Adobe will rebrand its Creative Cloud All Apps subscription to "Creative Cloud Pro" on June 17 for North American users, making significant price increases while bundling AI features. Individual annual subscribers will see monthly rates jump from $59.99 to $69.99, while monthly non-contracted subscribers face a $15 hike to $104.99.

The revamped plan includes unlimited generative AI image credits, 4,000 monthly "premium" AI video and audio credits, access to third-party models like OpenAI's GPT, and the beta Firefly Boards collaborative whiteboard. Adobe will also offer a cheaper "Creative Cloud Standard" option at $54.99 monthly with severely reduced AI capabilities, but this plan remains exclusive to existing subscribers -- forcing new customers into the pricier AI-focused tier.

French authorities have denied Telegram founder Pavel Durov's request to travel to the U.S. for "negotiations with investment funds." From a report: The Paris prosecutor's office told POLITICO that it rendered its decision on May 12 "on the grounds that such a trip abroad did not appear imperative or justified."

Durov was arrested in August 2024 at a French airport and has been under strict legal control since last September, when he was indicted on six charges related to illicit activity on the messaging app he operates. He is forbidden to leave France without authorization -- which he obtained to travel to Dubai from March 15 to April 7, the prosecutor's office said. Russian-born Durov is a citizen, among other countries, of France and the United Arab Emirates.

An anonymous reader shares a report: Intel has considered divesting its network and edge businesses as the chipmaker looks to shave off parts of the company its new chief executive does not see as crucial, three sources familiar with the matter said.

Talks about the potential sale of the group, once called NEX in Intel's financial results, are a part of CEO Lip-Bu Tan's strategy to focus its tens of thousands of employees on areas in which it has historically thrived: PC and data center chips.

The US tech sector shed 214,000 jobs in April amid continuing economic uncertainty, according to CompTIA analysis of Bureau of Labor Statistics data. Companies are extending hiring timelines to two or three times longer than last year while significantly raising skill requirements, particularly for AI competencies.

"It's the great hesitation," said George Denlinger of Robert Half, noting employers now demand 10-12 skills instead of 6-7 previously. Entry-level programming positions are disappearing as AI assumes those functions, with Janco Associates CEO Victor Janulaitis observing that "a job that has been eliminated from almost all IT departments is an entry-level IT programmer."

Klarna's net loss more than doubled in the first quarter [non-paywalled link] as more consumers failed to repay loans from the Swedish "buy now, pay later" lender as concerns rose about the financial health of US consumers. Financial Times: The fintech, which offers interest-free consumer loans to allow customers to make retail purchases, on Monday reported a net loss of $99 million for the three months to March, up from $47 million a year earlier.

The company, which makes money by charging fees to merchants and to consumers who fail to repay on time, said its customer credit losses had risen to $136 million, a 17% year-on-year increase. The increased failure to repay comes on the back of gloomy economic sentiment in the US, where a closely watched measure of consumers' confidence last week fell to its second-lowest level on record. US President Donald Trump's trade war has driven expectations of higher inflation. Further reading: The Klarna Hype Machine.

SAG-AFTRA has filed a labor complaint against Fortnite developer Epic Games, alleging the game improperly used AI to replicate James Earl Jones' Darth Vader voice without bargaining with the union, despite the estate's approval. Gizmodo reports: The union has now filed an unfair labor practice charge (link to the PDF is on the SAG-AFTRA website) that calls out "Fortnite's signatory company, Llama Productions" for "[replacing] the work of human performers with AI technology" without "providing any notice of their intent to do this and without bargaining with us over appropriate terms."

The union notes that it's not against the general idea here: "We celebrate the right of our members and their estates to control the use of their digital replicas and welcome the use of new technologies to allow new generations to share in the enjoyment of those legacies and renowned roles." The problem is that the AI being used here makes human voice actors obsolete, and "we must protect our right to bargain terms and conditions around uses of voice that replace the work of our members, including those who previously did the work of matching Darth Vader's iconic rhythm and tone in video games."

So far there's been no response from Epic Games on the filing. The Hollywood Reporter notes that despite the SAG-AFTRA's still-ongoing Interactive Media Agreement strike, which has been stuck for months on negotiating "AI protections for voice actors in video games," actors can actually work on Fortnite without violating the strike, since the game falls under an exception for titles that were in production before August 2023.

Regeneron Pharmaceuticals is acquiring most of 23andMe's assets for $256 million. The sale includes 23andMe's Personal Genome Service, Total Health and Research Services business lines. What's not included is 23andMe's telehealth unit, Lemonaid Health, which the company acquired for around $400 million in 2021. It'll be shut down, but all staffers will remain employed. CNBC reports: The deal is still subject to approval by the U.S. Bankruptcy Court for the Eastern District of Missouri. Pending approval, it's expected to close in the third quarter of this year, according to the release. In its bankruptcy proceedings, 23andMe required all bidders to comply with its privacy policies, and a court-appointed, independent "Consumer Privacy Ombudsman" will assess the deal, the companies said.

Several lawmakers and officials, including the Federal Trade Commission, had expressed concerns about the safety of consumers' genetic data through 23andMe's sale process. The privacy ombudsman will present a report on the acquisition to the court by June 10. "We are pleased to have reached a transaction that maximizes the value of the business and enables the mission of 23andMe to live on, while maintaining critical protections around customer privacy, choice and consent with respect to their genetic data," Mark Jensen, 23andMe's board chair, said in a statement. "At its peak, 23andMe was valued at around $6 billion," notes the report.

"The Danish government plans to evaluate the prospect of beginning a nuclear power programme," reports the Telegraph, noting that this week Denmark lifted a nuclear power ban imposed 40 years ago. Unlike its neighbours in Sweden and Germany, Denmark has never had a civil nuclear power programme. It has only ever had three small research reactors, the last of which closed in 2001. Most of the renewed interest in nuclear seen around the world stems from the expected growth in electricity demand from AI data centres, but Denmark is different. The Danes are concerned about possible blackouts similar to the one that struck Iberia recently. Like Spain and Portugal, Denmark is heavily dependent on weather-based renewable energy which is not very compatible with the way power grids operate... ["The spinning turbines found in fossil-fuelled energy systems provide inertia and act as a shock absorber to stabilise the grid during sudden changes in supply or demand," explains a diagram in the article, while solar and wind energy provide no inertia.]

The Danish government is worried about how it will continue to decarbonise its power grid if it closes all of its fossil fuel generators leaving minimal inertia. There are only three realistic routes to decarbonisation that maintain physical inertia on the grid: hydropower, geothermal energy and nuclear. Hydro and geothermal depend on geographic and geological features that not every country possesses. While renewable energy proponents argue that new types of inverters could provide synthetic inertia, trials have so far not been particularly successful and there are economic challenges that are difficult to resolve.

Denmark is realising that in the absence of large-scale hydroelectric or geothermal energy, it may have little choice other than to re-visit nuclear power if it is to maintain a stable, low carbon electricity grid.
Thanks to long-time Slashdot reader schwit1 for sharing the news.

"The world has changed," writes Stack Overflow's blog. "Fast. Artificial intelligence is reshaping how we build, learn, and solve problems. Software development looks dramatically different than it did even a few years ago — and the pace of change is only accelerating."

And they believe their brand "at times" lost "fidelity and clarity. It's very much been always added to and not been thought of holistically. So, it's time for our brand to evolve too," they write, hoping to articulate a perspective "forged in the fires of community, powered by collaboration, shaped by AI, and driven by people."

The developer news site DevClass notes the change happens "as the number of posts to its site continues a dramatic decline thanks to AI-driven alternatives." According to a quick query on the official data explorer, the sum of questions and answers posted in April 2025 was down by over 64 percent from the same month in 2024, and plunged more than 90 percent from April 2020, when traffic was near its peak...

Although declining traffic is a sign of Stack Overflow's reduced significance in the developer community, the company's business is not equally affected so far. Stack Exchange is a business owned by investment company Prosus, and the Stack Exchange products include private versions of its site (Stack Overflow for Teams) as well as advertising and recruitment. According to the Prosus financial results, in the six months ended September 2024, Stack Overflow increased its revenue and reduced its losses. The company's search for a new direction though confirms that the fast-disappearing developer engagement with Stack Overflow poses an existential challenge to the organization.
DevClass says Stack Overflow's parent company "is casting about for new ways to provide value (and drive business) in this context..." The company has already experimented with various new services, via its Labs research department, including an AI Answer Assistant and Question Assistant, as well as a revamped jobs site in association with recruitment site Indeed, Discussions for technical debate, and extensions for GitHub Copilot, Slack, and Visual Studio Code.
From the official announcement on Stack Overflow's blog: This rebrand isn't just a fresh coat of paint. It's a realignment with our purpose: to support the builders of the future in an AI world — with clarity, speed, and humanity. It's about showing up in a way that reflects who we are today, and where we're headed tomorrow.
"We have appointed an internal steering group and we have engaged with an external expert partner in this area to help bring about the required change," notes a post in Stack Exchange's "meta" area. This isn't just about a visual update or marketing exercise — it's going to bring about a shift in how we present ourselves to the world which you will feel everywhere from the design to the copywriting, so that we can better achieve our goals and shared mission. As the emergence of AI has called into question the role of Stack Overflow and the Stack Exchange Network, one of the desired outputs of the rebrand process is to clarify our place in the world.

We've done work toward this already — our recent community AMA is an example of this — but we want to ensure that this comes across in our brand and identity as well. We want the community to be involved and have a strong voice in the process of renewing and refreshing our brand. Remember, Stack Overflow started with a public discussion about what to name it!
And another another post two months ago Stack Exchange is exploring early ideas for expanding beyond the "single lane" Q&A highway. Our goal right now is to better understand the problems, opportunities, and needs before deciding on any specific changes...

The vision is to potentially enable:

- A slower lane, with high-quality durable knowledge that takes time to create and curate, like questions and answers.

- A medium lane, for more flexible engagement, with features like Discussions or more flexible Stack Exchanges, where users can explore ideas or share opinions.

- A fast lane for quick, real-time interaction, with features like Chat that can bring the community together to discuss topics instantly.

With this in mind, we're seeking your feedback on the current state of Chat, what's most important to you, and how you see Chat fitting into the future.
In a post in Stack Exchange's "meta" area, brand design director David Longworth says the "tension mentioned between Stack Overflow and Stack Exchange" is probably the most relevant to the rebranding.

But he posted later that "There's a lot of people behind the scenes on this who care deeply about getting this right! Thank you on behalf of myself and the team."

"Shares of Ubisoft sank 18% on Thursday," reports CNBC, "after the French video game firm reported full-year earnings that disappointed investors... The company's shares have lost almost 60% of their value in the past 12 months, as the firm faced financial struggles, development hurdles, and underperformance of some of its key titles."

Ubisoft said its latest Assassin's Creed game "delivered the second-highest Day 1 sales revenue in franchise history and set a new record for Ubisoft's Day 1 performance on the PlayStation digital store," according to Reuters. And AFP notes that according to data from consultancy Circana, that game become the second-best-selling game of the year so far in the U.S. But... [A] string of disappointing releases undermined this year's performance, with a net loss of 159 million euros ($178 million) on revenues of 1.9 billion — down 17.5 percent year-on-year. Over the past 12 months, Ubisoft's would-be blockbuster "Star Wars Outlaws" fell short of sales expectations on release, while it cancelled multiplayer first-person shooter "XDefiant" for lack of players. "This year has been a challenging one for Ubisoft, with mixed dynamics across our portfolio, amid intense industry competition," chief executive Yves Guillemot said in a statement. But a string of disappointing releases undermined this year's performance, with a net loss of 159 million euros ($178 million) on revenues of 1.9 billion — down 17.5 percent year-on-year.

The group expects the measure to hold steady in the coming 2025-26 financial year, during which it will release a new "Prince of Persia" game, strategy title "Anno 117: Pax Romana" and mobile versions of shooters "Rainbow Six" and "The Division"... Moving to address its business woes, Ubisoft said in late March that it would create a new subsidiary to manage its three top franchises: "Assassin's Creed", "Far Cry" and "Rainbow Six".
"Since January, the shares have lost more than 12 percent, touching their lowest price in over a decade in April."

Charter Communications announced a $21.9 billion deal Friday to acquire Cox Communications, combining two major cable providers as they face mounting competition from wireless carriers offering 5G home internet. The transaction merges Charter's 31.4 million customers with Cox's 6.3 million, creating a larger entity to defend against aggressive expansion from Verizon and T-Mobile.

Charter lost 60,000 internet customers in the March quarter, underscoring the industry's vulnerability as traditional cable broadband growth stalls. Wireless carriers have successfully marketed their fixed wireless access services at lower price points while delivering competitive speeds, turning what was once cable's most profitable segment into contested territory. The combined company, which will be headquartered in Stamford, Connecticut, plans to adopt the Cox Communications name within a year of closing while retaining Spectrum as its consumer-facing brand.

Broadcom employees have had their personal data compromised following a September 2024 ransomware attack on Business Systems House (BSH).

The breach, claimed by the Russian-speaking El Dorado ransomware group, wasn't fully identified until December when stolen data appeared online, according to The Register. Broadcom only received details of affected employees on May 12, 2025. Compromised information potentially includes national ID numbers, financial account numbers, health insurance details, dates of birth, salary information, and contact details.

Five employee accounts were initially compromised, ultimately affecting 560 users. ADP has distanced itself from the incident, stating only "a small subset of ADP clients" in "certain countries in the Middle East" were affected.

Editor's note: This story was updated shortly after publication to correctly state that BSH is a business partner of payroll company ADP, and not a subsidiary of ADP as first reported.

A Northeastern University student demanded her tuition money back after discovering her business professor was secretly using AI to create course materials. Ella Stapleton, who graduated this year, grew suspicious when she noticed telltale signs of AI generation in her professor's lecture notes, including a stray ChatGPT citation in the bibliography, recurring typos matching machine outputs, and images showing figures with extra limbs.

"He's telling us not to use it, and then he's using it himself," Stapleton told the New York Times. After filing a formal complaint with Northeastern's business school, Stapleton requested a tuition refund of about $8,000 for the course. The university ultimately rejected her claim. Professor Rick Arrowood acknowledged using ChatGPT, Perplexity AI, and presentation generator Gamma. "In hindsight, I wish I would have looked at it more closely," he said.

An anonymous reader shares an opinion piece from The Guardian, written by columnist Emma Brockes: Mark Zuckerberg has gone on a promotional tour to talk up the potential of AI in human relationships. I know; listening to Zuck on friendship is a bit like taking business advice from Bernie Madoff or lessons in sportsmanship from Tonya Harding. But at recent tech conferences and on podcasts, Zuck has been saying he has seen the future and it's one in which the world's "loneliness epidemic" is alleviated by people finding friendship with "a system that knows them well and that kind of understands them in the way that their feed algorithms do." In essence, we'll be friends with AI, instead of people. The missing air quotes around "knows" and "understands" is a distinction we can assume Zuck neither knows nor understands.

This push by the 41-year-old tech leader would be less startling if it weren't for the fact that semi-regularly online now you can find people writing about their relationships with their AI therapist or chatbot and insisting that if it's real to them, then it's real, period. The chatbot is, they will argue, "actively" listening to them. On a podcast with Dwarkesh Patel last month Zuck envisaged a near-future in which "you'll be scrolling through your feed, and there will be content that maybe looks like a Reel to start, but you can talk to it, or interact with it and it talks back." The average American, he said, has fewer than three friends but needs more. Hey presto, a ready solution.

The problem, obviously, isn't that chatting to a bot gives the illusion of intimacy, but that, in Zuckerberg's universe, it is indistinguishable from real intimacy, an equivalent and equally meaningful version of human-to-human contact. If that makes no sense, suggests Zuck, then either the meaning of words has to change or we have to come up with new words: "Over time," says Zuckerberg, as more and more people turn to AI friends, "we'll find the vocabulary as a society to be able to articulate why that is valuable." ... The sheer wrongness of this argument is so stark that it puts anyone who gives it more than a moment's thought in the weird position of having to define units of reality as basic as "person." To extend Zuckerberg's logic: a book can make you feel less alone and that feeling can be real. Which doesn't mean that your relationship with the author is genuine, intimate or reciprocated in anything like the way a relationship with your friends is.

Microsoft has stopped production of the Surface Laptop Studio 2 and will mark it as end-of-life in June, with no successor currently planned. Tom's Hardware reports: The Surface Laptop Studio 2 is being put out to pasture quietly, much like other devices that the company has sunset. The Surface Studio, a desktop PC that folded down into a creative studio for drawing, was formally discontinued in December without a successor. Microsoft's audio products, the Surface Headphones 2 and Surface Earbuds, have also quietly disappeared.

The Surface Laptop Studio's discontinuance comes at a hazy time for the Surface brand. On the one hand, two new devices -- the Surface Pro 12-inch and Surface Laptop 13-inch -- were just announced and are set to release next week. On the other hand, the lineup lost its champion, former chief Panos Panay, who left Microsoft for Amazon in 2023, reportedly over budget issues and product cancellations. Panay was succeeded by Pavan Davuluri.

Since Panay's departure, the lineup has been cut down to just the Surface Laptop, Surface Pro, and the Surface Go 4, the latter of which is only sold to business customers at the moment. Without the Surface Laptop Studio, Microsoft has removed systems with discrete GPUs from its hardware lineup, potentially alienating creatives and gamers. Prior to the Surface Laptop Studio, Microsoft's powerhouse system was the Surface Book, which combined a tablet with a base featuring a discrete GPU.

At its second annual Upfront 2025 event yesterday, Netflix announced that it has created interactive mid-roll ads and pause ads that incorporate generative AI. These new ad formats are expected to roll out in 2026. Ars Technica reports: "[Netflix] members pay as much attention to midroll ads as they do to the shows and movies themselves," Amy Reinhard, president of advertising at Netflix, said. Netflix started testing pause ads in July 2024, per The Verge. Speaking to advertisers, Reinhard claimed that ad subscribers spend 41 hours per month on Netflix on average. The new ad formats follow Netflix's launch of its own in-house advertising platform in the US in April. It had previously debuted the platform in Canada and plans to expand it globally by June, per The Verge.

Netflix considers its advertising business to be in its early stages, meaning customers can expect the firm's ad efforts to continue expanding at a faster rate over the coming years. The company plans to double its advertising revenue in 2025. "The foundations of our ads business are in place, and going forward, the pace of progress will be even faster," Reinhard said today. Further reading: Netflix Says Its Ad Tier Now Has 94 Million Monthly Active Users

The Federal Trade Commission has postponed enforcement of its consumer-friendly "click to cancel" rule from May 14 to July 14, giving businesses two additional months to comply. The regulation requires companies to make subscription cancellations as straightforward as the sign-up process, prohibiting practices like forcing customers who subscribed online to navigate through chatbots or call centers to cancel.

The rule, established under former Democratic Chair Lina Khan, unsurprisingly has garnered support from consumer advocates while facing legal opposition from industry groups. A coalition including the U.S. Chamber of Commerce and organizations representing major telecom and media companies -- Charter Communications, Comcast, Disney Entertainment, and Warner Bros. Discovery -- has sued to block implementation, claiming the agency exceeded its authority.

Nvidia-backed CoreWeave plans to spend up to $23 billion this year on AI infrastructure and data center capacity, as it aims to meet the booming demand from clients. Reuters reports: The heavy spending plan weighed on its shares, which fell 5% after surging as much as 11% on better-than-expected revenue in its first results as a public company after debuting on the Nasdaq in March. The company's projected capital expenditure of between $3 billion and $3.5 billion for the second quarter was way above its revenue expectation of $1.06 billion to $1.1 billion. "While the revenue from Microsoft is likely secure for the next three years, CoreWeave represents overflow capacity for Microsoft, which may not need that capacity in the future," D.A. Davidson analyst Gil Luria said.

The company's revenue backlog was $25.9 billion as of March 31, with its five-year deal with OpenAI adding $11.2 billion to the pile up. As part of the deal signed in March, CoreWeave will provide AI infrastructure to OpenAI, while the ChatGPT maker will get a stake. CoreWeave expects annual revenue of $4.9 billion to $5.1 billion, above analysts' expectation of $4.61 billion, according to data compiled by LSEG. It reported revenue of $981.6 million for the first quarter, beating the estimate of $852.9 million.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: Google's DeepMind research division claims its newest AI agent marks a significant step toward using the technology to tackle big problems in math and science. The system, known as AlphaEvolve, is based on the company's Gemini large language models (LLMs), with the addition of an "evolutionary" approach that evaluates and improves algorithms across a range of use cases. AlphaEvolve is essentially an AI coding agent, but it goes deeper than a standard Gemini chatbot. When you talk to Gemini, there is always a risk of hallucination, where the AI makes up details due to the non-deterministic nature of the underlying technology. AlphaEvolve uses an interesting approach to increase its accuracy when handling complex algorithmic problems.

According to DeepMind, this AI uses an automatic evaluation system. When a researcher interacts with AlphaEvolve, they input a problem along with possible solutions and avenues to explore. The model generates multiple possible solutions, using the efficient Gemini Flash and the more detail-oriented Gemini Pro, and then each solution is analyzed by the evaluator. An evolutionary framework allows AlphaEvolve to focus on the best solution and improve upon it. Many of the company's past AI systems, for example, the protein-folding AlphaFold, were trained extensively on a single domain of knowledge. AlphaEvolve, however, is more dynamic. DeepMind says AlphaEvolve is a general-purpose AI that can aid research in any programming or algorithmic problem. And Google has already started to deploy it across its sprawling business with positive results. DeepMind's AlphaEvolve AI has optimized Google's Borg cluster scheduler, reducing global computing resource usage by 0.7% -- a significant cost saving at Google's scale. It also outperformed specialized AI like AlphaTensor by discovering a more efficient algorithm for multiplying complex-valued matrices. Additionally, AlphaEvolve proposed hardware-level optimizations for Google's next-gen Tensor chips.

The AI remains too complex for public release but that may change in the future as it gets integrated into smaller research tools.

Google has warned that the hacker group known as "Scattered Spider," which recently disrupted UK retailer Marks & Spencer, is now targeting U.S. retailers with aggressive and sophisticated cyberattacks. "U.S. retailers should take note. These actors are aggressive, creative, and particularly effective at circumventing mature security programs," John Hultquist, an analyst at Google's cybersecurity arm, said in an email sent on Wednesday. The Guardian reports: Scattered Spider is widely reported to have been behind the particularly disruptive hack at M&S, one of the best-known names in British business, whose online operations have been frozen since 25 April. It has a history of focusing on a single sector at a time and is likely to target retail for a while longer, Hultquist said. Just a day before Google's warning, M&S announced that some customer data had been accessed, but this did not include usable payment or card details, or any account passwords. The Guardian understands the details taken are names, addresses and order histories. M&S said personal information had been accessed because of the "sophisticated nature of the incident."

"Today, we are writing to customers informing them that due to the sophisticated nature of the incident, some of their personal customer data has been taken," the company said. Hackers from the Scattered Spider ecosystem have been behind a slew of disruptive break-ins on both sides of the Atlantic. In 2023, hackers tied to the group made headlines for hacking the casino operators MGM Resorts International and Caesars Entertainment. Law enforcement has struggled to get a handle on the Scattered Spider hacking groups, in part because of their amorphousness, the hackers' youth, and a lack of cooperation from cybercrime victims.