The UK Information Commissioner's Office has issued its first guidance demanding manufacturers of air fryers, smart speakers, fertility trackers, and smart TVs respect users' privacy rights after reports of excessive data collection in homes.

The regulator requires companies to ensure data security, provide transparency to consumers, and regularly delete collected information. Stephen Almond, the ICO's executive director for regulatory risk, said smart products know who users live with, their music preferences, and medication details. The guidance addresses "internet of things" devices, including fertility trackers that record menstrual dates and body temperature before sending data to manufacturer servers.

Additionally, smart speakers that monitor family members and visitors must allow users to configure settings that minimize personal information collection. The ICO warned manufacturers it stands ready to take enforcement action in the event of noncompliance.

OpenAI CEO Sam Altman accused Meta of attempting to poach his developers with $100 million sign-on bonuses and higher compensation packages as the social media giant races to catch up in AI race. Altman said Meta, which has a $1.8 trillion market capitalization, began making the offers to his team members after falling behind in AI efforts. "I've heard that Meta thinks of us as their biggest competitor," Altman said on the Uncapped podcast [video] hosted by his brother.

None of his "best people" had accepted Zuckerberg's offers, he said. Meta has been recruiting top researchers and engineers from rival companies to build a new "superintelligence" team focused on developing AGI. The Facebook parent company has struggled this year to match competitors, facing criticism over its Llama 4 language model and delaying its flagship "Behemoth" AI model.

In response to escalating tensions with Israel, Iran has begun throttling internet access, with plans to disconnect from the global internet entirely to prevent Israeli cyberattacks. The Iranian government also urges citizens to delete WhatsApp -- one of the country's most popular messaging platforms -- claiming without evidence that the Meta-owned app has been weaponed by Israel to spy on its users. (WhatsApp vehemently denied those claims in a statement to the Associated Press.) Telegram is also said to be blocked as well. The Verge reports: The announcements come amidst the escalating war between Iran and Israel, which broke out after Israel attacked the country on June 12th, and a rise in reported internet outages. Civilians have claimed that they've been unable to access basic but critical telecommunications services, such as messaging apps, maps, and sometimes the internet itself. Cloudflare reported that two major Iranian cellular carriers effectively went offline on Tuesday, and The New York Times reports that even VPNs, which Iranians frequently use to access banned sites like Facebook and Instagram, have become increasingly harder to access. [...]

Israel's role in the cyber outages has not been officially confirmed, but independent analysts at NetBlocks noticed a significant reduction of internet traffic originating from Iran on Tuesday, starting at 5:30 PM local time. According to Tasnim, a news network affiliated with the Iranian Revolutionary Guards, Iranians will still have access to the country's state-operated national internet service, though two Iranian officials told the Times that the internal bandwidth could be reduced by up to 80 percent.

President Trump will extend the deadline for ByteDance to divest TikTok's U.S. operations by another 90 days, marking the third extension since taking office. The extension aims to prevent a TikTok ban while negotiations with potential buyers like Oracle and Project Liberty continue. CNBC reports: "President Trump will sign an additional Executive Order this week to keep TikTok up and running," White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt said in a statement. "As he has said many times, President Trump does not want TikTok to go dark. This extension will last 90 days, which the Administration will spend working to ensure this deal is closed so that the American people can continue to use TikTok with the assurance that their data is safe and secure."

ByteDance was nearing the deadline of June 19, to sell TikTok's U.S. operations in order to satisfy a national security law that the Supreme Court upheld just a few days before Trump's second presidential inauguration. Under the law, app store operators like Apple and Google and internet service providers would be penalized for supporting TikTok. ByteDance originally faced a Jan. 19 deadline to comply with the national security law, but Trump signed an executive order when he first took office that pushed the deadline to April 5. Trump extended the deadline for the second time a day before that April mark. Trump told NBC News in May that he would extend the TikTok deadline again if no deal was reached, and he reiterated his plans on Thursday.

An anonymous reader shares a report: [...] the rise in China of open technology, which relies on transparency and decentralisation, is awkward for an authoritarian state. If the party's patience with open-source fades, and it decides to exert control, that could hinder both the course of innovation at home, and developers' ability to export their technology abroad.

China's open-source movement first gained traction in the mid-2010s. Richard Lin, co-founder of Kaiyuanshe, a local open-source advocacy group, recalls that most of the early adopters were developers who simply wanted free software. That changed when they realised that contributing to open-source projects could improve their job prospects. Big firms soon followed, with companies like Huawei backing open-source work to attract talent and cut costs by sharing technology.

Momentum gathered in 2019 when Huawei was, in effect, barred by America from using Android. That gave new urgency to efforts to cut reliance on Western technology. Open-source offered a faster way for Chinese tech firms to take existing code and build their own programs with help from the country's vast community of developers. In 2020 Huawei launched OpenHarmony, a family of open-source operating systems for smartphones and other devices. It also joined others, including Alibaba, Baidu and Tencent, to establish the OpenAtom Foundation, a body dedicated to open-source development. China quickly became not just a big contributor to open-source programs, but also an early adopter of software. JD.com, an e-commerce firm, was among the first to deploy Kubernetes.

AI has lately given China's open-source movement a further boost. Chinese companies, and the government, see open models as the quickest way to narrow the gap with America. DeepSeek's models have generated the most interest, but Qwen, developed by Alibaba, is also highly rated, and Baidu has said it will soon open up the model behind its Ernie chatbot.

Longtime Slashdot reader jrepin writes: Plasma is a popular desktop (and mobile) environment for GNU/Linux and other UNIX-like operating systems. Among other things, it also powers the desktop mode of the Steam Deck gaming handheld. The KDE community today announced the latest release: Plasma 6.4. This fresh new release improves on nearly every front, with progress being made in accessibility, color rendering, tablet support, window management, and more.

Plasma already offered virtual desktops and customizable tiles to help organize your windows and activities, and now it lets you choose a different configuration of tiles on each virtual desktop. The Wayland session brings some new accessibility features: you can now move the pointer using your keyboard's number pad keys, or use a three-finger touchpad pinch gesture to zoom in or out.

Plasma file transfer notification now shows a speed graph, giving you a more visual idea of how fast the transfer is going and how long it will take to complete. When any applications are in full screen mode Plasma will now enter Do Not Disturb mode and only show urgent notifications. When you exit full-screen mode, you'll see a summary of any notifications you missed.

Now, when an application tries to access the microphone and finds it muted, a notification will pop up. A new feature in the Application Launcher widget will place a green New! tag next to newly installed apps, so you can easily find where something you just installed lives in the menu.

The Display and Monitor page in System Settings comes with a brand new HDR calibration wizard. Support for Extended Dynamic Range (a different kind of HDR) and P010 video color format has also been added. System Monitor now supports usage monitoring for AMD and Intel graphic cards -- it can even show the GPU usage on a per-process basis.

Spectacle, the built-in app for taking screenshots and screen recordings, has a much-improved design and more streamlined functionality. The background of the desktop or window now darkens when an authentication dialog shows up, helping you locate and focus on the window asking for your password.

There's a brand-new Animations page in System Settings that groups all the settings for purely visual animated effects into one place, making them easier to find and configure. Aurorae, a newly added SVG vector graphics theme engine, enhances KWin window decorations.

You can read more about these and many other other features in the Plasma 6.4 announcement and complete changelog.

Facebook announced it will soon share all videos as reels by default, regardless of their length or orientation. "Up until now, users have been able to share both video posts and reels," notes TechCrunch. From the report: The company is also renaming the "Video" tab on its platform to the "Reels" tab. The update won't change what videos are recommended to you, Facebook says. [...] The idea behind the changes is to streamline the video-sharing format on the social network. It won't be the first time that a Meta-owned platform has done so, as Instagram began automatically converting new video posts under 15 minutes into reels back in 2022.

"Previously, you'd upload a video to Feed or post a reel using different creative flows and tools for each format," Facebook explained in a blog post. "Now, we're bringing these experiences together with a simplified publishing flow that gives you access to even more creative tools. We'll also give you control over your audience setting of who sees your reels." [...] The company says it will gradually roll out the changes globally over the coming months.

An anonymous reader shares a report: Iran's cybersecurity authority has banned officials from using devices that connect to the internet, apparently fearing being tracked or hacked by Israel. According to the state-linked Fars news agency, Iranian officials and their bodyguards have been told they are not allowed to use any equipment that connects to public internet or telecommunications networks.

Veteran columnist Steven J. Vaughan-Nichols declared that Firefox was "dead" to him in a scathing opinion piece Tuesday that cites Mozilla's strategic missteps and the browser's declining technical performance as evidence of terminal decline. Vaughan-Nichols argues that Mozilla has fundamentally betrayed user trust by removing a longstanding promise never to sell personal data from its privacy policy in February, replacing it with a weaker pledge to "protect your personal information."

The veteran technology writer also criticized Mozilla's decision to discontinue Pocket, a popular article-saving service, and Fakespot, which identified fake online reviews, while pursuing what he called a misguided AI strategy. He cited user reports of Firefox running up to 30% slower than Chrome, consuming excessive memory, and failing to properly load major websites. Mozilla has also become financially more vulnerable, he argued, noting CFO Eric Muhlheim's admission that the company depends on Google for 90% of its revenue. According to federal data he cited, Firefox holds just 1.9% of the browser market, leading him to conclude the browser is "done."

Denmark has deployed four uncrewed robotic sailboats (known as "Voyagers") for a three-month trial to boost maritime surveillance amid rising tensions in the Baltic region. The Associated Press reports: Built by Alameda, California-based company Saildrone, the vessels will patrol Danish and NATO waters in the Baltic and North Seas, where maritime tensions and suspected sabotage have escalated sharply since Russia's full-scale invasion of Ukraine on Feb. 24, 2022. Two of the Voyagers launched Monday from Koge Marina, about 40 kilometers (25 miles) south of the Danish capital, Copenhagen. Powered by wind and solar energy, these sea drones can operate autonomously for months at sea. Saildrone says the vessels carry advanced sensor suites -- radar, infrared and optical cameras, sonar and acoustic monitoring. Their launch comes after two others already joined a NATO patrol on June 6.

Saildrone founder and CEO Richard Jenkins compared the vessels to a "truck" that carries sensors and uses machine learning and artificial intelligence to give a "full picture of what's above and below the surface" to about 20 to 30 miles (30 to 50 kilometers) in the open ocean. He said that maritime threats like damage to undersea cables, illegal fishing and the smuggling of people, weapons and drugs are going undetected simply because "no one's observing it." Saildrone, he said, is "going to places ... where we previously didn't have eyes and ears." The Danish Defense Ministry says the trial is aimed at boosting surveillance capacity in under-monitored waters, especially around critical undersea infrastructure such as fiber-optic cables and power lines.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from the BBC: Social media and video networks have become the main source of news in the US, overtaking traditional TV channels and news websites, research suggests. More than half (54%) of people get news from networks like Facebook, X and YouTube -- overtaking TV (50%) and news sites and apps (48%), according to the Reuters Institute. "The rise of social media and personality-based news is not unique to the United States, but changes seem to be happening faster -- and with more impact -- than in other countries," a report found. Podcaster Joe Rogan was the most widely-seen personality, with almost a quarter (22%) of the population saying they had come across news or commentary from him in the previous week. The report's author Nic Newman said the rise of social video and personality-driven news "represents another significant challenge for traditional publishers." Other key findings from the report include:
- TikTok is the fastest-growing social and video platform, now used for news by 17% globally (up 4% from last year).
- AI chatbot use for news is increasing, especially among under-25s, where it's twice as popular as in the general population.
- Most people believe AI will reduce transparency, accuracy, and trust in news.
- Across all age groups, trusted news brands with proven accuracy remain valued, even if used less frequently.

Google Cloud has attributed last week's widespread outage to a flawed code update in its Service Control system that triggered a global crash loop due to missing error handling and lack of feature flag protection. The Register reports: Google's explanation of the incident opens by informing readers that its APIs, and Google Cloud's, are served through our Google API management and control planes." Those two planes are distributed regionally and "are responsible for ensuring each API request that comes in is authorized, has the policy and appropriate checks (like quota) to meet their endpoints." The core binary that is part of this policy check system is known as "Service Control."

On May 29, Google added a new feature to Service Control, to enable "additional quota policy checks." "This code change and binary release went through our region by region rollout, but the code path that failed was never exercised during this rollout due to needing a policy change that would trigger the code," Google's incident report explains. The search monopolist appears to have had concerns about this change as it "came with a red-button to turn off that particular policy serving path." But the change "did not have appropriate error handling nor was it feature flag protected. Without the appropriate error handling, the null pointer caused the binary to crash."

Google uses feature flags to catch issues in its code. "If this had been flag protected, the issue would have been caught in staging." That unprotected code ran inside Google until June 12th, when the company changed a policy that contained "unintended blank fields." Here's what happened next: "Service Control, then regionally exercised quota checks on policies in each regional datastore. This pulled in blank fields for this respective policy change and exercised the code path that hit the null pointer causing the binaries to go into a crash loop. This occurred globally given each regional deployment."

Google's post states that its Site Reliability Engineering team saw and started triaging the incident within two minutes, identified the root cause within 10 minutes, and was able to commence recovery within 40 minutes. But in some larger Google Cloud regions, "as Service Control tasks restarted, it created a herd effect on the underlying infrastructure it depends on ... overloading the infrastructure." Service Control wasn't built to handle this, which is why it took almost three hours to resolve the issue in its larger regions. The teams running Google products that went down due to this mess then had to perform their own recovery chores. Going forward, Google has promised a couple of operational changes to prevent this mistake from happening again: "We will improve our external communications, both automated and human, so our customers get the information they need asap to react to issues, manage their systems and help their customers. We'll ensure our monitoring and communication infrastructure remains operational to serve customers even when Google Cloud and our primary monitoring products are down, ensuring business continuity."

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: Subscribers in Southern California of Spectrum's Internet service experienced outages over the weekend following what company officials said was an attempted theft of copper lines located in Van Nuys, a suburb located 20 miles from downtown Los Angeles. The people behind the incident thought they were targeting copper lines, the officials wrote in a statement Sunday. Instead, they cut into fiber optic cables. The cuts caused service disruptions for subscribers in Van Nuys and surrounding areas. Spectrum has since restored service and is offering a $25,000 reward for information leading to the apprehension of the people responsible. Spectrum will also credit affected customers one day of service on their next bill.

"Criminal acts of network vandalism have become an issue affecting the entire telecommunications industry, not just Spectrum, largely due to the increase in the price of precious metals," the officials wrote in a statement issued Sunday. "These acts of vandalism are not only a crime, but also affect our customers, local businesses and potentially emergency services. Spectrum's fiber lines do not include any copper." Outage information service Downdetector showed that thousands of subscribers in and around Van Nuys reported outages starting a little before noon on Sunday. Within about 12 hours, the complaint levels returned to normal. Spectrum officials told the Los Angeles Times that personnel had to splice thousands of fiber lines to restore service to affected subscribers.

Threads is testing a new feature that lets users hide spoiler content by blurring images or text, which can then be revealed with a tap. The Verge reports: Meta spokesperson Alec Booker told The Verge that this is a "global test," though it's not clear how many people will gain access to it. Spoilers will also look a bit different depending on which device you're using. On desktop, spoilers are hidden by a gray block, but they appear behind a bunch of floating dots on mobile (which you can see in the GIF embedded [here]). "This feature is currently optimized for mobile, but we're working to improve the experience for desktop," Booker said.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from TechCrunch: While Silicon Valley executives like those from Palantir, Meta, and OpenAI are grabbing headlines for trading their Brunello Cucinelli vests for Army Reserve uniforms, a quieter transformation has been underway in the U.S. Navy. How so? Well, the Navy's chief technology officer, Justin Fanelli, says he has spent the last two and a half years cutting through the red tape and shrinking the protracted procurement cycles that once made working with the military a nightmare for startups. The efforts represent a less visible but potentially more meaningful remaking that aims to see the government move faster and be smarter about where it's committing dollars.

"We're more open for business and partnerships than we've ever been before," Fanelli told TechCrunch in a recent episode of StrictlyVC Download. "We're humble and listening more than before, and we recognize that if an organization shows us how we can do business differently, we want that to be a partnership." Right now, many of these partnerships are being facilitated through what Fanelli calls the Navy's innovation adoption kit, a series of frameworks and tools that aim to bridge the so-called Valley of Death, where promising tech dies on its path from prototype to production. "Your granddaddy's government had a spaghetti chart for how to get in," Fanelli said. "Now it's a funnel, and we are saying, if you can show that you have outsized outcomes, then we want to designate you as an enterprise service."

In one recent case, the Navy went from a Request for Proposal (RFP) to pilot deployment in under six months with Via, an eight-year-old, Somerville, Massachusetts-based cybersecurity startup that helps big organizations protect sensitive data and digital identities through, in part, decentralization, meaning the data isn't stored in one central spot that can be hacked. (Another of Via's clients is the U.S. Air Force.) The Navy's new approach operates on what Fanelli calls a "horizon" model, borrowed and adapted from McKinsey's innovation framework. Companies move through three phases: evaluation, structured piloting, and scaling to enterprise services. The key difference from traditional government contracting, Fanelli says, is that the Navy now leads with problems rather than predetermined solutions. "Instead of specifying, 'Hey, we'd like this problem solved in a way that we've always had it,' we just say, 'We have a problem, who wants to solve this, and how will you solve it?'" Fanelli said.

Microsoft has disabled Windows Hello's ability to authenticate users in low-light environments through a recent security update that now requires both infrared sensors and color cameras to verify faces. The change forces the system to see a visible face through the webcam before completing authentication with IR sensors.

Windows Hello earlier relied solely on infrared sensors to create 3D facial scans, allowing the feature to work in complete darkness similar to iPhone's Face ID. Microsoft pushed the dual-camera requirement to address a spoofing vulnerability in the biometric system.

Microsoft's latest Windows 11 preview builds contain a bug that replaces the operating system's startup sound with Windows Vista's iconic boot chime from 2006. Microsoft acknowledged the bug in its release notes -- describing it as a "delightful blast from the past" -- and said it was working on a fix.

An anonymous reader shares a report: When Facebook bought WhatsApp for $19 billion in 2014, the messaging app had a clear focus. No ads, no games and no gimmicks. For years, that is what WhatsApp's two billion users -- many of them in Brazil, India and other countries around the world -- got. They chatted with friends and family unencumbered by advertising and other features found on social media. Now that is set to change.

On Monday, WhatsApp said it would start showing ads inside its app for the first time. The promotions will appear only in an area of the app called Updates, which is used by around 1.5 billion people a day. WhatsApp will collect some data on users to target the ads, such as location and the device's default language, but it will not touch the contents of messages or whom users speak with. The company added that it had no plans to place ads in chats and personal messages.

[...] In-app ads are a significant change from WhatsApp's original philosophy. Jan Koum and Brian Acton, who founded WhatsApp in 2009, were committed to building a simple and quick way for friends and family to communicate with end-to-end encryption, a method of keeping texts, photos, videos and phone calls inaccessible by third parties. Both left the company seven years ago. Since then, Mark Zuckerberg, the chief executive of Facebook, now Meta, has focused on WhatsApp's growth and user privacy while also melding the app into the company's other products, including Instagram and Messenger.

"Walmart is bringing drone deliveries to three more states," reports CNBC: On Thursday, the big-box retailer said it plans to launch the speedier delivery option at 100 stores in Atlanta, Charlotte, Houston, Orlando and Tampa within the coming year. With the expansion, Walmart's drone deliveries will be available in a total of five states: [parts of northwest] Arkansas, Florida, Georgia, North Carolina and [the Dallas-Fort Worth area of] Texas... The drone operator will have an up to a six-mile range from stores.
Walmart tells CNBC the most frequently delivered items include ice cream, fresh fruit, and pet food, as well as "urgent items, such as hamburger buns for a cookout, eggs to make brownies or Tylenol or cold medicine needed when sick." It's all part of Walmart's effort to compete with Amazon: With more than 4,600 Walmart stores across the U.S., the retailer has used its large footprint to get online orders to customers faster. It has an Express Delivery service that drops purchases at customers' doors in as fast as 30 minutes, along with InHome, a subscription-based service, that puts items directly into people's fridges. The company began same-day prescription deliveries last fall and has expanded the service across the country.... Walmart stores have an assortment of over 150,000 items in a location. Over 50% of those can be delivered by drone, said Greg Cathey [Walmart's senior VP for U.S. transformation and innovation]...

Walmart's drone delivery count so far is modest. The company did not share the specific count, but said it has racked up a total of more than 150,000 drone deliveries since 2021.

KDE isn't the only organization reaching out to " as Microsoft prepares to end support for Windows 10.

"Now, The Document Foundation, maker of LibreOffice, has also joined in to support the Endof10 initiative," reports the tech blog Neowin: The foundation writes: "You don't have to follow Microsoft's upgrade path. There is a better option that puts control back in the hands of users, institutions, and public bodies: Linux and LibreOffice. Together, these two programmes offer a powerful, privacy-friendly and future-proof alternative to the Windows + Microsoft 365 ecosystem."

It further adds the "real costs" of upgrading to Windows 11 as it writes:

"The move to Windows 11 isn't just about security updates. It increases dependence on Microsoft through aggressive cloud integration, forcing users to adopt Microsoft accounts and services. It also leads to higher costs due to subscription and licensing models, and reduces control over how your computer works and how your data is managed. Furthermore, new hardware requirements will render millions of perfectly good PCs obsolete.... The end of Windows 10 does not mark the end of choice, but the beginning of a new era. If you are tired of mandatory updates, invasive changes, and being bound by the commercial choices of a single supplier, it is time for a change. Linux and LibreOffice are ready — 2025 is the right year to choose digital freedom!"
The first words on LibreOffice's announcement? "The countdown has begun...."