More than 80 signatories representing about 100 European tech organizations have urged EU leaders to take "radical action" to reduce reliance on foreign digital infrastructure, according to a letter sent to European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen.

The coalition, including Airbus, Proton, and OVHCloud, warns Europe "will lose out on digital innovation" and become almost completely dependent on non-European technologies "in less than three years at current rates."

The group calls for public procurement requirements mandating European-made tech solutions, development of common standards, and creation of a "Sovereign Infrastructure Fund" for capital-intensive areas like chips and quantum computing. "Our reliance on non-European technologies will become almost complete in less than three years at current rates," the letter states, citing concerns over U.S. technological dominance following recent comments from Vice President JD Vance criticizing European regulations.

Across high-income countries, humans' ability to reason and solve problems appears to have peaked in the early 2010s and declined since. Despite no changes in fundamental brain biology, test scores for both teenagers and adults show deteriorating performance in reading, mathematics and science. In an eye-opening statistic, 25% of adults in high-income countries now struggle to "use mathematical reasoning when reviewing statements" -- rising to 35% in the US.

This cognitive decline coincides with a fundamental shift in our relationship with information. Americans reading books has fallen below 50%, while difficulty thinking and concentrating among 18-year-olds has climbed sharply since the mid-2010s. The timing points to our changing digital habits: a transition from finite web pages to infinite feeds, from active browsing to passive consumption, and from focused attention to constant context-switching.

Research shows that intentional use of digital technologies can be beneficial, but the passive consumption dominating recent years impairs verbal processing, attention, working memory and self-regulation.

Some of the cited research in the story:
New PIAAC results show declining literacy and increasing inequality in many European countries â" Better adult learning is necessary;
Have attention spans been declining?;
Short- and long-term effects of passive and active screen time on young children's phonological memory;
Efficient, helpful, or distracting? A literature review of media multitasking in relation to academic performance.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from 404 Media: Something very strange is happening inside Super Nintendo (SNES) consoles as they age: a component you've probably never heard of is running ever so slightly faster as we get further and further away from the time the consoles first hit the market in the early '90s. The discovery started a mild panic in the speedrunning community in late February since one theoretical consequence of a faster-running console is that it could impact how fast games are running and therefore how long they take to complete. This could potentially wreak havoc on decades of speedrunning leaderboards and make tracking the fastest times in the speedrunning scene much more difficult, but that outcome now seems very unlikely. However, the obscure discovery does highlight the fact that old consoles' performance is not frozen at the time of their release date, and that they are made of sensitive components that can age and degrade, or even 'upgrade', over time. The idea that SNESs are running faster in a way that could impact speedrunning started with a Bluesky post from Alan Cecil, known online as dwangoAC and the administrator of TASBot (short for tool-assisted speedrun robot), a robot that's programmed to play games faster and better than a human ever could.

[...] So what's going on here? The SNES has an audio processing unit (APU) called the SPC700, a coprocessor made by Sony for Nintendo. Documentation given to game developers at the time the SNES was released says that the SPC700 should have a digital signal processing (DSP) rate of 32,000hz, which is set by a ceramic resonator that runs 24.576Mhz on that coprocessor. We're getting pretty technical here as you can see, but basically the composition of this ceramic component and how it resonates when connected to an electronic circuit generates the frequency for the audio processing unit, or how much data it processes in a second. It's well documented that these types of ceramic resonators are sensitive and can run at higher frequencies when subject to heat and other external conditions. For example, the chart [here], taken from an application manual for Murata ceramic resonators, shows changes in the resonators' oscillation under different physical conditions.

As Cecil told me, as early as 2007 people making SNES emulators noticed that, despite documentation by Nintendo that the SPC700 should run at 32,000Hz, some SNESs ran faster. Emulators generally now emulate at the slightly higher frequency of 32,040Hz in order to emulate games more faithfully. Digging through forum posts in the SNES homebrew and emulation communities, Cecil started to put a pattern together: the SPC700 ran faster whenever it was measured further away from the SNES's release. Data Cecil collected since his Bluesky post, which now includes more than 140 responses, also shows that the SPC700 is running faster. There is still a lot of variation, in theory depending on how much an SNES was used, but overall the trend is clear: SNESs are running faster as they age, and the fastest SPC700 ran at 32,182Hz. More research shared by another user in the TASBot Discord has even more detailed technical analysis which appears to support those findings. "We don't yet know how much of an impact it will have on a long speedrun," Cecil told 404 Media. "We only know it has at least some impact on how quickly data can be transferred between the CPU and the APU."

Cecil said minor differences in SNES hardware may not affect human speedrunners but could impact TASBot's frame-precise runs, where inputs need to be precise down to the frame, or "deterministic."

With Microsoft ending free security updates for Windows 10 in October, millions of PCs that don't meet Windows 11's hardware requirements face an uncertain fate... Charities that refurbish and distribute computers to low-income individuals must choose between providing soon-to-be-insecure Windows 10 machines, transitioning to Linux -- despite usability challenges for non-tech-savvy users -- or recycling the hardware, contributing to ewaste. Tom's Hardware reports: So how bad will it really be to run an end-of-lifed Windows 10? Should people worry? [Chester Wisniewski, who serves as Director and Global Field CISO for Sophos, a major security services company] and other experts I talked to are unequivocal. You're at risk. "To put this in perspective, today [the day we talked] was Patch Tuesday," he said. "There were 57 vulnerabilities, 6 of which have already been abused by criminals before the fixes were available. There were also 57 in February and 159 in January. Windows 10 and Windows 11 largely have a shared codebase, meaning most, if not all, vulnerabilities each month are exploitable on both OSs. These will be actively turned into digital weapons by criminals and nation-states alike and Windows 10 users will be somewhat defenseless against them."

So, in short, even though Windows 10 has been around since 2015, there are still massive security holes being patched. Even within the past few weeks, dozens of vulnerabilities were fixed by Microsoft. So what's a charity to do when these updates are running out and clients will be left vulnerable? "What we decided to do is one year ahead of the cutoff, we discontinued Windows 10," said Casey Sorensen, CEO of PCs for People, one of the U.S.'s largest non-profit computer refurbishers. "We will distribute Linux laptops that are 6th or 7th gen. If we distribute a Windows laptop, it will be 8th gen or newer." Sorensen said that any PC that's fifth gen or older will be sent to an ewaste recycler.

[...] Sorensen, who founded the company in 1998, told us that he's comfortable giving clients computers that run Linux Mint, a free OS that's based on Ubuntu. The latest version of Mint, version 22.1, will be supported until 2029. "Ten years ago if we distributed Linux, they would be like what is it," he said. But today, he notes that many view their computers as windows to the Internet and, for that, a user-friendly version of Linux is acceptable. Further reading: Is 2025 the Year of the Linux Desktop?

Major technology companies are heavily promoting AI agents as transformative tools for work, but industry insiders say no one can agree on what these systems actually are, according to TechCrunch. OpenAI CEO Sam Altman said agents will "join the workforce" this year, while Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella predicted they will replace certain knowledge work. Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff declared his company's goal to become "the number one provider of digital labor in the world."

The definition problem has worsened recently. OpenAI published a blog post defining agents as "automated systems that can independently accomplish tasks," but its developer documentation described them as "LLMs equipped with instructions and tools." Microsoft distinguishes between agents and AI assistants, while Salesforce lists six different categories of agents. "I think that our industry overuses the term 'agent' to the point where it is almost nonsensical," Ryan Salva, senior director of product at Google, told TechCrunch. Andrew Ng, founder of DeepLearning.ai, blamed marketing: "The concepts of AI 'agents' and 'agentic' workflows used to have a technical meaning, but about a year ago, marketers and a few big companies got a hold of them." Analysts say this ambiguity threatens to create misaligned expectations as companies build product lineups around agents.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Register: New York State has sued Allstate Insurance for operating websites so badly designed they would deliver personal information in plain-text to anyone that went looking for it. The data was lifted from Allstate's National General business unit, which ran a website for consumers who wanted to get a quote for a policy. That task required users to input a name and address, and once that info was entered, the site searched a LexisNexis Risk Solutions database for data on anyone who lived at the address provided. The results of that search would then appear on a screen that included the driver's license number (DLN) for the given name and address, plus "names of any other drivers identified as potentially living at that consumer's address, and the entire DLNs of those other drivers."

Naturally, miscreants used the system to mine for people's personal information for fraud. "National General intentionally built these tools to automatically populate consumers' entire DLNs in plain text -- in other words, fully exposed on the face of the quoting websites -- during the quoting process," the court documents [PDF] state. "Not surprisingly, attackers identified this vulnerability and targeted these quoting tools as an easy way to access the DLNs of many New Yorkers," according to the lawsuit. The digital thieves then used this information to "submit fraudulent claims for pandemic and unemployment benefits," we're told. ... [B]y the time the insurer resolved the mess, crooks had built bots that harvested at least 12,000 individuals' driver's license numbers from the quote-generating site.

Spain's government has approved legislation imposing substantial fines of up to 35 million euros or 7% of global turnover on companies that fail to clearly label AI-generated content. Reuters reports: The bill adopts guidelines from the European Union's landmark AI Act imposing strict transparency obligations on AI systems deemed to be high-risk, Digital Transformation Minister Oscar Lopez told reporters. "AI is a very powerful tool that can be used to improve our lives ... or to spread misinformation and attack democracy," he said. Spain is among the first EU countries to implement the bloc's rules, considered more comprehensive than the United States' system that largely relies on voluntary compliance and a patchwork of state regulations. Lopez added that everyone was susceptible to "deepfake" attacks - a term for videos, photographs or audios that have been edited or generated through AI algorithms but are presented as real. [...]

The bill also bans other practices, such as the use of subliminal techniques - sounds and images that are imperceptible - to manipulate vulnerable groups. Lopez cited chatbots inciting people with addictions to gamble or toys encouraging children to perform dangerous challenges as examples. It would also prevent organizations from classifying people through their biometric data using AI, rating them based on their behavior or personal traits to grant them access to benefits or assess their risk of committing a crime. However, authorities would still be allowed to use real-time biometric surveillance in public spaces for national security reasons.

Abstract of a paper published on Journal of Hospitality and Tourism Management:The adoption of digital menus accessed through quick response (QR) codes has witnessed a notable upsurge. Despite potential benefits for restaurant operators, the nuanced effects of QR code menus on customer behavior and experience remain relatively unknown. This research investigates the influence of menu presentation (QR code vs. traditional) on customer loyalty. In two studies, we find that QR code menus diminish customer loyalty (compared to traditional menus) due to perceived inconvenience. This effect is further moderated by customers' need for interaction. Our work is timely in highlighting the negative impact of perceptions of inconvenience on technology adoption.

Businesses, governments, and researchers continue to struggle with extracting usable data from PDF files, despite AI advances. These digital documents contain valuable information for everything from scientific research to government records, but their rigid formats make extraction difficult.

"PDFs are a creature of a time when print layout was a big influence on publishing software," Derek Willis, a lecturer in Data and Computational Journalism at the University of Maryland, told ArsTechnica. This print-oriented design means many PDFs are essentially "pictures of information" requiring optical character recognition (OCR) technology.

Traditional OCR systems have existed since the 1970s but struggle with complex layouts and poor-quality scans. New AI language models from companies like Google and Mistral now attempt to process documents more holistically, with varying success. "Right now, the clear leader is Google's Gemini 2.0 Flash Pro Experimental," Willis notes, while Mistral's recent OCR solution "performed poorly" in tests.

Nominated for 10 Oscars, The Brutalist (directed and produced by Brady Corbet) has an "intriguing and controversial technical feature," according to the Baffler, that threatens to turn movie-viewing into "a drab appreciation of machine-managed flawlessness, and acting less interesting..." In January, the film's editor Dávid Jancsó revealed that he and Corbet used tools from AI speech software company Respeecher to make the Hungarian-language dialogue spoken by Adrien Brody (who plays the protagonist, Hungarian émigré architect László Tóth) and Felicity Jones (who plays Tóth's wife Erzsébet) sound more Hungarian. In response to the ensuing backlash, Corbet clarified that the actors worked "for months" with a dialect coach to perfect their accents; AI was used "in Hungarian language dialogue editing only, specifically to refine certain vowels and letters for accuracy...." Defenders of this slimy deception claim the use of AI in film is no different than CGI or automated dialogue replacement, tools commonly deployed in the editing suite for picture and audio enhancement. But CGI and ADR don't tamper with the substance of a performance, which is what's at issue here....

AI seems poised to decimate the voice acting industry; how long will it be before filmmakers give up on the whole time-wasting business of dialect coaching and language research and toss their performers' untrained vocalizations directly into the linguistic Instant Pot...? "Adrien and Felicity's performances are completely their own," Corbet has argued. Only, they're not. Brody and Jones's performances may now be authentic to spoken Hungarian, but they're no longer authentic to themselves: at least in the parts of the film with Hungarian dialogue, the acting stands more as a monument to the prowess of the voice-matching software than that of the actors...

AI is a different beast from color film, or the Louma crane, or the hand-held camera: it's steroidal, aesthetically corrupting, and unlike these earlier advances it confronts the filmmaker with real ethical questions... Use implies complicity. To incorporate AI into the production of art today, no matter how sparingly or subtly, is to endorse Silicon Valley's politics and worldview: its exploitation of both producers and "users," its blithe indifference to the social impact of post-automation layoffs and the environmental assault of industrial data processing, its cramped and uninteresting idea of imagination, its petrification of creation. It's a vote for the assholes...
In short, the essays calls this "recourse to corrective AI" a "filmmaking prosthesis that cheats the viewer and cheapens the performances." And ironically this clashes with the film's depiction of a "principled artist," according to the article. ("Some of the 'retro' digital renderings in the memorial video included in this scene were also, Corbet has admitted, produced with the help of AI.")

The essay notes that several of 2024's other Oscar-nominated films also employed Respeecher, including Dune: Part Two and Emilia Pérez. "What matters here is not this particular infraction but the precedent it sets, the course it establishes for culture."

As Christie's auction house planned the first-ever auction dedicated to AI-generated art works, over 5,600 people signed an online letter urging them to cancel it. "Many of the artworks you plan to auction were created using AI models that are known to be trained on copyrighted work without a license," the letter complained.

"These models, and the companies behind them, exploit human artists, using their work without permission or payment to build commercial AI products that compete with them. Your support of these models, and the people who use them, rewards and further incentivizes AI companies' mass theft of human artists' work." CNET reports that the signers "range from illustrators to authors to art therapists to cinematographers, from countries all across the globe."

Christie's ignored them all and held the auction anyways. So what happened when it was over on Wednesday morning? More than 30 lots attracted hundreds of bids and brought in $728,784, Christie's reports. And there's a generational twist: The auction house says 37% of registrants were completely new to Christie's, and 48% of bidders were millennials or members of Gen Z... The highest price in the sale was $277,200 for a work by Refik Anadol titled Machine Hallucinations — ISS Dreams — A. It used a data set of more than 1.2 million images taken from the International Space Station and satellites.
ARTnews reports that the auction actually brought in more than Christie's had expected: The sale, which made up of 34 lots, had an 82 percent sell through rate... While some digital artists, including Beeple, championed the sale, others decried it as emblematic of the ongoing struggle between human artistry and machine-driven innovation. The results, however, suggest that AI art — controversial as it may be — is carving a firm place in the market.

President Trump has signed an executive order to establish a strategic reserve of cryptocurrencies by using tokens already owned by the government. Reuters reports: A "Strategic Bitcoin Reserve" will be capitalized with bitcoin owned by the federal government that was seized as part of criminal or civil asset forfeiture proceedings, the White House crypto czar, billionaire David Sacks, said in a post on social media platform X. The order kept open the possibility of the government buying bitcoin in future. The U.S. commerce and treasury secretaries "are authorized to develop budget-neutral strategies for acquiring additional bitcoin, provided that those strategies impose no incremental costs on American taxpayers," a factsheet on the White House website said. "This is the most underwhelming and disappointing outcome we could have expected for this week," Charles Edwards, founder of bitcoin-focused hedge fund Capriole Investments, wrote in a post on X. "No active buying means this is just a fancy title for Bitcoin holdings that already existed with the Govt. This is a pig in lipstick."

Europe's new tech rule aims to keep digital markets open and is not targeted at U.S. tech giants, EU antitrust and tech chiefs told U.S. congressmen, reminding them that U.S. enforcers have in recent years also cracked down on these companies. From a report: The comments by EU antitrust chief Teresa Ribera and EU tech chief Henna Virkkunnen came after U.S. House Judiciary Chair Jim Jordan and Scott Fitzgerald, chairman of the subcommittee on the administrative state, regulatory reform and antitrust demanded clarifications on the Digital Markets Act (DMA).

"The DMA does not target U.S. companies," Ribera and Virkkunnen wrote in a joint letter dated March 6 to Jordan and Fitzgerald seen by Reuters. "It applies to all companies which fulfil the clearly defined criteria for being designated as a gatekeeper in the European Union irrespective of where they are headquartered," they said.

A Brazilian judge has ordered Apple to open its iOS platform to alternative app stores within 90 days, according to Valor International. The ruling cited Apple's compliance with similar requirements in the European Union under the Digital Markets Act without showing "significant impact or irreparable harm to its economic model."

The case originated from a 2022 complaint by Mercado Livre. Brazil previously issued a 20-day deadline in November for Apple to permit alternative payment options and sideloading, but that injunction was overturned in December. Apple plans to appeal.

Denmark's state-run postal service, PostNord, is to end all letter deliveries at the end of 2025, citing a 90% decline in letter volumes since the start of the century. From a report: The decision brings to an end 400 years of the company's letter service. Denmark's 1,500 post boxes will start to disappear from the start of June. Transport Minister Thomas Danielsen sought to reassure Danes, saying letters would still be sent and received as "there is a free market for both letters and parcels." Postal services across Europe are grappling with the decline in letter volumes. Germany's Deutsche Post said on Thursday it was axing 8,000 jobs, in what it called a "socially responsible manner."

Deutsche Post has 187,000 employees and staff representatives said they feared more cuts were to come. Denmark had a universal postal service for 400 years until the end of 2023, but as digital mail services have taken hold, the use of letters has fallen dramatically. PostNord says it will switch its focus to parcel deliveries and that any postage stamps bought this year or in 2024 can be refunded for a limited period in 2026.

Budget carrier Ryanair has delayed its move to 100% paperless boarding passes to the start of its winter schedule on November 3. From a report: Media reports had suggested that the change could come in May, ahead of the busy summer season. But the implementation will now begin at the start of the winter season in November, and means Ryanair passengers will no longer download and print a physical paper boarding pass. Instead they will use the digital boarding pass generated in their 'myRyanair' app during check-in.

Currently almost 80% of Ryanair's 200 million annual passengers already use this digital boarding pass. As a result of this initiative, Ryanair expects to eliminate almost all airport check-in fees from November, as all passengers will have checked-in online or in-app to generate their digital boarding pass. The airline said it will also reduce passengers' carbon footprint by eliminating unnecessary paper, saving more than 300 tonnes in paper waste each year.

India's income tax department will gain powers to access citizens' social media accounts, emails and other digital spaces beginning April 2026 under the new income tax bill, in a significant expansion of its search and seizure authority.

The legislation, which has raised privacy concerns among legal experts, allows tax officers to "gain access by overriding the access code" to computer systems and "virtual digital spaces" if they suspect tax evasion.

The bill broadly defines virtual digital spaces to include email servers, social media accounts, online investment accounts, banking platforms, and cloud servers.

"The expansion raises significant concerns regarding constitutional validity, potential state overreach, and practical enforcement," Sonam Chandwani, Managing Partner at KS Legal and Associates, told Indian newspaper Economic Times.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from TechCrunch: Google has open sourced an AI model, SpeciesNet, designed to identify animal species by analyzing photos from camera traps. Researchers around the world use camera traps -- digital cameras connected to infrared sensors -- to study wildlife populations. But while these traps can provide valuable insights, they generate massive volumes of data that take days to weeks to sift through. In a bid to help, Google launched Wildlife Insights, an initiative of the company's Google Earth Outreach philanthropy program, around six years ago. Wildlife Insights provides a platform where researchers can share, identify, and analyze wildlife images online, collaborating to speed up camera trap data analysis.

Many of Wildlife Insights' analysis tools are powered by SpeciesNet, which Google claims was trained on over 65 million publicly available images and images from organizations like the Smithsonian Conservation Biology Institute, the Wildlife Conservation Society, the North Carolina Museum of Natural Sciences, and the Zoological Society of London. Google says that SpeciesNet can classify images into one of more than 2,000 labels, covering animal species, taxa like "mammalian" or "Felidae," and non-animal objects (e.g. "vehicle"). SpeciesNet is available on GitHub under an Apache 2.0 license, meaning it can be used commercially largely sans restrictions.

U.S. publishers are increasingly abandoning paperback editions of nonfiction books, eliminating a traditional second chance for authors to reach readers with lower-priced versions of their work. New adult nonfiction paperback titles plummeted 42% between 2019 and 2024 [non-paywalled source] to under 40,000, while hardcover titles fell just 9% during the same period, according to Bowker Books in Print.

"It's profoundly demoralizing that a book that might have taken four years to write and was published with such promise is done after five months," Dan Conaway, a senior literary agent with Writers House, told WSJ. The shift reflects changing consumer habits, the rise of digital formats, and market realities where Amazon sometimes prices hardcovers below paperbacks. Barnes & Noble now promotes just one nonfiction paperback monthly.

Apple users noticed a change in 2023, "when streaming platforms like Netflix, HBO Max, Amazon Prime, and the Criterion Channel imposed a quiet embargo on the screenshot," noted the film blog Screen Slate: At first, there were workarounds: users could continue to screenshot by using the browser Brave or by downloading extensions or third-party tools like Fireshot. But gradually, the digital-rights-management tech adapted and became more sophisticated. Today, it is nearly impossible to take a screenshot from the most popular streaming services, at least not on a Macintosh computer. The shift occurred without remark or notice to subscribers, and there's no clear explanation as to why or what spurred the change...

For PC users, this story takes a different, and happier, turn. With the use of Snipping Tool — a utility exclusive to Microsoft Windows, users are free to screen grab content from all streaming platforms. This seems like a pointed oversight, a choice on the part of streamers to exclude Mac users (though they make up a tiny fraction of the market) because of their assumed cultural class.
"I'm not entirely sure what the technical answer to this is," tech blogger John Gruber wrote this weekend, "but on MacOS, it seemingly involves the GPU and video decoding hardware..." These DRM blackouts on Apple devices (you can't capture screenshots from DRM video on iPhones or iPads either) are enabled through the deep integration between the OS and the hardware, thus enabling the blackouts to be imposed at the hardware level. And I don't think the streaming services opt into this screenshot prohibition other than by "protecting" their video with DRM in the first place. If a video is DRM-protected, you can't screenshot it; if it's not, you can.

On the Mac, it used to be the case that DRM video was blacked-out from screen capture in Safari, but not in Chrome (or the dozens of various Chromium-derived browsers). But at some point a few years back, you stopped being able to capture screenshots from DRM videos in Chrome, too -- by default. But in Chrome's Settings page, under System, if you disable "Use graphics acceleration when available" and relaunch Chrome, boom, you can screenshot everything in a Chrome window, including DRM video...

What I don't understand is why Apple bothered supporting this in the first place for hardware-accelerated video (which is all video on iOS platforms -- there is no workaround like using Chrome with hardware acceleration disabled on iPhone or iPad). No one is going to create bootleg copies of DRM-protected video one screenshotted still frame at a time -- and even if they tried, they'd be capturing only the images, not the sound. And it's not like this "feature" in MacOS and iOS has put an end to bootlegging DRM-protected video content.
Gruber's conclusion? "This 'feature' accomplishes nothing of value for anyone, including the streaming services, but imposes a massive (and for most people, confusing and frustrating) hindrance on honest people simply trying to easily capture high-quality (as opposed to, say, using their damn phone to take a photograph of their reflective laptop display) screenshots of the shows and movies they're watching."