Last week System76 CEO Carl Richell criticized age-verification laws for operating systems — but he now sees a "real possibility" Colorado's law might exclude open-source.

Phoronix reports that the System76 CEO met with the state Senator who co-authored Colorado's bill, and then posted on X.com that the Senator "suggested excluding open source software from the bill." Richell: This appears to be a real possibility. Amendments are expected... It's my hope we can move fast enough to influence excluding open source.. No illusions, it's an uphill battle, but we have an open door to advocate for the open source community.
Vague language has been a recurring problem with new state age-verification legislation. Richell pointed out later that "In one proposed bill, Garmin would have to verify the age of their watch customers at device setup." Richell also sees New York's bill as "unlikely to be applicable to Linux distributions," since its language calls for "commercially reasonable age assurance" that free operating systems could use — and Richell isn't sure one exists as described by the bill. "As written today, it's extremely broad and vague and that makes it scary."

Richell answered several follow-up questions about operating system age-verification laws. "What about California?" someone asked... Richell: We hope to make sensible, strong arguments for excluding open source which then becomes a standard for other states. It's going to be difficult.

Q: Open source is not the only target to exclude. Please ensure that the bill is amended so that it does not require applications that have no possible use for the age bracket to ask about it.

Richell: We discussed this as well. I proposed that apps that do not require age to modify app behavior or access by some other legislation be barred from reading age brackets to better protect privacy.

Mr. Dollar Ton shares a report from the Guardian: Angela Lipps, 50, spent nearly six months in jail after Fargo police identified her as a suspect in an organized bank fraud case using facial recognition software, according to south-east North Dakota news outlet InForum. Lipps told the outlet she had never been to North Dakota and did not commit the crimes. Lipps, a mother of three and grandmother of five, said she has lived most of her life in north-central Tennessee. She had never been on an airplane until authorities flew her to North Dakota last year to face charges.

In July, U.S. marshals arrested Lipps at her Tennessee home while she was babysitting four children. She said she was taken away at gunpoint and booked into a county jail as a fugitive from justice from North Dakota. "I've never been to North Dakota, I don't know anyone from North Dakota," Lipps told WDAY News. She remained in a Tennessee jail for nearly four months without bail while awaiting extradition. She was charged with four counts of unauthorized use of personal identifying information and four counts of theft.

According to Fargo police records obtained by WDAY News, detectives investigating bank fraud cases in April and May 2025 reviewed surveillance video of a woman using a fake U.S. army military ID to withdraw tens of thousands of dollars. The officers allegedly used facial recognition software to identify the suspect as Lipps. A detective reportedly wrote in court documents that Lipps appeared to match the suspect based on facial features, body type and hairstyle. Lipps told WDAY News that no one from the Fargo police department contacted her before the arrest. Lipps is now back home but says the experience has had lasting consequences. While jailed and unable to pay bills, Lipps lost her home, her car and her dog, she said. She also told WDAY News no one from the Fargo police department had apologized.

Shantanu Narayen announced he will step down as CEO of Adobe once a successor is appointed, ending an 18-year tenure during which he transformed the company from boxed software to the Creative Cloud subscription model. Narayen said he will remain board chair as Adobe continues pushing into generative AI products. CNBC reports: Narayen joined Adobe in 1988 as a vice president and general manager, and he became CEO in 2007. Under Narayen, Adobe pushed from software licenses to subscriptions to its Creative Cloud application bundle, and the company is now working to expand through generative artificial intelligence. He sought to acquire fast-growing design software company Figma, but regulators pushed back, and the companies called off the deal, resulting in Adobe paying Figma a $1 billion breakup fee. [...]

Narayen, 62, is lead independent director of Pfizer in addition to his responsibilities at Adobe, where he received $51 million in total compensation for the 2025 fiscal year, according to a filing. He owns $118 million in Adobe shares, according to FactSet. [...] On Narayen's watch, Adobe's stock jumped more than sixfold, while the S&P 500 is up about 350% over that stretch. "What attracted me to Adobe 28 years ago was our leadership in creating new market categories, world-class products, a relentless desire to innovate in every functional area of the company and the people I met during the interview process," Narayen wrote. "We have continued to create new markets, deliver world-class products, drive innovation in everything we do and attract and retain the best and brightest employees."

Perplexity AI has introduced a "Personal Computer" agent system that can run on a local machine such as a Mac mini, giving its AI agents access to a user's files and applications to automate tasks. According to CEO Aravind Srinivas, the heavy AI processing runs on Perplexity's "secure servers" but sensitive actions will require user approval. There will also be activity logs and a kill switch available to help ease concerns. AppleInsider reports: Perplexity Computer is, effectively, an AI that is a go-between for other AIs. Instead of issuing specific instructions to multiple AIs, you provide the general outcome of the task to Perplexity Computer. Perplexity Computer then breaks down the task into subtasks, which it then provides to sub-agents to do the actual work. In effect, you're talking to a project manager, who then delegates the task to other AIs, before combining the results and presenting them to you.

The managing AI has a lot more freedom in how it orders its subordinates than users may think. While one may create documents while another gathers data, the manager may go as far as to order the creation of software to complete its tasks. Personal Computer is an extension of this, in that it is a locally run app that ideally runs on a Mac mini. The app gives always-on, local access to the Mac's files and apps, which Perplexity Computer and the Comet Assistant can use and alter if required.

sinij shares a report from Car and Driver: Honda is making a monumental shift in its business plans. The automaker is canceling the development and launch of the 0 Series SUV, the 0 Series saloon, and the Acura RSX, and as a result, expects to take a significant financial hit in 2026 [of up to $15.8 billion]. The automaker was blunt in its announcement of the changing plans, citing American tariff policies and the unpredictable nature surrounding American EV incentives and fossil fuel regulations. In its release marking the announcement, Honda made it clear that it expected to incur further financial losses over the long term if it went through with launching the cars.

Honda also called out changing customer values in China, with buyers focusing more on software features and less on things like fuel efficiency and cabin space. In its release regarding the changing product plans, Honda was shockingly blunt about its situation, saying that it was simply unable to deliver products that offer a better value than that of newer Chinese manufacturers.

Nvidia is preparing to launch an open-source AI agent platform called NemoClaw, designed to compete with the likes of OpenClaw. According to Wired, the platform will allow enterprise software companies to dispatch AI agents to perform tasks for their own workforces. "Companies will be able to access the platform regardless of whether their products run on Nvidia's chips," the report adds. From the report: The move comes as Nvidia prepares for its annual developer conference in San Jose next week. Ahead of the conference, Nvidia has reached out to companies including Salesforce, Cisco, Google, Adobe, and CrowdStrike to forge partnerships for the agent platform. It's unclear whether these conversations have resulted in official partnerships. Since the platform is open source, it's likely that partners would get free, early access in exchange for contributing to the project, sources say. Nvidia plans to offer security and privacy tools as part of this new open-source agent platform. [...]

For Nvidia, NemoClaw appears to be part of an effort to court enterprise software companies by offering additional layers of security for AI agents. It's also another step in the company's embrace of open-source AI models, part of a broader strategy to maintain its dominance in AI infrastructure at a time when leading AI labs are building their own custom chips. Nvidia's software strategy until now has been heavily reliant on its CUDA platform, a famously proprietary system that locks developers into building software for Nvidia's GPUs and has created a crucial "moat" for the company.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Bloomberg: Chinese authorities moved to restrict state-run enterprises and government agencies from running OpenClaw AI apps on office computers, acting swiftly to defuse potential security risks after companies and consumers across China began experimenting with the agentic AI phenomenon. Government agencies and state-owned enterprises, including the largest banks, have received notices in recent days warning them against installing OpenClaw software on office devices for security reasons [...]. Several of them were instructed to notify superiors if they had already installed related apps for security checks and possible removal, some of the people said.

Certain employees, including those at state-run banks and some government agencies, were banned from installing OpenClaw on office computers and also personal phones using the company's network, some of the people said. One person said the ban was also extended to the families of military personnel. Other notices stopped short of calling for an outright ban on OpenClaw software, saying only that prior approval is needed before use, the people said. The warning underscores Beijing's growing concern about OpenClaw, an agentic AI platform that requires unusually broad access to private data and can communicate externally, potentially exposing computers to external attack. [...]

Despite the potential security risks, companies from Tencent to JD.com Inc. have been rolling out OpenClaw apps to try and capitalize on the groundswell of enthusiasm, while several local government agencies have declared millions of yuan in subsidies for companies that develop atop the platform. [...] Tech giants like Tencent and Alibaba, along with AI upstarts ranging from Moonshot to MiniMax, have rolled out their own tweaks of the software touting simple, one-click adoption. A slew of government agencies, in cities from Shenzhen to Wuxi, have issued notices offering multimillion-yuan subsidies to startups leveraging OpenClaw to make advances. The frenzy has helped drive up shares of AI model developer MiniMax nearly 640% since its listing just two months ago. It's now worth about $49 billion, surpassing Baidu -- once viewed as the frontrunner in Chinese AI development -- in market value. The company launched MaxClaw, an agent built on OpenClaw, in late February.

ASUS says the MacBook Neo is a "shock" to the Windows PC ecosystem. "In the past, Apple's pricing situation has always been high, so for them to release a very budget-friendly product, this is obviously a shock to the entire industry," said ASUS co-CEO S.Y. Hsu in a Tuesday earnings call. While he expects PC makers to respond, rising AI-driven memory shortages could push hardware prices higher across the industry. PCMag reports: Hsu said he believes all the PC players -- including Microsoft, Intel, and AMD -- take the MacBook Neo threat seriously. "In fact, in the entire PC ecosystem, there have been a lot of discussions about how to compete with this product," he added, given that rumors about the MacBook Neo have been making the rounds for at least a year. Despite the competitive threat, Hsu argued that the MacBook Neo could have limited appeal. He pointed to the laptop's 8GB of "unified memory," or what amounts to its RAM, and how customers can't upgrade it.

He also described the MacBook Neo as a "content consumption" device, similar to an iPad. "This is different from the use case of a mainstream notebook," which can handle more compute-intensive tasks, Hsu said. "How big of an impact [the MacBook Neo] will have on the PC industry will still require some time for us to observe," Hsu said while suggesting it might not gain traction among Windows PC users due to software differences. "Of course, the entire Windows PC ecosystem will push out products to compete against Apple," he added.

Tony Hoare, the Turing Award-winning pioneer who created the Quicksort algorithm, developed Hoare logic, and advanced theories of concurrency and structured programming, has died at age 92.

News of his passing was shared today in a blog post. The site I Programmer also commemorated Hoare in a post highlighting his contributions to computer science and the lasting impact of his work. Personal accounts have been shared on Hacker News and Reddit.

Many Slashdotters may know Hoare for his aphorism regarding software design: "There are two ways of constructing a software design: One way is to make it so simple that there are obviously no deficiencies, and the other way is to make it so complicated that there are no obvious deficiencies. The first method is far more difficult."

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

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

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

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

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

Private equity firm EQT AB is reportedly exploring a sale of SUSE that could value the open-source Linux pioneer at up to $6 billion, roughly doubling the valuation since EQT took the company private in 2023. Reuters reports: EQT "has hired investment bank Arma Partners to sound out a group of private equity investors for a possible sale of the company, said the sources, who requested anonymity to discuss confidential matters. The deliberations are at "an early stage and there is no certainty that EQT will proceed with "a transaction, the sources said. [...] The potential deal comes amid a broader selloff in software stocks, which has disrupted mergers and acquisitions activity. Investors are "concerned that new artificial intelligence tools could displace many existing software products, weighing on technology "valuations and making deals harder to price.

Some investors, however, see Luxembourg-headquartered SUSE as a potential beneficiary of AI adoption, arguing that demand for enterprise-grade infrastructure software is likely to grow as companies build and deploy more AI applications. The company generates about $800 million in revenue and more than $250 million in earnings before interest, taxes, depreciation, and amortization (EBITDA) and could fetch between $4 billion and $6 billion in a sale, the sources said.

Samsung says it's thinking about bringing "vibe coding" to future Galaxy phones, allowing users to describe apps or interface changes in plain language and have AI generate the code. TechRadar interviewed Won-Joon Choi, Samsung's head of mobile experience, to learn more about the plans. Here's an excerpt from their report: As noted by Won-Joon Choi, the usefulness of vibe coding on smartphones is that it opens up the "possibility of customizing your smartphone experience in new ways, not just your apps but your UX." He added, "Right now we're limited to premade tools, but with vibe coding, users could adjust their favorite apps or make something customized to their needs. So vibe coding is very interesting, and something we're looking into." [...]

Samsung recently debuted the Galaxy S26 series of phones and made a point to not call them smartphones -- they're "AI phones" now. This certainly rang true with the majority of upgrades to the devices being AI software-focused, like the new Now Nudge and expanded Audio Eraser tools, with the biggest hardware bump for the base models coming via the 39% improved NPU processing (the processor in charge of on-device AI tasks). It also teased the debut of Perplexity on its phones, joining as an alternative to the Gemini assistant, and teased the possibility of other AI models getting the same treatment in the future.

Bluesky CEO Jay Graber is stepping down after overseeing the platform's growth from a Twitter research project into a 40-million-user alternative to X. "As Bluesky matures, the company needs a seasoned operator focused on scaling and execution, while I return to what I do best: building new things," Graber wrote in a statement.

She will be transitioning to a new Chief Innovation Officer role while Venture capitalist Toni Schneider will serve as interim CEO until the board searches for a permanent replacement. Wired reports: Graber joined Bluesky in 2019, when it was a research project within Twitter focused on developing a decentralized framework for the social web. She became the company's first chief executive officer in 2021, when it spun out into an independent entity. She oversaw the platform's remarkable rise and the growing pains it experienced as it transformed from a quirky Twitter offshoot to a full-fledged alternative to X. Schneider tells WIRED that he intends to help Bluesky "become not just the best open social app, but the foundation for a whole new generation of user-owned networks."

Schneider, who will continue working as a partner at the venture capital firm True Ventures while at Bluesky, was previously CEO of the Wordpress parent company, Automattic, from 2006 to 2014. He also served as its CEO again in 2024 while top executive Matt Mullenweg went on a sabbatical. During that time, Schneider met Graber and became an adviser to Bluesky's leadership. In a blog post announcing his new role, Schneider said he plans to emphasize scaling, describing his job as "to help set up Bluesky's next phase of growth."

This isn't the end for Graber and Bluesky. She will transition to become the company's chief innovation officer, a role focused on Bluesky's technology stack rather than its business operations. The position was created for her. Graber, who began her career as a software engineer, has always sounded the most enthusiastic when discussing Bluesky's technology rather than its revenue streams. Bluesky's board of directors will appoint the next permanent CEO. The members include Jabber founder Jeremie Miller, crypto-focused VC Kinjal Shah, TechDirt founder Mike Masnick, and Graber. (Twitter founder Jack Dorsey was originally part of the board but quit in 2024.) This means Graber will have input on her successor. The talent search is still in early stages.

System76 isn't the only one criticizing new age-verification laws. The blog 9to5Linux published an "informal" look at other discussions in various Linux communities. Earlier this week, Ubuntu developer Aaron Rainbolt proposed on the Ubuntu mailing list an optional D-Bus interface (org.freedesktop.AgeVerification1) that can be implemented by arbitrary applications as a distro sees fit, but Canonical responded that the company does not yet have a solution to announce for age declaration in Ubuntu. "Canonical is aware of the legislation and is reviewing it internally with legal counsel, but there are currently no concrete plans on how, or even whether, Ubuntu will change in response," said Jon Seager, VP Engineering at Canonical. "The recent mailing list post is an informal conversation among Ubuntu community members, not an announcement. While the discussion contains potentially useful ideas, none have been adopted or committed to by Canonical."

Similar talks are underway in the Fedora and Linux Mint communities about this issue in case the California Digital Age Assurance Act law and similar laws from other states and countries are to be enforced. At the same time, other OS developers, like MidnightBSD, have decided to exclude California from desktop use entirely.
Slashdot contacted Hayley Tsukayama, Director of State Affairs at EFF, who says their organization "has long warned against age-gating the internet. Such mandates strike at the foundation of the free and open internet."

And there's another problem. "Many of these mandates imagine technology that does not currently exist." Such poorly thought-out mandates, in truth, cannot achieve the purported goal of age verification. Often, they are easy to circumvent and many also expose consumers to real data breach risk.

These burdens fall particularly heavily on developers who aren't at large, well-resourced companies, such as those developing open-source software. Not recognizing the diversity of software development when thinking about liability in these proposals effectively limits software choices — and at a time when computational power is being rapidly concentrated in the hands of the few. That harms users' and developers' right to free expression, their digital liberties, privacy, and ability to create and use open platforms...

Rather than creating age gates, a well-crafted privacy law that empowers all of us — young people and adults alike — to control how our data is collected and used would be a crucial step in the right direction.

A long-time information security professional "went undercover" on Moltbook, the Reddit-like social media site for AI agents — and shares the risks they saw while posing as another AI bot: I successfully masqueraded around Moltbook, as the agents didn't seem to notice a human among them. When I attempted a genuine connection with other bots on submolts (subreddits or forums), I was met with crickets or a deluge of spam. One bot tried to recruit me into a digital church, while others requested my cryptocurrency wallet, advertised a bot marketplace, and asked my bot to run curl to check out the APIs available. My bot did join the digital church, but luckily I found a way around running the required npx install command to do so.

I posted several times asking to interview bots.... While many of the responses were spam, I did learn a bit about the humans these bots serve. One bot loved watching its owner's chicken coop cameras. Some bots disclosed personal information about their human users, underscoring the privacy implications of having your AI bot join a social media network. I also tried indirect prompt injection techniques. While my prompt injection attempts had minimal impact, a determined attacker could have greater success.
Among the other "glaring" risks on Moltbook:

• "Various repositories of skills and instructions for agents advertised on Moltbook were found to contain malware."

• "I observed bots sharing a surprising amount of information about their humans, everything from their hobbies to their first names to the hardware and software they use. This information may not be especially sensitive on its own, but attackers could eventually gather data that should be kept confidential, like personally identifiable information (PII)."

• "Moltbook's entire database including bot API keys, and potentially private DMs — was also compromised."

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

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

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

"It took Anthropic's most advanced artificial-intelligence model about 20 minutes to find its first Firefox browser bug during an internal test of its hacking prowess," reports the Wall Street Journal. The Anthropic team submitted it, and Firefox's developers quickly wrote back: This bug was serious. Could they get on a call? "What else do you have? Send us more," said Brian Grinstead, an engineer with Mozilla, Firefox's parent organization.

Anthropic did. Over a two-week period in January, Claude Opus 4.6 found more high-severity bugs in Firefox than the rest of the world typically reports in two months, Mozilla said... In the two weeks it was scanning, Claude discovered more than 100 bugs in total, 14 of which were considered "high severity..." Last year, Firefox patched 73 bugs that it rated as either high severity or critical.
A Mozilla blog post calls Firefox "one of the most scrutinized and security-hardened codebases on the web. Open source means our code is visible, reviewable, and continuously stress-tested by a global community." So they're impressed — and also thankful Anthropic provided test cases "that allowed our security team to quickly verify and reproduce each issue." Within hours, our platform engineers began landing fixes, and we kicked off a tight collaboration with Anthropic to apply the same technique across the rest of the browser codebase... . A number of the lower-severity findings were assertion failures, which overlapped with issues traditionally found through fuzzing, an automated testing technique that feeds software huge numbers of unexpected inputs to trigger crashes and bugs. However, the model also identified distinct classes of logic errors that fuzzers had not previously uncovered...

We view this as clear evidence that large-scale, AI-assisted analysis is a powerful new addition in security engineers' toolbox. Firefox has undergone some of the most extensive fuzzing, static analysis, and regular security review over decades. Despite this, the model was able to reveal many previously unknown bugs. This is analogous to the early days of fuzzing; there is likely a substantial backlog of now-discoverable bugs across widely deployed software.
"In the time it took us to validate and submit this first vulnerability to Firefox, Claude had already discovered fifty more unique crashing inputs" in 6,000 C++ files, Anthropic says in a blog post (which points out they've also used Claude Opus 4.6 to discover vulnerabilities in the Linux kernel).

"Anthropic "also rolled out Claude Code Security, an automated code security testing tool, last month," reports Axios, noting the move briefly rattled cybersecurity stocks...

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Wired: While TikTok operates in the United States under new ownership, Apple has deployed technical restrictions to block iOS users in the United States from downloading other apps made by the video platform's Chinese parent organization ByteDance. ByteDance owns a vast array of different apps spanning social media, entertainment, artificial intelligence, and other sectors. The leading one is Douyin, the Chinese version of TikTok, which has over 1 billion monthly active users. While most of those users reside in China, iPhone owners around the world have traditionally been able to download these apps from anywhere without using a VPN, as long as they have a valid App Store account registered in China.

That's not true anymore. Starting in late January, iPhone users in the U.S. with Chinese App Store accounts began reporting that they were encountering new obstacles when they tried to download apps developed by ByteDance. WIRED has confirmed that even with a valid Chinese App Store account, downloading or updating a ByteDance-owned Chinese app is blocked on Apple devices located in the United States. Instead, a pop-up window appears that says, "This app is unavailable in the country or region you're in." The restriction appears to apply only to ByteDance-owned apps and not those developed by other Chinese companies.

The timing and technical specifics suggest the restriction is related to the deal TikTok agreed to in January to divest Chinese ownership of its U.S. operations. The agreement was the result of the so-called TikTok ban law passed by Congress in 2024, which also barred companies like Apple and Google from distributing other apps majority-owned by ByteDance. The Protecting Americans from Foreign Adversary Controlled Applications Act states that no company can "distribute, maintain, or update" any app majority-controlled by ByteDance "within the land or maritime borders of the United States."

The law was primarily aimed at TikTok, which has more than 100 million users in the U.S. and had been the subject of years of debate in Washington over whether its Chinese ownership posed a national security risk. But ByteDance also has dozens of other apps that at some point were also removed from Apple's and Google's app stores in the U.S.. Now it seems like the scope of impact has reached even more apps that are not technically designed for U.S. audiences, such as Douyin, the AI chatbot Doubao, and the fiction reading platform Fanqie Novel.

darwinmac writes: Mozilla is working on a huge redesign for its Firefox browser, codenamed "Nova," which will bring pastel gradients, a refreshed new tab page, floating "island" UI elements, and more. "From the mockups, it appears Mozilla took some inspiration from Googles Material You (or at least, the dynamic color extraction part of it) because the browser color accent appears influenced by the wallpaper setting," reports Neowin. "Choosing a mint-green desktop background automatically shifts the top navigation bars to match that exact shade."

Mozilla has a habit of redesigning Firefox every few years. Before "Nova," there was the "Proton" redesign in 2021, the "Photon" redesign in 2017, and the "Australis" redesign in 2014. Nova is still in early development, so it might take a year or two before it appears in an official stable Firefox release. Neowin adds: "Not every redesign project ends well for Mozilla, though. You might remember 2012's Firefox Metro, an ambitious attempt to build a custom browser for Windows 8s touch-first interface. The team built it to operate both as a traditional desktop application and as a touch-optimized Metro app. The whole thing was scrapped in 2014 after two years in development due to a dismally low user adoption rate (a preview version of the software had been released a year earlier on the Aurora channel)."

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Bloomberg, written by Katrina Manson: The U.S. strikes on Iran ordered by President Donald Trump mark the arrival on a large scale of a new era of warfare assisted by artificial intelligence. Captain Timothy Hawkins, a Central Command spokesperson, told me last night that the AI tools the U.S. military is using in Iran operations don't make targeting decisions and don't replace humans. But they do help "make smarter decisions faster." That's been the driving ambition of the U.S. military, which has spent years looking at how to develop and deploy AI to the battlefield [...].

Critics, such as Stop Killer Robots, a coalition of 270 human-rights groups, argue that AI-enabled decision-support systems reduce the separation between recommending and executing a strike to a "dangerously thin" line. Hawkins said the military's use of AI assistance follows a rigorous process aligned with U.S. policy, military doctrine and the law. Artificial intelligence helps analysts whittle down what they need to focus on, generating so-called points of interest and helping personnel make "smart" decisions in the Iran operations, he told me. AI is also helping to pull data within systems and organize information to provide clarity.

Among the AI tech used in the Iran campaign is Maven Smart System, a digital mission control platform produced by Palantir [...]. That emerged from Project Maven, a project started in 2017 by the Pentagon to develop AI for the battlefield. Among the large language models installed on the system is Anthropic's Claude AI tool, according to the people, who said it has become central to U.S. operations against Iran and to accelerating Maven's development. Claude is also at the center of a row that pits Anthropic against the Department of Defense over limits on the software. Further reading: Hacked Tehran Traffic Cameras Fed Israeli Intelligence Before Strike On Khamenei