Australia proposes user choice over personalised social-media feeds
Draft online-safety legislation would require platforms to let Australians choose whether their default feed uses personalised recommendations.
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Report says LG TVs can collect too much data, and the safest fix may be to disconnect them
A new write-up based on Gamers Nexus research says the only sure way to stop the set from phoning home is to cut its network access entirely.
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A new critique says LG TV security claims mix real risks with overreach
A long response to a GamersNexus investigation argues that some of the alarming behavior may be ordinary smart-device networking, but that privacy concerns remain.
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Study finds coding agents still struggle to use testing techniques well
A new eval says prompting agents to use TDD, property-based tests or formal methods did not reliably improve correctness on Rust tasks.
Read report »One developer’s prompt test says harness choice still changes AI coding results
A small self-run experiment across ten model and harness combinations suggests tooling and orchestration can matter as much as the prompt itself.
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Jellyfin 12.0 adds a bigger backend reset, new book support and stricter upgrade rules
The media-server project says users need a full backup before moving to the new major release, which rewrites parts of the database on first boot.
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Mistral raises €3 billion in a record European tech funding round
The French AI company says Samsung led the Series D as it pushed its valuation above €21 billion and set a new benchmark for European fundraising.
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Independent wikis keep escaping Fandom’s search trap
A Weird Gloop post says its Overwatch and Fortnite communities have just been moved off Fandom, despite the pull of Google rankings and platform gravity.
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bzip3 wants to be the successor BZip2 never quite got
The open-source compressor bzip3 pitches itself as a better and stronger spiritual successor to BZip2, with higher ratios and faster performance.
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EU repair rules are being ignored by most new smartphones, campaigners say
Right to Repair Europe says more than 80 percent of new smartphones still fail to publish the repair information the EU requires.
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The tiny $70 Xteink X3 is the kind of gadget people actually use
The credit-card-sized Xteink X3 has become a viral hit because it is cheap, finicky and unusually effective at getting people to read more.
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Tottenham says VMware replacement cut licensing fees by more than 85 percent
The Premier League club says Broadcom’s VMware changes helped push it toward HPE’s Morpheus VM Essentials and a very large cost saving.
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Caltech’s Mathathon turns frontier models into a live test of AI and research math
The proposed October 30 event says a hundred teams will use frontier models on open conjectures and defend their results before mathematicians, in what organizers call the first hackathon devoted to research-level mathematics.
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A vacation essay argues slower time may be the best antidote to software brain fog
In a reflective post on DevZ, a software engineer says reading, family time and old-fashioned study helped counter the mental drift that can come with constant screens, AI tools and short-form content.
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Why Meta’s latest settlement has reignited the case against Zuckerberg
Meta’s agreement to pay as much as $18bn in a children’s safety settlement has reopened a long-running debate over whether the company can keep the same leader after years of scandals, fines and whistleblower criticism.
Read report »A programming essay argues the craft still matters more than AI shortcuts
An essay on Orchid Files says many developers treat coding as work, but a smaller group sees the act of programming itself as the point, not the paycheck or the speed of delivery.
Read report »vLLM’s AMD GPU guide shows speculative decoding is a tuning problem, not a magic switch
A new vLLM post explains how draft-and-verify decoding works on AMD Instinct GPUs, and why the throughput gains depend heavily on the model, draft method and proposal length.
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Nathan Fielder’s Elizabeth Holmes film turns the Theranos saga into another strange media object
Variety says an unannounced Telluride film about Elizabeth Holmes is part documentary, part reality-TV experiment and part character study, extending the long afterlife of the Theranos case.
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Trail of Bits publishes coop, a disposable VM layer for running Claude Code and Codex
Trail of Bits’ new Rust CLI wraps agentic coding tools in disposable virtual machines, giving Claude Code and Codex a contained environment with full development tooling but a smaller blast radius on the host.
Read report »Oxide sketches rack-level key hierarchy to keep stolen drives from revealing data
Oxide’s latest design note lays out a rack-level secret-sharing scheme meant to protect data at rest even if an attacker steals a subset of drives or sleds from a machine rack.
Read report »South African workers are being paid to teach AI the jobs they studied for years
A Rest of World essay says a newly graduated South African PhD holder was invited to train an AI system on tasks from assessment design to essay marking, showing how the AI labor market now depends on human judgment it may later replace.
Read report »Engrim wants to keep AI coding agents from forgetting the project
A new GitHub project called Engrim is pitching a local-first SQLite memory layer for coding assistants, aiming to preserve project decisions, constraints and context as developers switch between AI tools.
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Switzerland starts a pilot to move 3,000 federal computers off Microsoft 365
Switzerland’s federal administration has launched a pilot that will replace Microsoft 365 with open-source tools on 3,000 workstations, part of a broader push for digital sovereignty and lower dependence on a single foreign vendor.
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TiVo plans to turn automatic ad skipping into a paid add-on
TiVo is telling customers that its free automatic commercial-skipping feature will end in November, with a paid replacement service set to follow after a trial period.
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