sing 'Rocket Man' the same way that what's-his-name did. ... So, I looked at the song very carefully to see if I could find what actors call a throughline. What is the character singing? What is he singing about? And so I look through all of these weird lyrics, and all of a sudden, the word sticks out to me: "alone." So I say to the band members, "OK, let's make this song about being alone in space." And I work on it with the band and the musicians, and again on a Saturday night, I perform the number, and 4,000 people stand up and applaud "Rocket Man." And they won't let me off the stage, again and again. Four times, I get a standing ovation, wild.

And that's the progression for me, of science fiction for me, as exemplified by this song. The song went from superficial to something of depth and meaning... It touched people enough for them to stand up and applaud, and I realized that is the story of science fiction... Science fiction with all its great technology has evolved into great storytelling that reaches people in a manner that is very difficult for other types of drama to do.
Shatner answered questions from Slashdot readers in 2002 ("My life is my statement...") and again in 2011. ("I used to try to assemble computers way back when and they came out looking like a skateboard...")

And judging by his X.com posts, Shatner is now involved in early testing of the site's upcoming digital payment system X Money.

China's orbital outpost Tiangong was completed in 2022 and is hosting up to three astronauts at a time, reports CNN.

But meanwhile U.S. lawmakers are now signaling there's not time to develop and launch a replacement for the International Space Station — considered the signal most expensive object ever built — before its deorbiting in 2030. A recent Senate bill calls for the U.S. to continue funding it as late as 2032, but that bill still awaits approval from the U.S. Senate and the House.

But some private space companies are already building their alternatives: Private companies that are in the early design and mockup phase of developing these space stations are still waiting on NASA for guidance — and money... [NASA's "Requests for Proposals"] were delayed, in part because it took all of 2025 to cinch a confirmation for Trump's on-again-off-again pick for NASA administrator, Jared Isaacman [confirmed in December]... Similarly, 2025 saw a 45-day government shutdown, the longest in history — adding another hiccup in the space agency's plans to begin formally soliciting proposals from the private sector. Companies now expect that NASA will issue its Request for Proposals in late March or early April, one CEO told CNN...

Several commercial outfits have recently announced big funding influxes aimed at speeding up the development and launch of new orbiting outposts. Houston-based Axiom Space announced a $350 million funding round last month. Its California-based competitor Vast then notched a $500 million raise in early March. Vast is determined to launch a bare-bones station to orbit as soon as possible, with or without federal input, according to the company. "Our approach is to actually not wait for (NASA) and get going and build a minimum viable product, single-module space station called Haven-1, which we're launching into orbit next year," Vast CEO Max Haot told CNN in a phone interview earlier this month. Similarly, Axiom Space is working toward a 2028 launch date for a module that it plans to initially attach to the ISS before breaking off to orbit on its own. A spokesperson told CNN that it the company is "committed" to winning the NASA contract money and may continue pursing such goals even without contract awards.

Still, there's lingering doubt that any of the companies pursuing space stations will be able to stay afloat without securing a coveted NASA contract or at least cinching significant business from the public sector.
The article includes "Another complicating fact: Russia, the United States' primary partner on the ISS, has not pledged to keep operating its half of the space station past 2028." NASA will eventually evaluate proposals for an ISS alternative from Vast, Axiom Space, Jeff Bezos' Blue Origin, Max Space and several competitors including Voyager Technologies, CNN notes, ultimately handing out an estimated $1.5 billion in contracts between 2026 and 2031.

And while those companies may wait decades before a return on their investment, the article includes this quotes from the cofounder/general partner of Balerion Space Ventures, which led the fundraising for Vast. " What's obvious to us is you're going to have multiple vehicles with myriad companies go into space. You're going to have vehicles leaving from celestial bodies, like the moon. And we need a habitat."

Jeff Bezos "is in early talks to raise $100 billion," reports the Wall Street Journal, "for a new fund that would buy up manufacturing companies and seek to use AI technology to accelerate their path to automation."

"The Amazon.com founder is meeting with some of the world's largest asset managers to raise funding for the project." A few months ago, [Bezos] traveled to the Middle East to discuss the new fund with sovereign wealth representatives in the region. More recently, he went to Singapore to raise funding for the effort as well, according to people familiar with the matter. The fund, described in investor documents as a "manufacturing transformation vehicle," is aiming to buy companies in major industrial sectors such as chipmaking, defense and aerospace...

Bezos was recently appointed co-CEO of Project Prometheus, a new startup that is building artificial-intelligence models that can understand and simulate the physical world. Bezos plans to use the company's technology to boost the efficiency and profitability of businesses owned by the fund, a playbook that some investment firms are similarly deploying in sectors such as accounting and property management... [Prometheus has also hired employees from OpenAI and Google DeepMind, the article points out.]

While much of the AI revolution has been focused on large language models, billions of dollars have begun to flow to companies that are seeking to apply spatially focused AI systems toward industries including robotics and manufacturing... Amazon, one of [America's] largest employers, has closed in on the milestone of having as many robots as humans.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from the Times of Israel, written by journalist Emanuel Fabian: On Tuesday, March 10, a massive explosion shook the city of Beit Shemesh, just outside Jerusalem, in yet another Iranian ballistic missile attack during the ongoing war. Rescue services scrambled to the scene in search of possible casualties, though as it turned out, the projectile had struck a forested area just outside the city, around 500 meters from homes. On The Times of Israel's liveblog that day, I reported that the missile had hit an open area and no injuries were caused, citing the rescue services, as well as footage that emerged showing the massive explosion caused by the missile's warhead. But what I thought was a seemingly minor incident during the war has turned into days of harassment and death threats against me. Emanuel began receiving numerous emails, messages and phone calls from individuals urging him to change the report to say the missile had been intercepted. "It was indeed a little strange to receive the same question, about something relatively inconsequential, from two different people within a day," he said. The connection eventually became clear after he noticed two users on X responding to his story with apparent ties to Polymarket. "There are people saying that they have received word from you that the missile strike in Beit Shemesh on March 10th was in fact intercepted, is this true or did no such interaction occur?" one user wrote. Another asked, "Was there any video of the actual impact?"

The rules of this particular Polymarket bet state: "This market will resolve to 'Yes' if Iran initiates a drone, missile, or air strike on Israel's soil on the listed date in Israel Time (GMT+2). Otherwise, this market will resolve to 'No'." However, there is a clause: "Missiles or drones that are intercepted... will not be sufficient for a 'Yes' resolution, regardless of whether they land on Israeli territory or cause damage."

At that point, Emanuel realized his "minor report" of a missile strike had suddenly become part of a "betting war," with traders who had wagered 'No' on an Iranian strike on Israel on March 10 pressuring him to change the article so they could win their bets.

When he refused, some of the Polymarket gamblers escalated to harassment, fabricated messages, bribery attempts, and explicit threats against him and his family. "You have no idea how much you've put yourself at risk," wrote a user named Haim. "Today is the most significant day of your career. You have two choices: either believe that we have the capabilities, and after you make us lose $900,000 we will invest no less than that to finish you. Or end this with money in your pocket, and also earn back the life you had until now."

After receiving no response, Haim sent him another series of messages: "You are choosing to go to war knowing that you will lose your life as you've grown accustomed to it -- for nothing." He later added: "You have exactly a few hours left to fix your attempt at influencing [the market]. It would be stupid of you to ignore this." According to Emanuel, the messages also included detailed threats referencing his neighborhood, parents, and family.

Starting in September, even Android developers not in Google's Play Store will still be required to register with Google to distribute their apps in Brazil, Singapore, Indonesia, and Thailand, with Google continuing "to roll out these requirements globally" four months later. Even developers distributing Android apps on the web for sideloading will be required to register, pay Google a $25 fee, and provide a government ID.

But there's a new theory on what's secretly been motivating Google from an unnamed source in the "Keep Android Open" movement, writes long-time Slashdot reader destinyland: "You can't separate this really from their ongoing interactions with Epic and the settlement that they came to," they argue. Twelve days ago Epic Games and Google announced a new proposal for settling their long-running dispute over the legality of alternative app stores on Android phones. (Rather than agreeing to let third-party app stores into their Play Store, Google wants them to continue being sideloaded, promising in a blog post last week that they'll even offer a "more streamlined" and "simplified" sideloading alternative for rival app stores. "This Registered App Store program will begin outside of the US first, and we intend to bring it to the US as well, subject to court approval.")

So "developer verification" could be Google's fallback plan if U.S. courts fail to approve this. "If the Google Play Store has to allow any third-party repository app store, Google essentially has given up all control of the apps. But if they're able to claw back that control by requiring that all developers, no matter how they distribute their apps, have to register with Google — have to agree to their Terms & Conditions, pay them money, provide identification — then they have a large degree of indirect control over any app that can be developed for the entire platform."
But that plan threatens millions of people using the alternative F/OSS app distributor F-Droid, since Google also wants to have only one signature attached to Android apps. Marc Prud'hommeaux, a member of F-Droid's board of directors, says that "all of a sudden breaks all those versions of the application distributed through F-Droid or any other app store!"

Prud'hommeaux says they've told Google's Android team "You know perfectly well that you're killing F-Droid!" creating an "existential" threat to an app distributor "that has existed happily for over 10 years." But good things started happening when he created the website Keep Android Open: There's now a "huge backlog" of signers for an Open Letter that already includes EFF, the Software Freedom Conservancy, and the Free Software Foundation. He believes Android's existing Play Protect security "is completely sufficient to handle the particular scenarios they claim that developer verification is meant to address"...

The Keep Android Open site urges developers not to sign up for Android's early access program when it launches next week. (Instead, they're asking developers to respond to invites with an email about their concerns — and to spread the word to other developers and organizations in forums and social media posts.) There's also a petition at Change.org currently signed by 64,000 developers — adding 20,000 new signatures in the last 10 days. And "If you have an Android device, try installing F-Droid!" he adds. Google tracks how many people install these alternative app repositories, and a larger user base means greater consequences from any Android policy changes.

Plus, installing F-Droid "might be refreshing!" Prud'hommeaux says. "You don't see all the advertisements and promotions and scam and crapware stuff that you see in the commercial app stores!"

NBC News investigates North Korea's "wide-ranging effort to place remote workers at U.S. companies in order to funnel money back to its coffers and, in some cases, steal sensitive information."

And working with the FBI, one corporate security/investigations company decided to knowingly hire one of North Korea's remote workers — then "ship him a laptop and gain as much information as possible" about this "sprawling international employment scheme that is estimated to include hundreds of American companies, thousands of people and hundreds of millions of dollars per year." It worked.... Over a roughly three-month investigation, Nisos uncovered an apparent network of at least 20 North Korean operatives including "Jo" who had collectively applied to at least 160,000 roles. During that time, workers in the network — which some evidence showed were based in China — were employed by five U.S.-based companies and allegedly helped by an American citizen operating out of two nondescript suburban homes in Florida...

Nisos estimated that in about a year, "Jo", who was likely a newer member of the team, applied to about 5,000 jobs... "They attended interviews all day every day, and then once they secured a job, they would collect paychecks until they were terminated," [according to Jared Hudson, Nisos' chief technology officer]... With the ability to see which other U.S. companies Jo and his team were working for — all remote technology roles — Nisos' CEO, Ryan LaSalle, began making calls to their security teams to alert them of the fraud. "Most of the companies weren't aware of it, even if they had pretty robust security teams," LaSalle said. "It wasn't really high on the radar."
NBC News describes North Korea's 10-year effort — and its educational pipeline that steers promising students into "computer science and hacking training before being placed into cyberunits under military and state agencies, according to a recent report by DTEX, a risk-adaptive security and behavioral intelligence firm that tracks North Korea's cybercrime." In one case, a North Korean worker stole sensitive information related to U.S. military technology, according to the Justice Department. In another, an American accomplice obtained an ID that enabled access to government facilities, networks and systems. At least three organizations have been extorted and suffered hundreds of thousands of dollars in damages after proprietary information was posted online by IT workers... Analysts warn that North Korean IT workers are targeting larger organizations, increasing extortion attempts and seeking out employers that pay salaries in cryptocurrency. More recently, security researchers have uncovered fake job application platforms impersonating major U.S. cryptocurrency and AI firms, including Anthropic, designed to infect legitimate applicants' networks with malware to be utilized once hired. The global cybersecurity company CrowdStrike identified a 220% rise in 2025 in instances of North Koreans gaining fraudulent employment at Western companies to work remotely as developers...

The payoff flowing back to Pyongyang from these schemes is enormous. Some North Korean IT workers earn more than $300,000 per year, far more than they'd be able to earn domestically, with as much as 90% of their wages directed back to the regime, according to congressional testimony from Bruce Klinger, a former CIA deputy division chief for Korea. The United Nations estimates the schemes, which proliferated after the pandemic when more companies' workforces went remote, generate as much as $600 million annually, while a U.S. State Department-led sanctions monitoring assessment placed earnings for 2024 as high as $800 million... So far, at least 10 alleged U.S.-based facilitators have been federally charged, including one active-duty member of the U.S. Army, for their alleged roles in hosting laptop farms, laundering payments and moving proceeds through shell companies. At least six other alleged U.S. facilitators have been identified in court documents but not named...

"We believe there are many more hundreds of people out there who are participating in these schemes," said Rozhavsky, the FBI assistant director. "They could never pull this off if they didn't have willing facilitators in the U.S. helping them...." The scheme itself is also becoming more complex. North Korean IT teams are now subcontracting work to developers in Pakistan, Nigeria and India, expanding into fields like customer service, financial processing, insurance and translation services — roles far less scrutinized than software development.

There's a surprise in a new documentary about that Bigfoot film shot in 1967 by Roger Patterson, reports the Wall Street Journal.

Capturing Bigfoot "builds to a big reveal: freshly surfaced film that appears to show a woodsy dress rehearsal for one of the world's most enduring hoaxes." In the new footage — from a Kodak reel dating to 1966 — Patterson's camera tracks a man in costume, his brother-in-law, moving in a similar fashion to the figure in the 1967 shoot, which featured a different location and a bigger man with a more distinctive stride, according to the documentary. The test-run footage "is the work of a director with a vision," says Capturing Bigfoot director Marq Evans. He says the reel was given to him by a colleague at Olympic College in Bremerton, Wash., where Evans runs a documentary film program. The colleague found the film in a safe that belonged to her late father, who worked in a Boeing film lab and could have developed film discreetly.

With the long-buried footage in hand, Evans set out to explore the ripple effects from the Bigfoot film. Patterson, who died in 1972, hailed from the same region of Washington as Evans; the documentarian discovered that the hardscrabble cowboy had also been a gifted craftsman and artist. Patterson illustrated a self-published book, "Do Abominable Snowmen of America Really Exist?", and set out to make a wildlife movie that would feature the ultimate trophy footage. He and his collaborators inadvertently helped spawn "this massive culture and industry" around the Bigfoot legend, Evans says...

Roger Paterson presented his footage to America in a traveling show that crisscrossed the nation and climaxed with the hyped Bigfoot sequence on screen. The money poured in, leading to resentment among cohorts who felt they'd been shortchanged, none more so than Bob Gimlin, Patterson's wingman in the field during the infamous shoot.. [Roger's son] Clint Patterson says his mother privately confirmed his suspicions that the family's claim to fame was bogus, but he kept quiet to protect their financial stream. About 10 years ago, when he first wanted to go public with the truth, his mother disowned him.
Bigfoot was also a recurring character on the 1970s TV show The Six Million Dollar Man.

Which kind of puts the whole thing in perspective...

Long-time tech journalist Clive Thompson interviewed over 70 software developers at Google, Amazon, Microsoft and start-ups for a new article on AI-assisted programming. It's title?

"Coding After Coders: The End of Computer Programming as We Know It."

Published in the prestigious New York Times Magazine, the article even cites long-time programming guru Kent Beck saying LLMs got him going again and he's now finishing more projects than ever, calling AI's unpredictability "addictive, in a slot-machine way."

In fact, the article concludes "many Silicon Valley programmers are now barely programming. Instead, what they're doing is deeply, deeply weird..." Brennan-Burke chimed in: "You remember seeing the research that showed the more rude you were to models, the better they performed?" They chuckled. Computer programming has been through many changes in its 80-year history. But this may be the strangest one yet: It is now becoming a conversation, a back-and-forth talk fest between software developers and their bots... For decades, being a software developer meant mastering coding languages, but now a language technology itself is upending the very nature of the job... A coder is now more like an architect than a construction worker... Several programmers told me they felt a bit like Steve Jobs, who famously had his staffers churn out prototypes so he could handle lots of them and settle on what felt right. The work of a developer is now more judging than creating...

If you want to put a number on how much more productive A.I. is making the programmers at mature tech firms like Google, it's 10 percent, Sundar Pichai, Google's chief executive, has said. That's the bump that Google has seen in "engineering velocity" — how much faster its more than 100,000 software developers are able to work. And that 10 percent is the average inside the company, Ryan Salva, a senior director of product at the company, told me. Some work, like writing a simple test, is now tens of times faster. Major changes are slower. At the start-ups whose founders I spoke to, closer to 100 percent of their code is being written by A.I., but at Google it is not quite 50 percent.
The article cites a senior principal engineer at Amazon who says "Things I've always wanted to do now only take a six-minute conversation and a 'Go do that." Another programmer described their army of Claude agents as "an alien intelligence that we're learning to work with." Although "A.I. being A.I., things occasionally go haywire," the article acknowledges — and after relying on AI, "Some new developers told me they can feel their skills weakening."

Still, "I was surprised by how many software developers told me they were happy to no longer write code by hand. Most said they still feel the jolt of success, even with A.I. writing the lines... " A few programmers did say that they lamented the demise of hand-crafting their work. "I believe that it can be fun and fulfilling and engaging, and having the computer do it for you strips you of that," one Apple engineer told me. (He asked to remain unnamed so he wouldn't get in trouble for criticizing Apple's embrace of A.I.) He went on: "I didn't do it to make a lot of money and to excel in the career ladder. I did it because it's my passion. I don't want to outsource that passion"... But only a few people at Apple openly share his dimmer views, he said.

The coders who still actively avoid A.I. may be in the minority, but their opposition is intense. Some dislike how much energy it takes to train and deploy the models, and others object to how they were trained by tech firms pillaging copyrighted works. There is suspicion that the sheer speed of A.I.'s output means firms will wind up with mountains of flabbily written code that won't perform well. The tech bosses might use agents as a cudgel: Don't get uppity at work — we could replace you with a bot. And critics think it is a terrible idea for developers to become reliant on A.I. produced by a small coterie of tech giants.

Thomas Ptacek, a Chicago-based developer and a co-founder of the tech firm Fly.io... thinks the refuseniks are deluding themselves when they claim that A.I. doesn't work well and that it can't work well... The holdouts are in the minority, and "you can watch the five stages of grief playing out."
"How things will shake out for professional coders themselves isn't yet clear," the article concludes. "But their mix of exhilaration and anxiety may be a preview for workers in other fields... Abstraction may be coming for us all."

The deal to take control of TikTok's U.S. business came with an unusual condition, according to people familiar with the matter. The investors — which include Oracle, Abu Dhabi investor MGX, and private-equity firm Silver Lake — "paid the Treasury Department about $2.5 billion when the deal closed in January," reports the Wall Street Journal, "and are set to make several additional payments until hitting the $10 billion total." The $10 billion payment would be nearly unprecedented for a government helping arrange a transaction, historians have said... Investment bankers advising on a typical deal receive fees of less than 1% of the transaction value, and the percentage generally gets smaller as the deal size increases. Bank of America is in line to make some $130 million for advising railroad operator Norfolk Southern on its $71.5 billion sale to Union Pacific, one of the largest fees on record for a single bank on a deal. Administration officials have said the fee is justified given Trump's role in saving TikTok in the U.S. and navigating negotiations with China to get the deal done while addressing the security concerns of lawmakers...

The TikTok fee extracted from private-sector investors is the administration's latest transaction involving the nation's largest businesses. Trump took a nearly 10% stake in semiconductor company Intel and has agreed to take a chunk of chip sales to China from Nvidia in exchange for granting export licenses. The administration has also taken equity stakes in other companies and has a say in the operations of U.S. Steel following a "golden share" agreement with Japan's Nippon Steel in its takeover.
Reuters notes earlier this month, a lawsuit was filed by investors in two of TikTok's social media rivals, seeking to reverse the approval of the deal.

Thanks to long-time Slashdot reader schwit1 for sharing the news.

AI services may not stay cheap for long, as companies like OpenAI and Anthropic are currently subsidizing usage to rapidly grow market share. As these companies move toward profitability and potential IPOs, Axios reports that investors will likely push them to increase prices and improve margins. An anonymous reader shares an excerpt from the report: Flashback: Silicon Valley has seen this movie before. The so-called "millennial lifestyle subsidy" meant VC money helped underwrite cheap Uber rides and DoorDash deliveries. Before that, Amazon built its base with low prices, free shipping and, for years, no sales tax in most states. Eventually, all of these companies had to charge enough to cover costs -- and make a profit.

Follow the money: The current iteration of AI subsidies won't last forever. Both OpenAI and Anthropic are widely expected to go public. Public investors will demand earnings growth and expanding margins. Even as chips get more efficient, total spending keeps rising. Labs need more capacity, more upgrades and more supply to meet demand.

The bottom line: The costs of AI will keep going down. But total spend from customers will need to keep going up if AI companies are going to become profitable and investors are ever going to get returns on their massive investments.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: Binance is hoping that suing (PDF) The Wall Street Journal for defamation might help shake off a fresh round of government probes into how the cryptocurrency exchange failed to detect $1.7 billion in transfers to a network that was funding Iran-backed terror groups. The lawsuit comes after a Wall Street Journal investigation, based on conversations with insiders and reviews of internal documents, reported that Binance had quietly dismantled its own investigation into the unlawful transfers and then fired compliance staff who initially flagged them.

Alleging that the report falsely accused Binance of retaliation -- among 10 other allegedly false claims -- Binance accused the Journal of conducting a "sham" investigation that intentionally disregarded the company's statements. That included supposedly failing to note that Binance had not closed its investigation into the unlawful transfers. Binance's role in the large-scale violation of US sanctions laws is currently being investigated by the Justice and Treasury Departments. Congress members also took notice, including Sen. Richard Blumenthal (D-Conn.), ranking member of the Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations (PSI), who launched an additional inquiry. In a letter to Binance CEO Richard Teng, Blumenthal cited the Journal's report, as well as reporting from The New York Times and Fortune, while demanding that Binance explain how it managed to overlook the money-laundering for so long and why compliance staff members were fired.

In its complaint Wednesday, Binance claimed that these probes may "be just the tip of the iceberg" if the record is not corrected. The reputational harm is particularly damaging, the exchange noted, since Binance has allegedly worked hard to strengthen its compliance after reaching a settlement with the US government in 2023. In taking that plea deal, Binance admitted to violating anti-money laundering and sanctions laws and paid a $4.3 billion fine, and its founder, Changpeng Zhao, eventually pled guilty to a related charge. Since that scandal, Binance claimed that the WSJ has "made a business of maligning both the cryptocurrency industry generally and Binance specifically." That's why the Journal allegedly rushed to publish its story following a similar New York Times investigation. Alleging that the WSJ was financially motivated to publish a negative story that would get more clicks, Binance claimed the Journal provided little time to respond and then failed to make necessary corrections before and after publication.

Valve is facing a new consumer class-action lawsuit two weeks after New York sued the video game company for "letting children and adults illegally gamble" with loot boxes. The new lawsuit is similar, alleging that loot boxes in games like Counter-Strike 2, Dota 2, and Team Fortress 2 are "carefully engineered to extract money from consumers, including children, through deceptive, casino-style psychological tactics."

"We believe Valve deliberately engineered its gambling platform and profited enormously from it," Steve Berman, founder and managing partner at law firm Hagens Berman, said in a press release. "Consumers played these games for entertainment, unaware that Valve had allegedly already stacked the odds against them. We intend to hold Valve accountable and put money back in the pockets of consumers." PC Gamer reports: The system is well known to anyone who's played a Valve multiplayer game: Earn a locked loot box by playing, pay $2.50 for a key, unlock it, get a digital doohickey that's sometimes worth hundreds or even thousands of dollars but far more often is worth just a few pennies. Is that gambling? If these cases go to court, we'll find out.

The full complaint points out that the unlocking process is even designed to look like a slot machine: "Images of possible items scroll across the screen, spinning fast at first, then slowing to a stop on the player's 'prize.' Players buy and open loot boxes for the same reason people play slot machines -- the hope of a valuable payout." Loot boxes, the complaint continues, are not "incidental features" of Valve's games, but rather "a deliberate, carefully engineered revenue model." So too is the Steam Community Market, and Steam itself, which the suit claims is "deliberately designed" to enable the sale of digital items on third-party marketplaces through "trade URLs," despite Valve's terms of service prohibiting off-platform sales.

And while the debate over whether loot boxes constitute a form of gambling continues to rage, the suit claims Valve's system does indeed qualify under Washington law, which defines gambling as "staking or risking something of value upon the outcome of a contest of chance or a future contingent event not under the person's control or influence." "Valve's loot boxes satisfy every element of this definition," the lawsuit alleges. "Users stake money (the price of a key) on the outcome of a contest of chance (the random selection of a virtual item), and the items received are 'things of value' under RCW 9.46.0285 because they can be sold for real money through Valve's own marketplace and through third-party marketplaces that Valve has fostered and facilitated."

sziring shares a report from Business Insider: Silicon Valley has long competed for talent with ever-richer pay packages built around salary, bonus, and equity. Now, a fourth line item is creeping into the mix: AI inference. As generative AI tools become embedded in software development, the cost of running the underlying models -- known as inference -- is emerging as a productivity driver and a budget line that finance chiefs can't ignore.

Software engineers and AI researchers inside tech companies have already been jousting for access to GPUs, with this AI compute capacity being carefully parceled out based on which projects are most important. Now, some tech job candidates have begun asking about what AI compute budget they will have access to if they decide to join.

"I am increasingly asked during candidate interviews how much dedicated inference compute they will have to build with Codex," Thibault Sottiaux, engineering lead at OpenAI's Codex, the startup's AI coding service, wrote on X recently. He added that usage per user is growing much faster than overall user growth, a sign that AI compute is becoming even scarcer and more valuable. That scarcity is reshaping how engineers think about their work and pay. "The inference compute available to you is increasingly going to drive overall software productivity," said OpenAI President Greg Brockman.

The report cites a recent compensation submission from a software engineer that listed "Copilot subscription" as part of the pay and benefits. "OpenAI and Anthropic should create recruitment sites where their clients can advertise roles, listing the token budget for the job alongside the salary range," said Peter Gostev, AI capability lead at Arena, a startup that measures the performance of models.

Tomasz Tunguz of Theory Ventures predicts AI inference will be the fourth component of engineering compensation, alongside salary, bonus, and equity. "Will you be paid in tokens? In 2026, you likely will start to be," Tunguz said.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Heise: Pay securely with an Android smartphone, completely without Google services: This is the plan being developed by the newly founded industry consortium led by the German Volla Systeme GmbH. It is an open-source alternative to Google Play Integrity. This proprietary interface decides on Android smartphones with Google Play services whether banking, government, or wallet apps are allowed to run on a smartphone.

Obstacles and tips for paying with an Android smartphone without official Google services have been highlighted by c't in a comprehensive article. The European industry consortium now wants to address some problems mentioned. To this end, the group, which includes Murena, which develops the hardened custom ROM /e/OS, Iode from France, and Apostrophy (Dot) from Switzerland, in addition to Volla, is developing a so-called "UnifiedAttestation" for Google-free mobile operating systems, primarily based on the Android Open-Source Project (AOSP).

According to Volla, a European manufacturer and a leading manufacturer from Asia, as well as European foundations such as the German UBports Foundation, have also expressed interest in supporting it. Furthermore, developers and publishers of government apps from Scandinavia are examining the use of the new procedure as "first movers." In its announcement, Volla explains that Google provides app developers with an interface called Play Integrity, which checks whether an app is running on a device with specific security requirements. This primarily affects applications from "sensitive areas such as identity verification, banking, or digital wallets -- including apps from governments and public administrations".

The company criticizes that the certification is exclusively offered for Google's own proprietary "Stock Android" but not for Android versions without Google services, such as /e/OS or similar custom ROMs. "Since this is closely intertwined with Google services and Google data centers, a structural dependency arises -- and for alternative operating systems, a de facto exclusion criterion," the company states. From the consortium's perspective, this also leads to a "security paradox," because "the check of trustworthiness is carried out by precisely that entity whose ecosystem is to be avoided at the same time". The UnifiedAttestation system is built around three main components: an "operating system service" that apps can call to check whether the device's OS meets required security standards, a decentralized validation service that verifies the OS certificate on a device without relying on a single central authority, and an open test suite used to evaluate and certify that a particular operating system works securely on a specific device model.

"We don't want to centralize trust, but organize it transparently and publicly verifiable. When companies check competitors' products, we can strengthen that trust," says Dr. Jorg Wurzer, CEO of Volla Systeme GmbH and initiator of the consortium. The goal is to increase digital sovereignty and break free from the control of any one, single U.S. company, he says.

"If Lockheed Martin made a Game Boy, would you buy one?" That was the [rhetorical] question The Verge's Sean Hollister asked when he reviewed ModRetro's Game Boy-style handheld device back in 2024. He said it "might be the best version of the Game Boy ever made," though the connection to Palmer Luckey and his defense tech startup Anduril left him conflicted. "I don't remember my childhood nostalgia coming with a side of possible guilt and fear about putting money into the pocket of a weapons contractor," he wrote. "Feels weird!"

Those conflicted feelings have lingered ever since. TechCrunch recently cited Hollister's review while reporting that ModRetro is now seeking funding at a $1 billion valuation. The company is said to have additional retro-inspired hardware in development, including one designed to replicate the Nintendo 64. As for Anduril? It's reportedly in talks to raise a new funding round that would value the company at around $60 billion.

Swiss voters overwhelmingly approved a constitutional amendment guaranteeing the right to use physical cash. "The vote means Switzerland will join the likes of Hungary, Slovakia and Slovenia, which have already written the right to cold, hard cash in their constitutions," reports Politico. From the report: Official results revealed that 73.4 percent of voters backed the legal amendment, which the government proposed as a counter to a similar initiative by a group called the Swiss Freedom Movement. The Swiss Freedom Movement triggered the national referendum after its initiative to protect cash collected more than 100,000 signatures, triggering a national referendum. Its initiative secured only 46 percent of the final vote after the government said some of the group's proposed amendments went too far.

"OpenAI's former chief research officer is raising $70 million for a new startup building an AI and software platform to automate manufacturing," reports the Wall Street Journal, citing "people familiar with the matter.

"Arda, the new startup co-founded by Bob McGrew, is raising at a valuation of $700 million, according to people familiar with the matter...." Arda is developing an AI and software platform, including a video model that can analyze footage from factory floors and use it to train robots to run factories autonomously, the people said. The company's software will coordinate machines and humans across the entire production process, from product design and manufacturability to finished goods coming off the line.

The startup's goal is to make manufacturing cost effective in the Western part of the globe, reducing reliance on China as geopolitical and national security concerns rise... At OpenAI, McGrew was tasked with training robots to do tasks in the physical world, according to this LinkedIn. McGrew was also one of the earliest employees at Palantir.

An anonymous reader shared this report from the Independent: A popular predictions market app will not pay out the $54 million some of its users believed they were owed after correctly forecasting the death of Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, according to a report.

Kalshi, which allows players to gamble on real-world events, offered customers favorable odds on Khamenei, 86, being "out as Supreme Leader" in response to the announcement of joint U.S.-Israeli airstrikes on Tehran in the early hours of Saturday morning. The company promoted the trade on its homepage and app and tweeted [last] Saturday: "BREAKING: The odds Ali Khamenei is out as Supreme Leader have surged to 68 percent." It continued: "Reminder: Kalshi does not offer markets that settle on death. If Ali Khamenei dies, the market will resolve based on the last traded price prior to confirmed reporting of death." Khamenei was later confirmed dead in the airstrikes and the company clarified in a follow-up post: "Please note: A prior version of this clarification was grammatically ambiguous. As a customer service measure, Kalshi will reimburse lost value due to trades made between these clarifications...."

While the company has offered to reimburse any bets, fees or losses from the trade placed prior to its clarification message, it has nevertheless attracted a firestorm of complaints on social media.
A Kalshi spokesperson told Reuters they'd reimbursed "net losses" out of pocket "to the tune of millions of dollars". But a class action lawsuit was filed Thursday saying Kalshi had failed to pay $54 million: Kalshi did not invoke a "death carveout" provision until after the Iranian leader was killed to avoid paying customers in Kalshi's "Khamenei Market" what they were owed, the lawsuit said... The language specifying that Khamenei's departure could be due to any cause, including death, was "clear, unambiguous and binary," the lawsuit said, describing Kalshi's actions as "deceptive" and "predatory."
"In a notice filed Monday, the company proposed standardizing the terms of all its markets that implicitly depend on a person surviving..." reports Business Insider. "The update comes after Kalshi paid $2.2 million to resolve complaints from users who were confused by the way it divided the $55 million wagered on Iran's Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei's ouster after his targeted killing by Israel and the US."

Their article cites a DePaul University law professor who says "There's now sort of this nascent, but bipartisan movement against prediction markets. I think Kalshi's feeling the heat." For example, U.S. Senator Chris Murphy told the Washington Post, "People shouldn't be rooting for people to die because they placed a bet."

U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP) said in a filing on Friday that it currently cannot process billions in tariff refunds because its import-processing system is "not well suited to a task of this scale." The Verge reports: The CBP's admission comes after the Supreme Court struck down the tariffs imposed by Trump under the International Emergency Economic Powers Act (IEEPA) last month. This week, the International Trade Court ruled that importers impacted by the tariffs are entitled to refunds with interest. The CBP estimates that it collected around $166 billion in IEEPA duties as of March 4th, 2026. [...]

The CBP says it currently processes imports through its Automated Commercial Environment (ACE) system. In the filing, Lord says that using the department's existing technology, it would take more than 4.4 million hours to process refunds for the over 53.2 million entries with IEEPA duties. Despite these current limitations, the CBP says it's "confident" it can develop and launch new capabilities to "streamline and consolidate refunds and interest payments on an importer basis" -- but this could take 45 days. "The process will be simpler and more efficient than the existing functionalities, and CBP will provide guidance on how to file refund declarations in the new system," Lord says.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from TechCrunch: At the Morgan Stanley Technology, Media and Telecom conference in downtown San Francisco Wednesday, Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang said his company's recent investments in OpenAI and Anthropic are likely to be its last in both, saying that once they go public as anticipated later this year, the opportunity to invest closes. It could be that simple. While firms sometimes pile into companies until practically the eve of their public debut in search of more upside, Nvidia is minting money selling the chips that power both companies -- it's not like it needs to goose its returns by pouring even more money into either one.

Nvidia, for its part, isn't offering much more on the matter. Asked for comment earlier today following Huang's remarks, a spokesman pointed TechCrunch to a transcript from the company's fourth-quarter earnings call, where Huang said all of Nvidia's investments are "focused very squarely, strategically on expanding and deepening our ecosystem reach," a goal its earlier stakes in both companies have arguably met. Still, a few other dynamics might also explain the pullback, including the circular nature of these arrangements themselves. [...] Meanwhile, Nvidia's relationship with Anthropic has looked fraught in its own right. Just two months after Nvidia announced a $10 billion investment in November, Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei took the stage at Davos and, without naming Nvidia directly, compared the act of U.S. chip companies selling high-performance AI processors to approved Chinese customers to "selling nuclear weapons to North Korea." Ouch. [...]

Where that leaves Nvidia is holding stakes in two companies that, at this particular moment, are pulling in very different directions, and potentially dragging customers and partners along for the ride. Whether Huang saw any of this coming, given Nvidia's web of partnerships, is impossible to know. But his stated reason on Wednesday for likely pulling the plug on future investments -- that the IPO window closes the door on this kind of deal -- is hard to square with how late-stage private investing actually works. What's looking more probable is that this is an exit from a situation that has gotten really complicated, really fast.