Announced this week at RustConf 2025 in Seattle, the new Rust Innovation Lab will offer open source projects "the opportunity to receive fiscal sponsorship from the Rust Foundation, including governance, legal, networking, marketing, and administrative support."

And their first project will be the TLS library Rustls (for cryptographic security), which they say "demonstrates Rust's ability to deliver both security and performance in one of the most sensitive areas of modern software infrastructure." Choosing Rustls "underscores the lab's focus on infrastructure-critical tools, where reliability is paramount," argues explains WebProNews. But "Looking ahead, the foundation plans to expand the lab's portfolio, inviting applications from promising Rust initiatives. This could catalyze innovations in areas like embedded systems and blockchain, where Rust's efficiency shines."

Their article notes that the Rust Foundation "sees the lab as a way to accelerate innovation while mitigating the operational burdens that often hinder open-source development." [T]he Foundation aims to provide a stable, neutral environment for select Rust endeavors, complete with governance oversight, legal and administrative backing, and fiscal sponsorship... At its core, the Rust Innovation Lab addresses a growing need within the developer community for structured support amid Rust's rising adoption in sectors like systems programming and web infrastructure. By offering a "home" for projects that might otherwise struggle with sustainability, the lab ensures continuity and scalability. This comes at a time when Rust's memory safety features are drawing attention from major tech firms, including those in cloud computing and cybersecurity, as a counter to vulnerabilities plaguing languages like C++...

Industry observers note that such fiscal sponsorship could prove transformative, enabling projects to secure funding from diverse sources while maintaining independence. The Rust Foundation's involvement ensures compliance with best practices, potentially attracting more corporate backers wary of fragmented open-source efforts... By providing a neutral venue, the foundation aims to prevent the pitfalls seen in other ecosystems, such as project abandonment due to maintainer burnout or legal entanglements... For industry insiders, the Rust Innovation Lab represents a strategic evolution, potentially accelerating Rust's integration into mission-critical systems.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Phys.org: In a first-of-its-kind experiment, engineers at the University of Pennsylvania brought quantum networking out of the lab and onto commercial fiber-optic cables using the same Internet Protocol (IP) that powers today's web. Reported in Science, the work shows that fragile quantum signals can run on the same infrastructure that carries everyday online traffic. The team tested their approach on Verizon's campus fiber-optic network. The Penn team's tiny "Q-chip" coordinates quantum and classical data and, crucially, speaks the same language as the modern web. That approach could pave the way for a future "quantum internet," which scientists believe may one day be as transformative as the dawn of the online era.

Quantum signals rely on pairs of "entangled" particles, so closely linked that changing one instantly affects the other. Harnessing that property could allow quantum computers to link up and pool their processing power, enabling advances like faster, more energy-efficient AI or designing new drugs and materials beyond the reach of today's supercomputers. Penn's work shows, for the first time on live commercial fiber, that a chip can not only send quantum signals but also automatically correct for noise, bundle quantum and classical data into standard internet-style packets, and route them using the same addressing system and management tools that connect everyday devices online. "By showing an integrated chip can manage quantum signals on a live commercial network like Verizon's, and do so using the same protocols that run the classical internet, we've taken a key step toward larger-scale experiments and a practical quantum internet," says Liang Feng, Professor in Materials Science and Engineering (MSE) and in Electrical and Systems Engineering (ESE), and the Science paper's senior author.

"This feels like the early days of the classical internet in the 1990s, when universities first connected their networks," added Robert Broberg, a doctoral student in ESE and co-author of the paper. "That opened the door to transformations no one could have predicted. A quantum internet has the same potential."

The Hill reports: Russian state-sponsored hackers have targeted thousands of networking devices associated with U.S. critical infrastructure sectors over the past year, the FBI warned Wednesday. The cyber actors are associated with the Russian Federal Security Service's (FSB) Center 16 and have taken aim at a vulnerability in certain Cisco devices, according to an agency public service announcement.

In some cases, hackers have been able to modify configuration files to enable unauthorized access, which they have used to conduct reconnaissance on networks. This has "revealed their interest in protocols and applications commonly associated with industrial control systems," the FBI said.

Cisco's threat intelligence research arm, Talos, explained in a separate advisory that a subcluster of this group, which it has named "Static Tundra," is targeting a seven-year-old vulnerability in the company's Smart Install feature. The firm has offered a patch for the vulnerability, but it remains a problem in unpatched and end-of-life network devices, it warned.
"Once they establish initial access to a network device, Static Tundra will pivot further into the target environment, compromising additional network devices and establishing channels for long-term persistence and information gathering," warns the Talos blog. "This is demonstrated by the group's ability to maintain access in target environments for multiple years without being detected."

In a statement emailed to The Register, a Cisco spokesperson "said the company is aware of ongoing exploitation targeting this flaw." "We strongly urge customers to immediately upgrade to fixed software versions as outlined in the security advisory and follow our published security best practices," the spokesperson said, directing customers to the FBI's announcement and Cisco Talos blog for additional details.

The ongoing campaign targets telecommunications, higher education, and manufacturing organizations across North America, Asia, Africa, and Europe, "with victims selected based on their strategic interest to the Russian government," according to Talos researchers Sara McBroom and Brandon White. "We assess that the purpose of this campaign is to compromise and extract device configuration information en masse, which can later be leveraged as needed based on then-current strategic goals and interests of the Russian government," McBroom and White wrote.

And while both security alerts focus on the FSB's latest round of network intrusions, "many other state-sponsored actors also covet the access these devices afford," the Talos team warned. "Organizations should be aware that other advanced persistent threats (APTs) are likely prioritizing carrying out similar operations as well."
Some context from Hot Hardware: Cisco indicated in its advisory that "Only Smart Install client switches are affected by the vulnerability". The list of affected devices is in Table A-1 here. For a successful attack, hackers exploit a vulnerability tracked as CVE-2018-0171. This was a vulnerability that was patched way back in 2018.

Threads now has more than 400 million monthly active users. But who are these people who are actually using Threads, asks Mashable? And what is their cultural footprint? Threads is the Big Bang Theory of social media. Bland, boring, largely unoffensive, and somehow, it was the most popular show on television for years... At any given time, "Twitter" and "X" are searched somewhere between 12 and 30 times more than "Threads" on Google, according to the search engine's Trends data. Threads is a popular platform without much of an identity...

[Threads] is consistently good at one thing users really want from a social media platform: for their posts to be seen and engaged with. Threads might be boring in comparison to its competitors, but its users say it might be the only place on the internet right now where they don't feel they are screaming into the void.... Much like TikTok, you don't actually have to have thousands of followers to find decent engagement on the app. One user, commenting in a Reddit forum questioning who actually uses the app, said they "find it worthwhile" because "you can just say stuff on there under a tag and people will find it and respond...." According to consumer research company GWI, while users signed up for Threads because of its integration with Instagram, they're staying because Threads users are "community-focused," noting there's a strong overlap between Discord users and Threads users....

It just doesn't have the same flair as X or Twitter, which could be because Adam Mosseri, the head of Instagram, went out of his way to ensure politics was downplayed when Threads first launched. (Meta has since backtracked slightly by phasing "civic content" back into Threads "with a more personalized approach....") Threads is still in its adolescence. It lacks the media ecosystem that made Twitter indispensable for journalists, politicians, and celebrities. But it has something else: sheer scale and Meta's backing. With Instagram's 2 billion users as a feeder system, Meta can keep funneling people toward Threads whether they like it or not.
The article also points out Threads is integrated with the fediverse, supporting ActivityPub's decentralized protocol...

A 22-year-old Oregon man has been charged with operating one of the most powerful botnets ever recorded. The network, known as Rapper Bot, launched over 370,000 DDoS attacks worldwide, including against X, DeepSeek, U.S. tech firms, and even Defense Department systems. It was allegedly operated by Ethan Foltz of Eugene, Oregon. The Wall Street Journal reports: Foltz faces a maximum of 10 years in prison on a charge of abetting computer intrusions, the Justice Department said in a news release. Rapper Bot was made up of tens of thousands of hacked devices and was capable of flooding victims' websites with enough junk internet traffic to knock them offline, an attack known as a distributed denial of service, or DDoS.

In February, the networking company Nokia measured a Rapper Bot attack against a gaming platform at 6.5 trillion bits per second, well above the several hundred million bits a second of the average high-speed internet connection. "This would place Rapper Bot among the most powerful DDoS botnets to have ever existed," said a criminal complaint that the prosecutors filed Tuesday in a federal court in Alaska. Investigators said Rapper Bot's attacks were so powerful that they were able to overwhelm all but the most robust networks.

Foltz allegedly rented out Rapper Bot to paying customers, including gambling website operators who would use the network in extortion attempts, according to the complaint. The botnet was used to launch more than 370,000 attacks in 80 countries, including China, Japan and the U.S., prosecutors said. It launched its attacks from hacked routers, digital video recorders and cameras, not from computers. [...] "At its height, it mobilized tens of thousands of devices, many with no prior role in DDoS," said Jerome Meyer, a researcher with Nokia's Deepfield network-analysis division. "Taking it down removes a major source of the largest attacks we see."

Prospect magazine, in a recent piece: "LinkedIn doesn't know me anymore," someone complained to me recently. "What do you mean?" I asked. She explained that the platform has replaced the old "recommended jobs" section, which used to show her quite useful job openings based on her previous searches and CV, with an AI search engine that asks you to describe your ideal job in freeform text. The results it brings up aren't nearly as relevant.

This is just one of many ways in which the professionals' social media platform, which has embraced artificial intelligence with ferocious zeal, is being gradually "enshittified," to borrow tech writer Cory Doctorow's phrase. Each new embrace of AI tools promises to make hiring, job searching, networking and even posting a bit easier or more fruitful. Instead, AI seems to have made the user's experience more alienating, and to have helped foster a genre of LinkedIn-speak which bears all the hallmarks of the worst AI writing on the internet.

Let's start with my opening example -- which, to be fair, is in beta testing mode and can be switched off. Instead of the AI assistant being like an intuitive digital servant, pulling up the best jobs based on your ruminations, users are confronted with a new and annoying task: crafting prompts for the AI. But the non-AI search bar worked perfectly well as it was.

Then there is the AI writing assistant, which is available to users who pay for the platform's $40 per month premium service to help them craft their posts. LinkedIn's CEO Ryan Roslansky recently admitted that users aren't using the tool as much as he anticipated. It seems that sounding like a human being to your colleagues and clients is put at, well, a premium.

And then there are the ways in which users are deploying outputs from external AI chatbots on the platform, something with which LinkedIn is struggling to cope. According to the New York Times, the number of job applications submitted via the platform increased by 45 per cent in the year to June, now clocking in at an average of 11,000 per minute.

An anonymous reader shares a report: Manufacturer to the stars Foxconn is building so many AI servers that they're now bringing in more cash than consumer electronics -- even counting the colossal quantity of iPhones it creates for Apple.

The Taiwanese company revealed the shift in its Thursday announcement of Q2 results, which saw revenue grow 16% to NT$1.79 trillion ($59.73 billion) and operating profit rise 27% to NT$56.6 billion ($1.9 billion). CEO Kathy Yang told investors the company's Cloud and Networking Products division delivered 41% of total revenue, up nine percent compared to Q2 2024, and surpassing the company's Smart Consumer Electronics unit for the first time. The latter business includes Foxconn's work for Apple.

Australia's spy chief has warned that defense workers are exposing themselves to foreign intelligence services through LinkedIn profiles that detail classified projects and security clearances. Director-General Mike Burgess said over 35,000 Australians on the platform indicate access to sensitive information, with 7,000 mentioning defense work and 400 listing involvement in the AUKUS nuclear submarine program. Foreign spies routinely scour professional networking sites posing as consultants and recruiters, Burgess said.

ZDNet's Steven Vaughan-Nichols shares his list of "what's new and improved" in the latest Linux 6.16 kernel. An anonymous reader shares an excerpt from the report: First, the Rust language is continuing to become more well-integrated into the kernel. At the top of my list is that the kernel now boasts Rust bindings for the driver core and PCI device subsystem. This approach will make it easier to add new Rust-based hardware drivers to Linux. Additionally, new Rust abstractions have been integrated into the Direct Rendering Manager (DRM), particularly for ioctl handling, file/GEM memory management, and driver/device infrastructure for major GPU vendors, such as AMD, Nvidia, and Intel. These changes should reduce vulnerabilities and optimize graphics performance. This will make gamers and AI/ML developers happier.

Linux 6.16 also brings general improvements to Rust crate support. Crate is Rust's packaging format. This will make it easier to build, maintain, and integrate Rust kernel modules into the kernel. For those of you who still love C, don't worry. The vast majority of kernel code remains in C, and Rust is unlikely to replace C soon. In a decade, we may be telling another story. Beyond Rust, this latest release also comes with several major file system improvements. For starters, the XFS filesystem now supports large atomic writes. This capability means that large multi-block write operations are 'atomic,' meaning all blocks are updated or none. This enhances data integrity and prevents data write errors. This move is significant for companies that use XFS for databases and large-scale storage.

Perhaps the most popular Linux file system, Ext4, is also getting many improvements. These boosts include faster commit paths, large folio support, and atomic multi-fsblock writes for bigalloc filesystems. What these improvements mean, if you're not a file-system nerd, is that we should see speedups of up to 37% for sequential I/O workloads. If your Linux laptop doubles as a music player, another nice new feature is that you can now stream your audio over USB even while the rest of your system is asleep. That capability's been available in Android for a while, but now it's part of mainline Linux.

If security is a top priority for you, the 6.16 kernel now supports Intel Trusted Execution Technology (TXT) and Intel Trusted Domain Extensions (TDX). This addition, along with Linux's improved support for AMD Secure Encrypted Virtualization and Secure Memory Encryption (SEV-SNP), enables you to encrypt your software's memory in what's known as confidential computing. This feature improves cloud security by encrypting a user's virtual machine memory, meaning someone who cracks a cloud can't access your data. Linux 6.16 also delivers several chip-related upgrades. It introduces support for Intel's Advanced Performance Extensions (APX), doubling x86 general-purpose registers from 16 to 32 and boosting performance on next-gen CPUs like Lunar Lake and Granite Rapids Xeon. Additionally, the new CONFIG_X86_NATIVE_CPU option allows users to build processor-optimized kernels for greater efficiency.

Support for Nvidia's AI-focused Blackwell GPUs has also been improved, and updates to TCP/IP with DMABUF help offload networking tasks to GPUs and accelerators. While these changes may go unnoticed by everyday users, high-performance systems will see gains and OpenVPN users may finally experience speeds that challenge WireGuard.

Long-time Slashdot reader hackingbear writes: China's Huawei Technologies showed off an AI computing system on Saturday that can rival Nvidia's most advanced offering, even though the company faces U.S. export restrictions. The CloudMatrix 384 system made its first public debut at the World Artificial Intelligence Conference (WAIC), a three-day event in Shanghai where companies showcase their latest AI innovations, drawing a large crowd to the company's booth. The CloudMatrix 384 incorporates 384 of Huawei's latest 910C chips, optically connected through an all-to-all topology, and outperforms Nvidia's GB200 NVL72 on some metrics, which uses 72 B200 chips, according to SemiAnalysis. A full CloudMatrix system can now deliver 300 PFLOPs of dense BF16 compute, almost double that of the GB200 NVL72. With more than 3.6x aggregate memory capacity and 2.1x more memory bandwidth, Huawei and China "now have AI system capabilities that can beat Nvidia's," according to a report by SemiAnalysis.

The trade-off is that it takes 4.1x the power of a GB200 NVL72, with 2.5x worse power per FLOP, 1.9x worse power per TB/s memory bandwidth, and 1.2x worse power per TB HBM memory capacity, but SemiAnalysis noted that China has no power constraints only chip constraints. Nvidia had announced DGX H100 NVL256 "Ranger" Platform [with 256 GPUs], SemiAnalysis writes, but "decided to not bring it to production due to it being prohibitively expensive, power hungry, and unreliable due to all the optical transceivers required and the two tiers of network. The CloudMatrix Pod requires an incredible 6,912 400G LPO transceivers for networking, the vast majority of which are for the scaleup network."


Also at this event, Chinese e-commerce giant Alibaba released a new flagship open-source reasoning model Qwen3-235B-A22B-Thinking-2507 which has "already topped key industry benchmarks, outperforming powerful proprietary systems from rivals like Google and OpenAI," according to industry reports. On the AIME25 benchmark, a test designed to evaluate sophisticated, multi-step problem-solving skills, Qwen3-Thinking-2507 achieved a remarkable score of 92.3. This places it ahead of some of the most powerful proprietary models, notably surpassing Google's Gemini-2.5 Pro, while Qwen3-Thinking secured a top score of 74.1 at LiveCodeBench, comfortably ahead of both Gemini-2.5 Pro and OpenAI's o4-mini, demonstrating its practical utility for developers and engineering teams.

College graduates across specialized fields are pursuing a new career path training AI models, with companies paying between $30 to $160 per hour for their expertise. Handshake, a university career networking platform, recruited more than 1,000 AI trainers in six months through its newly created Handshake AI division for what it describes as the top five AI laboratories.

The trend stems from federal funding cuts straining academic research and a stalled entry-level job market, making AI training an attractive alternative for recent graduates with specialized knowledge in fields including music, finance, law, education, statistics, virology, and quantum mechanics.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Tom's Hardware: At the 2025 RISC-V Summit in China, Nvidia announced that its CUDA software platform will be made compatible with the RISC-V instruction set architecture (ISA) on the CPU side of things. The news was confirmed during a presentation during a RISC-V event. This is a major step in enabling the RISC-V ISA-based CPUs in performance demanding applications. The announcement makes it clear that RISC-V can now serve as the main processor for CUDA-based systems, a role traditionally filled by x86 or Arm cores. While nobody even barely expects RISC-V in hyperscale datacenters any time soon, RISC-V can be used on CUDA-enabled edge devices, such as Nvidia's Jetson modules. However, it looks like Nvidia does indeed expect RISC-V to be in the datacenter.

Nvidia's profile on RISC-V seems to be quite high as the keynote at the RISC-V Summit China was delivered by Frans Sijsterman, who appears to be Vice President of Hardware Engineering at Nvidia. The presentation outlined how CUDA components will now run on RISC-V. A diagram shown at the session illustrated a typical configuration: the GPU handles parallel workloads, while a RISC-V CPU executes CUDA system drivers, application logic, and the operating system. This setup enables the CPU to orchestrate GPU computations fully within the CUDA environment. Given Nvidia's current focus, the workloads must be AI-related, yet the company did not confirm this. However, there is more.

Also featured in the diagram was a DPU handling networking tasks, rounding out a system consisting of GPU compute, CPU orchestration, and data movement. This configuration clearly suggests Nvidia's vision to build heterogeneous compute platforms where RISC-V CPU can be central to managing workloads while Nvidia's GPUs, DPUs, and networking chips handle the rest. Yet again, there is more. Even with this low-profile announcement, Nvidia essentially bridges proprietary CUDA stack to an open architecture, one that seems to develop fast in China. Yet, being unable to ship flagship GB200 and GB300 offerings to China, the company has to find ways to keep its CUDA thriving.

"Anybody who's got a hosted SharePoint server has got a problem," the senior VP of cybersecurity firm CrowdStrike told the Washington Post. "It's a significant vulnerability."

And it's led to a new "global attack on government agencies and businesses" in the last few days, according to the article, "breaching U.S. federal and state agencies, universities, energy companies and an Asian telecommunications company, according to state officials and private researchers..."

"Tens of thousands of such servers are at risk, experts said, and Microsoft has issued no patch for the flaw, leaving victims around the world scrambling to respond." (Microsoft says they are "working on" security updates "for supported versions of SharePoint 2019 and SharePoint 2016," offering various mitigation suggestions, and CISA has released their own recommendations.)

From the Washington Post's article Sunday: Microsoft has suggested that users make modifications to SharePoint server programs or simply unplug them from the internet to stanch the breach. Microsoft issued an alert to customers but declined to comment further... "We are seeing attempts to exploit thousands of SharePoint servers globally before a patch is available," said Pete Renals, a senior manager with Palo Alto Networks' Unit 42. "We have identified dozens of compromised organizations spanning both commercial and government sectors.''

With access to these servers, which often connect to Outlook email, Teams and other core services, a breach can lead to theft of sensitive data as well as password harvesting, Netherlands-based research company Eye Security noted. What's also alarming, researchers said, is that the hackers have gained access to keys that may allow them to regain entry even after a system is patched. "So pushing out a patch on Monday or Tuesday doesn't help anybody who's been compromised in the past 72 hours," said one researcher, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because a federal investigation is ongoing.

The breaches occurred after Microsoft fixed a security flaw this month. The attackers realized they could use a similar vulnerability, according to the Department of Homeland Security's Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency. CISA spokeswoman Marci McCarthy said the agency was alerted to the issue Friday by a cyber research firm and immediately contacted Microsoft... The nonprofit Center for Internet Security, which staffs an information-sharing group for state and local governments, notified about 100 organizations that they were vulnerable and potentially compromised, said Randy Rose, the organization's vice president. Those warned included public schools and universities. Others that were breached included a government agency in Spain, a local agency in Albuquerque and a university in Brazil, security researchers said.
But there's many more breaches, according to the article:

• "Eye Security said it has tracked more than 50 breaches, including at an energy company in a large state and several European government agencies."

• "At least two U.S. federal agencies have seen their servers breached, according to researchers."

• "One state official in the eastern U.S. said the attackers had 'hijacked' a repository of documents provided to the public to help residents understand how their government works. The agency involved can no longer access the material..."

"It was not immediately clear who is behind the hacking of global reach or what its ultimate goal is. One private research company found the hackers targeting servers in China..."

Long-time Slashdot reader wattersa is a lawyer in Redwood City, California, and a Slashdot reader since 1998. In 2022 he shared the remarkable story of a three-year missing person investigation that was ultimately solved with a subpoena to Google. A murder victim appeared to have sent an email at a time which would exonerate the chief suspect. But a closer inspection of that email's IP addresses revealed it was actually sent from a hotel where the suspect was staying. ("Although Google does not include the originating IP address in the email headers, it turns out that they retain the IP address for some unknown length of time...")

Today wattersa brings this update: The case finally went to trial in July 2025, where I testified about the investigation along with an expert witness on computer networking. The jury took three hours to return a verdict against the victim's husband for wrongful death in the amount of $23.2 million, with a special finding that he caused the death of his wife.

The defendant is a successful mechanical engineer at an energy company, but is walking as a free man because he is Canadian and no one can prosecute him in the U.S., since Taiwan and the U.S. don't have extradition with each other.

It was an interesting case and I look forward to using it as a model in other missing person cases.

This week Hewlett-Packard Enterprise settled its antitrust case with America's Justice Department, "paving the way for its acquisition of rival kit maker Juniper Networks," reported Telecoms.com: Under the agreement, HPE has agreed to divest its Instant On unit, which sells a range of enterprise-grade Wi-Fi networking equipment for campus and branch deployments. It has also agreed to license Juniper's Mist AIOps source code — a software suite that enables AI-based network automation and management. HPE can live with that, since its primary motivation for buying Juniper is to improve its prospects in an IT networking market dominated by Cisco, where others like Arista and increasingly Nokia and Nvidia are also trying to make inroads.
And after receiving regulatory clearance, HPE "very quickly closed the deal..." reports The Motley Fool. "In the press release heralding the news, the buyer wrote that it "doubles the size of HPE's networking business and provides customers with a comprehensive portfolio of networking solutions." Investors were obviously happy about this, as according to data compiled by S&P Global Market Intelligence the company's stock price ballooned by nearly 16% across the week, largely on the news.... The Justice Department had alleged, in a lawsuit filed in January, that an HPE/Juniper tie-up would essentially result in a duopoly in networking equipment. It claimed that a beefed-up HPE and networking incumbent Cisco would hold more than 70% combined of the domestic market.
Thanks to long-time Slashdot reader AmiMoJo for sharing the news.

Facebook is prompting users to opt into a feature that uploads photos from their camera roll -- even those not shared on the platform -- to Meta's servers for AI-driven suggestions like collages and stylized edits. While Meta claims the content is private and not used for ads, opting in allows the company to analyze facial features and retain personal data under its broad AI terms, raising privacy concerns. TechCrunch reports: The feature is being suggested to Facebook users when they're creating a new Story on the social networking app. Here, a screen pops up and asks if the user will opt into "cloud processing" to allow creative suggestions. As the pop-up message explains, by clicking "Allow," you'll let Facebook generate new ideas from your camera roll, like collages, recaps, AI restylings, or photo themes. To work, Facebook says it will upload media from your camera roll to its cloud (meaning its servers) on an "ongoing basis," based on information like time, location, or themes.

The message also notes that only you can see the suggestions, and the media isn't used for ad targeting. However, by tapping "Allow," you are agreeing to Meta's AI Terms. This allows your media and facial features to be analyzed by AI, it says. The company will additionally use the date and presence of people or objects in your photos to craft its creative ideas. [...] According to Meta's AI Terms around image processing, "once shared, you agree that Meta will analyze those images, including facial features, using AI. This processing allows us to offer innovative new features, including the ability to summarize image contents, modify images, and generate new content based on the image," the text states.

The same AI terms also give Meta's AIs the right to "retain and use" any personal information you've shared in order to personalize its AI outputs. The company notes that it can review your interactions with its AIs, including conversations, and those reviews may be conducted by humans. The terms don't define what Meta considers personal information, beyond saying it includes "information you submit as Prompts, Feedback, or other Content." We have to wonder whether the photos you've shared for "cloud processing" also count here.

Aaron Sorkin is officially working on a sequel to The Social Network. From a report: Last year, the Oscar-winning writer revealed he was working on a film that would revisit the subject of Facebook, and Deadline has now reported that The Social Network Part II is in development at Sony Pictures yet isn't a "straight sequel."

The original film, which traced the early days of Facebook and its creator Mark Zuckerberg, was directed by David Fincher. Sorkin is rumoured to be directing the follow-up. "I blame Facebook for January 6," he said in 2024 on a special edition of The Town podcast, live from Washington DC. When asked to explain why, he responded: "You're gonna need to buy a movie ticket."

The Social Network was an adaptation of Ben Mezrich's book The Accidental Billionaires, and the sequel will be based on the Wall Street Journal series The Facebook Files. The 2021 investigation examined the damage caused by the social networking site and how internal findings had been buried. Subjects included the influence on the January 6 riot and the mental health of teenage users.

The Register's Simon Sharwood reports: Huawei's chairman Xu Zhijun -- aka Eric Xu -- has called out China's enormous lead in fiber-to-the-room (FTTR) installations. Speaking at last week's Mobile World Congress event in Shanghai, Xu shared his views on the telecommunications industry's future growth opportunities and said by the end of 2025 China will be home to 75 million FTTR installations -- but just 500,000 exist outside the Middle Kingdom. Xu said FTTR will benefit businesses by increasing their internet connection speeds, helping them address spotty Wi-Fi coverage, allowing them to deploy tech in more places, and therefore creating more opportunities to adopt productivity-boosting devices and services. FTTR will also help carriers to sell more expensive packages, he said. Xu also urged telecom carriers to target high-growth user groups like delivery riders and livestream influencers, citing their above-average data consumption and revenue potential. Delivery riders, who will make up 5% of the global workforce by 2030, use four times more voice minutes and double the data of average users, while influencers generate five times the data usage and four times the revenue.

He also pushed for greater collaboration between carriers and platforms to deliver more high-res video content, and called for improved efficiency in networking equipment and device power use. "Xu said Huawei is here to help carriers deliver any of the scenarios he mentioned," concludes Sharwood. "And of course it is, because the Chinese giant has a thriving business selling to telcos -- or at least to telcos beyond the liberal democracies that have largely decided Huawei's close ties with Beijing mean the company and its products represent an unacceptable threat to the operation of critical infrastructure."

BlueSky has grown from roughly 10 million users in early November to 36.79 million today — and its last 30 days of traffic looks very level.

But instead of calling BlueSky's traffic "level", right-leaning libertarian Megan McArdle argues instead that BlueSky's "decline shows no sign of leveling out" (comparing the stable figures from the last month to a one-time spike seven months ago so they can write "It's now down about 50 percent"). And Wednesday the conservative UK magazine Spectator also ignored the 30-day-leveling to write instead that BlueSky is somehow "sliding down a slope".

But TechCrunch thinks the "up or down" conversation is entirely missing the point of "the wider network of apps built on the open protocol that Bluesky's team spearheaded" — and how BlueSky "is only meant to be one example of what's possible within the wider AT Proto ecosystem." If you don't like the tone of the topics trending on Bluesky, you can switch to other apps, change your default feeds, or even build your own social platform using the technology. Already, people are using the protocol that powers Bluesky to build social experiences for specific groups — like Blacksky is doing for the Black online community or like Gander Social is doing for social media users in Canada. There are also feed builders like Graze and those in Surf that let you create custom feeds where you can focus on specific content you care about — like video games or baseball — and exclude others, like politics. Built into Bluesky (and other third-party clients) are tools that let you pick your default feed and add others that interest you from a range of topics. If you want to follow a feed devoted to your favorite TV show or animal, for instance, you can. In other words, Bluesky is meant to be what you make it, and its content can be consumed in whatever format you prefer best.

In addition to Bluesky itself, the wider network of apps built on the AT Protocol includes photo- and video-sharing apps, livestreaming tools, communication apps, blogging apps, music apps, movie and TV recommendation apps, and more. Other tools also let you combine feeds from Bluesky with other social networks. Openvibe, for instance, can mix together feeds from social networks like Threads, Bluesky, Mastodon, and Nostr. Apps like Surf and Tapestry offer ways to track posts on open social platforms as well as those published with other open protocols like RSS. This lets the apps pull in content from blogs, news sites, YouTube, and podcasts.
Even just considering BlueSky itself, three weeks ago Fast Company pointed out that BlueSky "grew from 11 million users to 25 million between late October and mid-December, but has added only about 10 million more since then." So how is a 10-million user increase "dying"? For a social network, being prematurely written off is a rite of passage. It's even a compliment of sorts — a sign that people are paying attention and care... When I chatted with Bluesky CEO Jay Graber this week, I wasn't surprised that she didn't seem fazed by the debate on her platform and saw the parallels with early-days Twitter. "Reports of our death are greatly exaggerated," she told me. "It's a similar thing, because with social sites, it's not straight up all the time. [Growth] comes in waves, and at each stage, there's a new era of communities being established and formed. We're still seeing a lot of community formation, and one of the most exciting things is how structurally different this is. It's not just another social site that has to be a singular winner-take-all in an ecosystem with existing incumbents...."

One other challenge that Bluesky has not yet fully confronted is monetizing itself. Onstage at Web Summit, Graber emphasized that it's working on subscription services, a healthier revenue source than stuffing feeds with ads, though potentially a tougher one to scale up to sustainability. The company announced a $15 million Series A funding round last October.
But again, the point isn't BlueSky's increasing user count or its stablizing levels of Daily Unique "Likers" — but its underlying open source protocol: [S]he was at her most passionate when discussing the company's aspiration to decentralize social networking via its open AT Protocol. It powers Bluesky — and variants such as the Pinksky photo-sharing app, which she praised onstage — but could also provide the infrastructure for further-flung social experiences. Maybe even ones catering to folks who have zero interest in participating in the Bluesky community. "The goal is to really get through that this is a Choose Your Own Adventure and Bluesky's just the beginning," she says. "The sky's the limit." Whether she'll fulfill her grandest ambitions, I'm not sure. But I already like this era of social networking better than the one when a handful of winners really did take all.

Cisco is updating its networking and security products to make AI networks speedier and more secure, part of a broader push to capitalize on the AI spending boom. From a report: A new generation of switches -- networking equipment that links computer systems -- will offer a 10-fold improvement in performance, the company said on Tuesday. That will help prevent AI applications from suffering bottlenecks when transferring data, Cisco said. Networking speed has become a bigger issue as data center operators try to manage a flood of AI information -- both in the cloud and within the companies' own facilities. Slowdowns can hinder AI models, Cisco President and Chief Product Officer Jeetu Patel said in an interview. That applies to the development phase -- known as training -- and the operation of the models, a stage called inference. A massive build-out of data centers has made Cisco more relevant, he said. "AI is going to be network-bound, both on training and inference," Patel said. Having computer processors sit idle during training because of slow networks is "just throwing away money."