The Wall Street Journal reports: Walking into his kitchen, Tim Yoder recoiled at a message on his refrigerator door: "Shop Samsung water filters." Yoder, a supply-chain manager in Chicago, owns a Samsung Electronics Family Hub fridge. He paid $1,400 for an appliance that came with a 32-inch screen on the door that allows him to control other Samsung gadgets, pull up recipes or stream music. But since last fall, it's been intermittently serving up ads, part of a pilot program being tested on some of Samsung's smart fridges sold in the U.S. The response? Not warm. "I guess this is another place for somebody to shove an ad in your face," said the 47-year-old Yoder, recalling the first time he noticed one...

The ads are only on certain Family Hub fridges that have screens and internet connectivity. They run as a rectangular banner at the bottom — part of a widget that also shows news, the weather and a calendar. Samsung declined to say how long the pilot might last or whether it would end. The firm recently unveiled a "Screens Everywhere" initiative that also includes washers, dryers and ovens.... Samsung launched the banner-type fridge ads that come as part of the widget via an October software update. In a footnote of a news release at the time, Samsung pledged to "serve contextual or non-personal ads" and respect data privacy. The banner ads can be turned off in settings.

Samsung said the purpose of the pilot is to explore whether ads relevant to home chores can be useful to owners, and that overall pushback has been negligible. The "turn-off" rate for the pilot ad program remains in the bottom single-digit range, it said... While owners can turn off the banner ads, doing so eliminates the widget altogether, a bummer for Brian Bosworth, a media-industry engineer who liked the feature. Bosworth thinks it's wrong to take away the new feature as a condition. Wanting to keep the widget but not the ads, the 49-year-old in Edgewater, Md., made sure his home router's ad-blocking software extended to his fridge. He hasn't seen another since.
One 27-year-old plans to return his refrigerator after the entire display "lit up with a full-screen ad for Apple TV's sci-fi show Pluribus," according to the article. The all-caps ad beckoned him "with an oft-used refrain directed at protagonist Carol Sturka: 'We're Sorry We Upset You, Carol.'"

Thanks to Slashdot reader fjo3 for sharing the article.

A dog missing for two months was found at an animal shelter — and its owner received an email from an artificial intelligence service that identified it, according to the Washington Post.

"As controversial as AI is right now, this is one of those areas where it's a real win," according to the chief executive at the nonprofit animal welfare organization Best Friends Animal Society. And while it shouldn't replace microchipping pets, AI does offer another tool to help desperate pet owners (and overcrowded animal shelters) — and might even be "game-changing"... People send photos of their lost pets to a database, and AI compares the pets' features — including facial structure, coat pattern and ear shape — to photos of stray pets that have been spotted elsewhere. Many of the stray pets have already been taken to shelters... Doorbell cameras have recently implemented facial recognition for dogs, and perhaps the largest AI database for pet reunification is Petco Love Lost, which says it has reunited more than 200,000 pets and owners since 2021... After owners upload photos of their lost pets, AI scans thousands of photos of lost animals from social media and from about 3,000 animal shelters and rescues that use the software, according to Petco Love, an animal welfare nonprofit that's affiliated with the pet store Petco. It notifies owners if two photos match.
The article notes that one in three pets go missing during their lifetime, according to figures from the Animal Humane Society. "But as technology has progressed, so have resources for finding lost pets" — including GPS collars — and now, apparently, AI-powered pet identification.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: AOMedia Video 1 (AV1) was invented by a group of technology companies to be an open, royalty-free alternative to other video codecs, like HEVC/H.265. But a lawsuit that Dolby Laboratories Inc. filed this week against Snap Inc. calls all that into question with claims of patent infringement. Numerous lawsuits are currently open in the US regarding the use of HEVC. Relevant patent holders, such as Nokia and InterDigital, have sued numerous hardware vendors and streaming service providers in pursuit of licensing fees for the use of patented technologies deemed essential to HEVC.

It's a touch rarer to see a lawsuit filed over the implementation of AV1. The Alliance for Open Media (AOMedia), whose members include Amazon, Apple, Google, Microsoft, Mozilla, and Netflix, says it developed AV1 "under a royalty-free patent policy (Alliance for Open Media Patent License 1.0)" and that the standard is "supported by high-quality reference implementations under a simple, permissive license (BSD 3-Clause Clear License)."

Yet, Dolby's lawsuit filed in the US District Court for the District of Delaware [PDF] alleges that AV1 leverages technologies that Dolby has patented and has not agreed to license for free and without receiving royalties. The filing reads: "[AOMedia] does not own all patents practiced by implementations of the AV1 codec. Rather, the AV1 specification was developed after many foundational video coding patents had already been filed, and AV1 incorporates technologies that are also present in HEVC. Those technologies are subject to existing third-party patent rights and associated licensing obligations." Dolby is seeking a jury trial, a declaration that Dolby isn't obligated to license the patents in questions under FRAND (fair, reasonable, and non-discriminatory) licensing obligations, and for the court to enjoin Snap from further "infringement."

A workplace-device study says Windows PCs crash significantly more often than Macs, lag further behind on patching and encryption in some sectors, and are typically replaced sooner. TechSpot reports: Omnissa's 2026 State of Digital Workspace report outlines the IT challenges that various organizations face from the growing use of AI and the heterogeneous deployment of enterprise devices. The relative instability of Windows and Android is a recurring theme throughout the report. The company gathered telemetry from clients located across the globe in retail, healthcare, finance, education, government, and other sectors throughout 2025. The data suggests that IT administrators face frustrating security gaps due to inconsistent patching across a diverse mosaic of devices and operating systems.

Employee workflow disruption, often due to software issues, is one area of concern. The report found that Windows devices were forced to shut down 3.1 times more often than Macs. Windows programs also froze 7.5 times more often than macOS apps and needed to be restarted more than twice as often. Certain industries were also alarmingly lax in securing Windows and Android devices. More than half of Windows and Android devices in healthcare and pharma were five major operating system updates behind, likely leaving them more vulnerable to errors and malware. More than half of the desktops and mobile devices used for education were also unencrypted, putting students' privacy at risk.

Macs also last longer, being replaced every five years on average, compared to every three years for Windows PCs. Despite a recent backlash against Windows, driven by a push for digital sovereignty in countries such as Germany, Windows use on government devices actually doubled last year. Meanwhile, Macs using Apple's M-series chips showcase a significant thermal advantage, with an average temperature of 40.1 degrees Celsius, while Intel processors run at 65.2 degrees.

Google is expanding Android Automotive from the infotainment screen into the broader non-safety "brain" of software-defined vehicles. With its new Android Automotive OS for Software-Defined Vehicles, the in-car experience will feel "much more cohesive and the latest features will reach your driveway faster," Matt Crowley, Android Automotive's group product manager, writes in a blog post. "From a truly integrated voice experience to proactive maintenance reminders, your car will become a true extension of your digital life," Crowley adds. The Verge reports: With its new software, Google is promising faster over-the-air software updates, better voice assistants, and more proactive vehicle maintenance alerts. Non-driving functions like climate control, lighting, and seating adjustment would fall under Android's control. And the system would move beyond basic infotainment to create a unified ecosystem for features like remote cabin conditioning, digital key management, and personalized driver profiles.

For automakers, the new system promises less expensive software development costs and an opportunity to focus on what matters most to them: branding. By providing the "foundational code and a common language for their software," Google says automakers will be free to design cool experiences for their customers. Google says its already working with companies like Renault Group and Qualcomm to bring its new software-defined vehicle version of Android Automotive to more cars. A variety of automakers already use regular Android Automotive, like Volvo, Polestar, General Motors, Nissan, and Honda.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: A new hacking group has been rampaging the Internet in a persistent campaign that spreads a self-propagating and never-before-seen backdoor -- and curiously a data wiper that targets Iranian machines. The group, tracked under the name TeamPCP, first gained visibility in December, when researchers from security firm Flare observed it unleashing a worm that targeted cloud-hosted platforms that weren't properly secured. The objective was to build a distributed proxy and scanning infrastructure and then use it to compromise servers for exfiltrating data, deploying ransomware, conducting extortion, and mining cryptocurrency. The group is notable for its skill in large-scale automation and integration of well-known attack techniques.

More recently, TeamPCP has waged a relentless campaign that uses continuously evolving malware to bring ever more systems under its control. Late last week, it compromised virtually all versions of the widely used Trivy vulnerability scanner in a supply-chain attack after gaining privileged access to the GitHub account of Aqua Security, the Trivy creator. Over the weekend, researchers said they observed TeamPCP spreading potent malware that was also worm-enabled, meaning it had the potential to spread to new machines automatically, with no interaction required of victims behind the keyboard. [...]

As the weekend progressed, CanisterWorm [as Aikido has named the malware] was updated to add an additional payload: a wiper that targets machines exclusively in Iran. When the updated worm infects machines, it checks if the machine is in the Iranian timezone or is configured for use in that country. When either condition was met, the malware no longer activated the credential stealer and instead triggered a novel wiper that TeamPCP developers named Kamikaze. Eriksen said in an email that there's no indication yet that the worm caused actual damage to Iranian machines, but that there was "clear potential for large-scale impact if it achieves active spread." It's unclear what the motive is for TeamPCP. Aikido researcher Charlie Eriksen wrote: "While there may be an ideological component, it could just as easily be a deliberate attempt to draw attention to the group. Historically, TeamPCP has appeared to be financially motivated, but there are signs that visibility is becoming a goal in itself. By going after security tools and open-source projects, including Checkmarx as of today, they are sending a clear and deliberate signal."

BrianFagioli writes: Canonical has joined the Rust Foundation as a Gold Member, signaling a deeper investment in the Rust programming language and its role in modern infrastructure. The company already maintains an up-to-date Rust toolchain for Ubuntu and has begun integrating Rust into parts of its stack, citing memory safety and reliability as key drivers. By joining at a higher tier, Canonical is not just adopting Rust but also stepping closer to its governance and long-term direction.

The move also highlights ongoing tensions in Rust's ecosystem. While Rust can reduce entire classes of bugs, it often depends heavily on external crates, which can introduce complexity and auditing challenges, especially in enterprise environments. Canonical appears aware of that tradeoff and is positioning itself to influence how the ecosystem evolves, as Rust continues to gain traction across Linux and beyond. "As the publisher of Ubuntu, we understand the critical role systems software plays in modern infrastructure, and we see Rust as one of the most important tools for building it securely and reliably. Joining the Rust Foundation at the Gold level allows us to engage more directly in language and ecosystem governance, while continuing to improve the developer experience for Rust on Ubuntu," said Jon Seager, VP Engineering at Canonical. "Of particular interest to Canonical is the security story behind the Rust package registry, crates.io, and minimizing the number of potentially unknown dependencies required to implement core concerns such as async support, HTTP handling, and cryptography -- especially in regulated environments."

Many U.S. consumers are increasingly interested in lower-cost Chinese electric vehicles but steep tariffs and political resistance are keeping them out of the market. A recent survey from Cox Automotive found that 40% of respondents support allowing Chinese auto brands into the U.S. market. Reuters reports: While Chinese autos hit the highways of Europe, Latin America and even Canada, the U.S. government has effectively banned the cars with tariffs exceeding 100%, out of concerns over data security and protecting American jobs. In places like Europe, a number of Chinese EVs sell at prices under $30,000. Some of those cars include amenities like advanced driving assistance software, a built-in mini fridge, and the option to sing karaoke with your fellow passengers. "The technology they offer for those lower price tags was astounding," said Clint Simone, senior features editor for car-shopping website Edmunds, who drove several Chinese vehicles while at the CES trade show earlier this year. [...]

Consumers have some concerns over allowing Chinese car imports, though, including over data security and protecting U.S. businesses, survey results from The Harris Poll as well as Cox show. Rhett Ricart, an Ohio car dealer who sells several brands, including Ford, Chevrolet and Hyundai, said he has no doubt customers would snap up Chinese models if they became available. He and other dealers don't want that to happen yet, according to a recent Cox Automotive survey, which found that just 15% of dealers supported the entry of Chinese auto brands into the U.S., and just 26% trust that they would comply with U.S. safety standards.

Not meeting U.S. safety standards is one reason Chinese EVs cannot yet be owned permanently in the U.S. But those obstacles haven't quieted the buzz. The Cox survey polled 802 U.S. consumers who expect to buy a car in the next two years. Nearly half -- 49% -- rated Chinese cars as having very good or excellent value, and 40% say they support the idea of Chinese auto brands in the U.S. market. Rich Benoit, a car enthusiast whose YouTube videos reviewing Chinese models garner millions of views, said the most compelling feature is the price. "That's what a lot of people are looking for: efficient, quiet and low cost," he said. "They want to 'get to work-- not everyone is a car enthusiast." He's considering buying a BYD model in Mexico and driving it across the border. "That's the only way to get one," Benoit said. "They've been selling in Mexico for years... "I want to own a Chinese EV in America."

Will there be an AI-optimized programming language at the expense of human readability? There's now been experiments with minimizing tokens for "LLM efficiency, without any concern for how it would serve human developers."

This new article asks if AI will force source code to evolve — or make it extinct, noting that Stephen Cass, the special projects editor at IEEE Spectrum, has even been asking the ultimate question about our future. "Could we get our AIs to go straight from prompt to an intermediate language that could be fed into the interpreter or compiler of our choice? Do we need high-level languages at all in that future?" Cass acknowledged the obvious downsides. ("True, this would turn programs into inscrutable black boxes, but they could still be divided into modular testable units for sanity and quality checks.") But "instead of trying to read or maintain source code, programmers would just tweak their prompts and generate software afresh." This leads to some mind-boggling hypotheticals, like "What's the role of the programmer in a future without source code?" Cass asked the question and announced "an emergency interactive session" in October to discuss whether AI is signaling the end of distinct programming languages as we know them.

In that webinar, Cass said he believes programmers in this future would still suggest interfaces, select algorithms, and make other architecture design choices. And obviously the resulting code would need to pass tests, Cass said, and "has to be able to explain what it's doing." But what kind of abstractions could go away? And then "What happens when we really let AIs off the hook on this?" Cass asked — when we "stop bothering" to have them code in high-level languages. (Since, after all, high-level languages "are a tool for human beings.") "What if we let the machines go directly into creating intermediate code?" (Cass thinks the machine-language level would be too far down the stack, "because you do want a compile layer too for different architecture....")

In this future, the question might become 'What if you make fewer mistakes, but they're different mistakes?'" Cass said he's keeping an eye out for research papers on designing languages for AI, although he agreed that it's not a "tomorrow" thing — since, after all, we're still digesting "vibe coding" right now. But "I can see this becoming an area of active research."
The article also quotes Andrea Griffiths, a senior developer advocate at GitHub and a writer for the newsletter Main Branch, who's seen the attempts at an "AI-first" languages, but nothing yet with meaningful adoption. So maybe AI coding agents will just make it easier to use our existing languages — especially typed languages with built-in safety advantages.

And Scott Hanselman's podcast recently dubbed Chris Lattner's Mojo "a programming language for an AI world," just in the way it's designed to harness the computing power of today's multi-core chips.

An anonymous reader shared this report from Tom's Hardware: GrapheneOS, the privacy-focused Android fork, said in a post on X on Friday that it will not comply with emerging laws requiring operating systems to collect user age data at setup. "GrapheneOS will remain usable by anyone around the world without requiring personal information, identification or an account," the project stated. "If GrapheneOS devices can't be sold in a region due to their regulations, so be it."

The statement came after Brazil's Digital ECA (Law 15.211) took effect on March 17, imposing fines of up to R$50 million (roughly $9.5 million) per violation on operating system providers that fail to implement age verification...

Motorola and GrapheneOS announced a long-term partnership at MWC on March 2, to bring to bring the hardened OS to future Motorola hardware, ending GrapheneOS's long-standing exclusivity to Google Pixel devices. A GrapheneOS-powered Motorola phone is expected in 2027. If Motorola sells devices with GrapheneOS pre-installed, those devices would need to comply with local regulations in every market where they ship, or Motorola may need to restrict sales geographically.
Or, "People can buy the devices without GrapheneOS and install it themselves in any region where that's an issue," according to a post on the GrapheneOS BlueSky account. "Motorola devices with GrapheneOS preinstalled is something we want but it doesn't have to happen right away and doesn't need to happen everywhere for the partnership to be highly successful. Pixels are sold in 33 countries which doesn't include many countries outside North America and Europe."

Tom's Hardware also notes that GrapheneOS "isn't the first and won't be the last company to outright refuse compliance with incoming age verification laws."

"The developers of open-source calculator firmware DB48X issued a legal notice recently, stating that their software 'does not, cannot and will not implement age verification,' while MidnightBSD updated its license to ban users in Brazil."

A man crossing the street one San Francisco night spotted a self-driving car — and decided to confront its passenger, 37-year-old tech worker Doug Fulop. The New York Times reports the man yelled that "he wanted to kill Fulop and the other two passengers for giving money to a robot." A taxi driver would have simply driven away. But Fulop's vehicle had no driver — it was a self-driving Waymo... Self-driving cars are designed to stop moving if a person is nearby. People can take advantage of that function to harass and threaten their passengers.... It was unsettling to be trapped inside a Waymo during an attack, Fulop said. "If he had kept hammering on one window instead of alternating, I'm sure he would have eventually broken through," he said. The attacker did not appear to be on drugs or otherwise impaired, but seemed to be overtaken by extreme anger at the self-driving car, Fulop said.

It did not seem safe to get out and run, he added, since the man was trying to open the locked doors and said he wanted to kill the passengers. They called 911 and Waymo's support line, Fulop said. Waymo told them that it would not manually direct the car away if someone was standing nearby, and that the passengers would be OK with the doors locked. The car's software does not allow riders to jump into the driver's seat and take over during an incident. The attack lasted around six minutes. By then, bystanders had begun cheering on the man, Fulop said. That distracted the man, who moved far enough away from the car that it could finally drive away...

Fulop said he had stopped using Waymo for a time after the January attack and would avoid the service at night unless the company changed its policy of not intervening when a hostile person threatened riders. "As passengers, we deserve more safety than that if someone is trying to attack us," he said. "This can't be the policy to be trapped there."
The article remembers other incidents — including a 2024 video showing three women screaming as their autonomous taxi is spray-painted by vandals. And technology author/speaker Anders Sorman-Nilsson says in Los Angeles five men on e-bikes surrounded his Waymo and forced it to stop. The author felt safe inside the vehicle, according to the times, which adds "He felt reassured knowing that Waymo's many exterior cameras were recording the men. After around five minutes, he said, they gave up and rode away."

"Google is beginning to replace news headlines in its search results with ones that are AI-generated," reports the Verge: After doing something similar in its Google Discover news feed, it's starting to mess with headlines in the traditional "10 blue links," too. We've found multiple examples where Google replaced headlines we wrote with ones we did not, sometimes changing their meaning in the process. For example, Google reduced our headline "I used the 'cheat on everything' AI tool and it didn't help me cheat on anything" to just five words: "'Cheat on everything' AI tool." It almost sounds like we're endorsing a product we do not recommend at all.

What we are seeing is a "small" and "narrow" experiment, one that's not yet approved for a fuller launch, Google spokespeople Jennifer Kutz, Mallory De Leon, and Ned Adriance tell The Verge. They would not say how "small" that experiment actually is. Over the past few months, multiple Verge staffers have seen examples of headlines that we never wrote appear in Google Search results — headlines that do not follow our editorial style, and without any indication that Google replaced the words we chose. And Google says it's tweaking how other websites show up in search, too, not just news.

The good news, for now, is that these changed headlines seem to be few and far between, and they're not yet the kind of tripe we've seen in Google Discover. (For example, Google Discover told me this week that the PlayStation Portal was getting a 1080p streaming mode, when it actually got a higher bitrate mode instead.) Compared to that and other lying Google Discover headlines like "US reverses foreign drone ban" — on a story reporting the opposite — the nonsense headlines we're seeing in Google Search are downright tame.
The article points out that Google "originally told us its AI headlines in Google Discover were an experiment too. A month later, it told us those AI headlines are now a feature..."

"Google confirmed that the test uses generative AI, but claimed that 'if we were to actually launch something based on this experiment, it would not be using a generative model and we would not be creating headlines with gen AI'..."

"We have removed all malicious artifacts from the affected registries and channels," Trivy maintainer Itay Shakury posted today, noting that all the latest Trivy releases "now point to a safe version." But "On March 19, we observed that a threat actor used a compromised credential..."

And today The Hacker News reported the same attackers are now "suspected to be conducting follow-on attacks that have led to the compromise of a large number of npm packages..." (The attackers apparently leveraged a postinstall hook "to execute a loader, which then drops a Python backdoor that's responsible for contacting the ICP canister dead drop to retrieve a URL pointing to the next-stage payload.") The development marks the first publicly documented abuse of an ICP canister for the explicit purpose of fetching the command-and-control (C2) server, Aikido Security researcher Charlie Eriksen said... Persistence is established by means of a systemd user service, which is configured to automatically start the Python backdoor after a 5-second delay if it gets terminated for some reason by using the "Restart=always" directive. The systemd service masquerades as PostgreSQL tooling ("pgmon") in an attempt to fly under the radar...

In tandem, the packages come with a "deploy.js" file that the attacker runs manually to spread the malicious payload to every package a stolen npm token provides access to in a programmatic fashion. The worm, assessed to be vibe-coded using an AI tool, makes no attempt to conceal its functionality. "This isn't triggered by npm install," Aikido said. "It's a standalone tool the attacker runs with stolen tokens to maximize blast radius."

To make matters worse, a subsequent iteration of CanisterWorm detected in "@teale.io/eslint-config" versions 1.8.11 and 1.8.12 has been found to self-propagate on its own without the need for manual intervention... [Aikido Security researcher Charlie Eriksen said] "Every developer or CI pipeline that installs this package and has an npm token accessible becomes an unwitting propagation vector. Their packages get infected, their downstream users install those, and if any of them have tokens, the cycle repeats."
So far affected packages include 28 in the @EmilGroup scope and 16 packages in the @opengov scope, according to the article, blaming the attack on "a cloud-focused cybercriminal operation known as TeamPCP."

Ars Technica explains that Trivy had "inadvertently hardcoded authentication secrets in pipelines for developing and deploying software updates," leading to a situation where attacks "compromised virtually all versions" of the widely used Trivy vulnerability scanner: Trivy maintainer Itay Shakury confirmed the compromise on Friday, following rumors and a thread, since deleted by the attackers, discussing the incident. The attack began in the early hours of Thursday. When it was done, the threat actor had used stolen credentials to force-push all but one of the trivy-action tags and seven setup-trivy tags to use malicious dependencies... "If you suspect you were running a compromised version, treat all pipeline secrets as compromised and rotate immediately," Shakury wrote.

Security firms Socket and Wiz said that the malware, triggered in 75 compromised trivy-action tags, causes custom malware to thoroughly scour development pipelines, including developer machines, for GitHub tokens, cloud credentials, SSH keys, Kubernetes tokens, and whatever other secrets may live there. Once found, the malware encrypts the data and sends it to an attacker-controlled server. The end result, Socket said, is that any CI/CD pipeline using software that references compromised version tags executes code as soon as the Trivy scan is run... "In our initial analysis the malicious code exfiltrates secrets with a primary and backup mechanism. If it detects it is on a developer machine it additionally writes a base64 encoded python dropper for persistence...."

Although the mass compromise began Thursday, it stems from a separate compromise last month of the Aqua Trivy VS Code extension for the Trivy scanner, Shakury said. In the incident, the attackers compromised a credential with write access to the Trivy GitHub account. Shakury said maintainers rotated tokens and other secrets in response, but the process wasn't fully "atomic," meaning it didn't thoroughly remove credential artifacts such as API keys, certificates, and passwords to ensure they couldn't be used maliciously.

"This [failure] allowed the threat actor to perform authenticated operations, including force-updating tags, without needing to exploit GitHub itself," Socket researchers wrote.
Pushing to a branch or creating a new release would've appeared in the commit history and trigger notifications, Socket pointed out, so "Instead, the attacker force-pushed 75 existing version tags to point to new malicious commits." (Trivy's maintainer says "we've also enabled immutable releases since the last breach.")

Ars Technica notes Trivy's vulnerability scanner has 33,200 stars on GitHub, so "the potential fallout could be severe."

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Reuters: Fan Xinquan, a retired electronics worker in Beijing, has recently started raising a "lobster," hoping that the AI agent he has been training can help organize his specialized industry knowledge better than chatbots like DeepSeek. "OpenClaw can actually help you accomplish many practical things," the 60-year-old said at a recent event hosted by AI startup Zhipu to teach people how to use and train the AI agent, which has gone viral in China, with its various local versions earning the "lobster" nickname.

In the past month, OpenClaw, which can connect several hardware and software tools and learn from the data produced with much less human intervention than a chatbot, has captured the imaginations of many in China, from retirees looking for side income to AI firms hoping to generate new revenue streams. [...]

Huang Rongsheng, chief architect at Baidu's smart device unit Xiaodu, said at an event on Tuesday that parent group chats for his daughter's primary school class have become overwhelmed by OpenClaw discussions. "My daughter came to me and asked: Dad, I see you raising a lobster every day," he said. "Can I have one too?" Bai Yiyun, another attendee at the Zhipu event, said she hopes to use the agent to start a side hustle during her retirement. "If DeepSeek marked a milestone for open-source large language models, then OpenClaw represents a similar turning point for open-source "agents," said Wei Sun, chief AI analyst at Counterpoint Research.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Register: A lobbying trade body for smaller cloud providers is asking the European Commission to impose interim measures blocking Broadcom from terminating the VMware Cloud Service Provider program, calling the decision a death sentence for some tech suppliers and an illegal squeeze on customer choice. As The Reg revealed in January, Broadcom shuttered the scheme, a move sources claimed affects hundreds of CSPs across Europe and curtails options for enterprises buying VMware software and services. The Cloud Infrastructure Service Provider in Europe (CISPE) trade group, representing nearly 50 tech suppliers, filed the complaint today with the EC Directorates-General, accusing Broadcom of bully-boy tactics, and calling for authorities to halt what it terms as "ongoing abuse."

Francisco Mingorance, CISPE secretary general, said of the complaint: "Businesses -- both cloud providers and their customers -- are being irreparably damaged by Broadcom's unfair actions, which we believe are illegal. "After imposing outrageous and unjustified price hikes immediately following the acquisition of VMware, Broadcom is now applying the 'coup de grace'. We need urgent intervention to force them to change. The only way to stop bullies is to stand up to them." CISPE claims that, since Broadcom completed its $69 billion takeover of VMware in October 2023, prices have risen tenfold, payment is demanded upfront, products are bundled regardless of customer need, and minimum commitments are based on potential rather than actual consumption.

The VMware Cloud Service Provider (VCSP) program officially closed in January and all transactions must be complete by March 31. After that date, only a select group of suppliers will be able to sell VMware subscriptions -- either standalone or as part of a broader service. Across Europe, we're told this equates to hundreds of businesses losing their authorization. For some, the loss of VCSP status effectively destroys their market. Those whose operations were built around VMware must now hand customers to another authorized supplier or begin the costly migration to an alternative platform. Broadcom said in a statement responding to the complaint: "Broadcom strongly disagrees with the allegations by CISPE, an organization funded by hyperscalers, which misrepresent the realities of the market. We continue to be committed to investing significantly in our European VMware Cloud Service Provider partners... helping them offer alternatives to the hyperscalers and meet the evolving needs of European businesses and organizations."

OpenAI announced it's acquiring developer tooling startup Astral to strengthen its Codex AI coding assistant, which has over 2 million weekly users and has seen a three-fold increase in user growth since the start of the year. CNBC reports: "Through it all, though, our goal remains the same: to make programming more productive. To build tools that radically change what it feels like to build software," Astral's founder and CEO Charlie Marsh wrote in a blog post. The company's acquisition of Astral is still subject to customary closing conditions, including regulatory approval.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Reuters: Microsoft is considering legal action against its partner OpenAI and Amazon over a $50 billion deal that could violate its exclusive cloud agreement with the ChatGPT maker, the Financial Times reported on Wednesday. Last month, Amazon and OpenAI signed several agreements, including one that makes Amazon Web Services the exclusive third-party cloud provider for Frontier, OpenAI's enterprise platform for building and running AI agents. The dispute centers on whether OpenAI can offer Frontier via AWS without violating the Microsoft partnership, which requires the startup's models to be accessed through the Windows maker's Azure cloud platform, the FT report said, citing sources.

OpenAI and Microsoft recently stated together that "Azure remains the exclusive cloud provider of stateless OpenAI APIs," a Microsoft spokesperson said in an emailed statement, referring to software interfaces used to access OpenAI's models. "We are confident that OpenAI understands and respects the importance of living up to this legal obligation," the spokesperson added. FT said Microsoft executives believed the approach was not feasible and would violate the spirit, if not the letter, of their agreement, and added that the companies were in talks to resolve the dispute without litigation ahead of Frontier's launch. "We know our contract," a person familiar with Microsoft's position told the newspaper. "We will sue them if they breach it. If Amazon and OpenAI want to take a bet on the creativity of their contractual lawyers, I would back us, not them."

Longtime Slashdot reader internet-redstar writes: Nearly a trillion dollars has been wiped from software stocks in 2026, with hedge funds making billions shorting Salesforce, HubSpot, and Atlassian. At FOSDEM 2026, cURL maintainer Daniel Stenberg shut down his bug bounty program after AI-generated slop overwhelmed his team. A new article on HackerNoon argues that most commercial SaaS could inevitably become OpenSource, not out of ideology but economics. The author points to Proxmox replacing VMware at enterprise scale and startups like Holosign replicating DocuSign at $19/month flat as evidence. The catch, the article claims, is that maintainers who refuse to embrace AI tools risk being forked, or simply replicated from scratch, by those who do.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from the Wall Street Journal: A battle of insults and threats has broken out between the tech world and Wall Street. What's got everyone so worked up? The same thing that starts most fights: business software. A series of social-media posts went viral in recent days with claims that AI has created a worthy -- and way cheaper -- alternative to the Bloomberg terminal, a computer system that is like oxygen to professional investors. Now "Bloomberg is cooked," some posters argued as they heralded the arrival of a newly released AI tool from startup Perplexity. [...]

The finance bros who worship at the altar of Bloomberg have declared war on the tech evangelists who have put all their faith in AI. To suggest that the terminal is replaceable is "laughable," said Jason Lemire, who jumped into the conversation on LinkedIn. (Ironically or not, his post also included an AI-generated image of churchgoers praying to the Bloomberg terminal). "It seems quite obvious to me that those propagating that post are either just looking for easy engagement and/or have never worked in a serious financial institution," he wrote. [...] Morgan Linton, the co-founder and CTO of AI startup Bold Metrics and an avid Perplexity Computer user, said it's rare for a single AI prompt to generate anything close to what Bloomberg does. That said, he added that tools like this can lay "a really good foundation for a financial application. And that really has not been possible before."

Others aren't so sure. Michael Terry, an institutional investment manager who used the terminal for more than 30 years, said he used a prompt circulating online to try to vibe code a Bloomberg replica on Anthropic's Claude. "It was laughable at best, horrific at worst," he said. Shevelenko acknowledged there are some aspects of the terminal that can't be replicated with vibe coding, including some of Bloomberg's proprietary data inputs. The live chat network, which includes 350,000 financial professionals in 184 countries, would also be hard to re-create, as well as the terminal's data security, reliability and robust support system. "I love Bloomberg. And I know most people that use Bloomberg are very, very loyal and extremely happy," said Lemire. His message to the techies? "There's nothing that you can vibe code in a weekend or even like over the course of a year that's going to come anywhere close."

"There are countless upgrades you could make to your gaming setup," writes PC Gamer's Jacob Ridley. "A wireless this, a bigger that, a faster thing. But how do you know what's going to be a genuine upgrade worth investing in? Personally, I think it might be split spacebars." His argument centers on the fact that spacebars take up a "greedy" amount of keyboard space -- space that could instead be divided into multiple keys for different actions, such as voice chat or melee attacks. From the report: While it's often very easy to reprogram your spacebar to do a different action via your keyboard's software, it's a lot harder to reprogram your brain to hit any other key when you try to jump in game. Spacebar makes you jump. Everyone knows that; it's practically etched onto your brain if you're a long-time mouse and keyboard player. So, why does a split spacebar help with that? It comes down to this: once you know which side of a spacebar you tend to thwack with your thumb, you can program the other side to do whatever you want. I hit the right-side of my spacebar every time when I'm typing. Therefore, when I started using a Wooting 60HE v2 with a split spacebar, I set the left-side to be the delete key; the keyboard lacking a dedicated delete key for its 60% size.

Though for gaming, the split spacebar offers much more varied purpose. People do strange things with the WASD keys that I won't litigate here, but I'm pretty sure most gamers use their left thumb to strike the spacebar for gaming. Right? Right. If you fall into this category, you have the option of using the right-side spacebar for things like a chunky melee key, or, my personal favorite, an in-game voice chat key.