South Korea postponed a decision for the second time this year on Friday regarding Google's request to export detailed mapping data to overseas servers, which would enable full Google Maps functionality in the country. The inter-agency committee extended the deadline from August to October to allow further review of security concerns and consultations with industry stakeholders. South Korea remains one of only a handful of countries alongside China and North Korea where Google Maps fails to function properly, unable to provide directions despite displaying landmarks and businesses. Tourism complaints increased 71% last year, with Google Maps accounting for 30% of all app-related grievances, while local industry groups representing 2,600 companies report 90% opposition to Google's request due to fears of market domination by the US tech company.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader shares a report: The Federal Communications Commission is planning a review of the US emergency alert systems. Both the Emergency Alert System (EAS) and the Wireless Emergency Alerts (WAS) will be subject to a "re-examination" by the agency. "We want to ensure that these programs deliver the results that Americans want and need," FCC Chairman Brendan Carr posted on X. The announcement of this plan notes that the infrastructure underlying the EAS -- which includes radio, television, satellite and cable systems -- is 31 years old, while the framework underpinning the WAS mobile device alerts is 13 years old. The FCC review will also assess what entities should be able to send alerts on those systems, as well as topics such as geographic targeting and security.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader shares a report: China told local brokers and other bodies to stop publishing research or hold seminars to promote stablecoins [non-paywalled source], seeking to rein in the asset class to avoid instability. Some leading brokerages and think tanks in late July and earlier this month received guidance from financial regulators, urging them to cancel seminars and halt disseminating research on stablecoins, people familiar with the matter said. Regulators are also concerned that stablecoins could be exploited as a new tool for fraudulent activities in mainland China, said the people, who asked not to be identified because the details are private.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Intel CEO Lip-Bu Tan, who faces calls for resignation from President Trump, helped build China's semiconductor industry over four decades. Tan's San Francisco-based Walden International, founded in 1987, was invited by Chinese officials to introduce venture capital to China in 1993, WSJ reported Friday. The firm invested in SMIC, China's largest chip manufacturer, where Tan served as board director for at least 18 years until the Commerce Department restricted the company in 2020. Walden also backed Advanced Micro-Fabrication Equipment, now worth $17 billion and a leader in China's chip-manufacturing sector. During Tan's tenure as Cadence CEO from 2009-2021, the company sold banned technology to a Chinese university conducting military simulations, resulting in a 2025 guilty plea and $140 million settlement. These investments, once common among Silicon Valley venture capitalists and U.S. university endowments, now appear problematic amid U.S.-China tensions and Washington's restrictions on chip exports to China. Tan wrote in a blog post late Thursday that there had been a "lot of misinformation" circulating about his past roles. "Over 40+ years in the industry, I've built relationships around the world and across our diverse ecosystem -- and I have always operated within the highest legal and ethical standards," Tan wrote.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Google will discontinue Steam for Chromebook Beta on January 1, 2026, removing all installed games from devices after that date. The beta launched in March 2022 as an alpha before expanding to beta status in November 2022 with reduced hardware requirements of Intel Core i3 or AMD Ryzen 3 processors and 8GB RAM. The program never progressed beyond beta testing despite supporting 99 compatible Linux-based titles through its three-year run.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

People who experience nightmares weekly or more frequently face three times higher risk of dying before age 70 compared to those having nightmares less than monthly, according to research by Dr. Abidemi Otaiku at Imperial College London. His analysis of six long-term studies covering more than 180,000 adults and 2,500 children found frequent nightmares predict early death more strongly than smoking, obesity, poor diet, or physical inactivity. Among 174 people who died prematurely, 31 experienced at least weekly nightmares. Otaiku's research shows chromosomes of nightmare-prone individuals display accelerated aging patterns linked to stress hormones, accounting for roughly 40% of their increased mortality risk. Effective nightmare treatment options are currently limited and require more medical research, the report adds.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Conscientiousness levels among young adults have fallen substantially since 2014 as people in their twenties and thirties report increased distractibility and carelessness alongside decreased tenacity and commitment-making, according to Financial Times analysis of Understanding America Study data. The personality trait, which research links to longer lifespans, career success, and relationship durability, has witnessed its steepest decline during and after the pandemic. Young adults simultaneously showed rising neuroticism scores and declining extroversion measures, transforming from society's most outgoing age group to its most introverted.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Google announced Friday it will roll out an AI-powered redesign of Google Finance over the coming weeks in the United States. The update adds natural language query processing for financial research questions with comprehensive AI responses including relevant links, advanced charting tools with technical indicators and candlestick charts, expanded market data covering commodities and additional cryptocurrencies, and a live news feed displaying real-time headlines.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Computer scientists at Tsinghua University and Stanford have developed an algorithm that surpasses a fundamental speed limit that has constrained network pathfinding calculations since 1984. The team's approach to the shortest-path problem -- finding optimal routes from one point to all others in a network -- runs faster than Dijkstra's 1956 algorithm and its improvements by avoiding the sorting process that created the decades-old computational barrier. Led by Ran Duan at Tsinghua, the researchers combined clustering techniques with selective application of the Bellman-Ford algorithm to identify influential nodes without sorting all paths by distance. The algorithm divides graphs into layers and uses Bellman-Ford to locate key intersection points before calculating paths to other nodes. The technique works on both directed and undirected graphs with arbitrary weights, solving a problem that stymied researchers after partial breakthroughs in the late 1990s and early 2000s applied only to specific weight conditions.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader shares a report: Privacy groups report a surge in UK police facial recognition scans of databases secretly stocked with passport photos lacking parliamentary oversight. Big Brother Watch says the UK government has allowed images from the country's passport and immigration databases to be made available to facial recognition systems, without informing the public or parliament. The group claims the passport database contains around 58 million headshots of Brits, plus a further 92 million made available from sources such as the immigration database, visa applications, and more. By way of comparison, the Police National Database contains circa 20 million photos of those who have been arrested by, or are at least of interest to, the police.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

American airlines have transformed into financial services companies that happen to fly planes as loyalty programs now constitute their primary profit engine rather than passenger transport. Delta, American, Southwest, and United all operated their passenger services at a loss in 2024 while generating $14 billion in combined operating profits from credit card partnerships. Delta received $2.1 billion from American Express in Q2 2025 -- exactly matching its total operating profit -- while the airline's passenger operations alone would have posted a loss. These loyalty programs command valuations in the tens of billions, sometimes exceeding the airlines' total equity value, with Delta reporting 1% of U.S. GDP flows through its co-branded cards. Customers can now reach American Airlines' top loyalty tier without boarding a single flight.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Intel's chief executive Lip-Bu Tan has hit out at "misinformation" over his career after U.S. President Donald Trump alleged the semiconductor industry veteran was "highly conflicted" and should resign. From a report: In a letter to Intel staff published late on Thursday, Tan said that Intel was "engaging" with the Trump administration "to address the matters that have been raised and ensure they have the facts." "There has been a lot of misinformation circulating about my past roles...âI want to be absolutely clear: Over 40+ years in the industry, I've built relationships around the world and across our diverse ecosystem -- and I have always operated within the highest legal and ethical standards," Tan wrote. Tan's move to reassure staff at Intel, the only US-headquartered company capable of manufacturing advanced chips, came hours after Trump had demanded his resignation in a post on Truth Social. Trump did not detail Tan's alleged conflicts of interest but the U.S. president's broadside followed a letter from Tom Cotton, the Republican head of the Senate intelligence committee, to Intel's chair expressing "concern about the security and integrity of Intel's operations" and Tan's ties to China.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Back in the beginning I wanted the web to be like Harvard.

It's one of the reasons I went there as a research fellow in 2003.

I wasn't satisfied with the web, the density of minds wasn't up to my expectations, so I thought if I brought the web to the minds, that would work better. I wanted to work on communication systems for people trying to work together to solve big problems.

I chose Harvard over MIT, because the web was already strong at MIT, and they weren't friendly to my cause, they were busy trying to reinvent the web when it imho didn't need that, and I wanted no part of it. I hoped instead, Harvard, more a school of the liberal arts would be more open to innovation.

It didn't happen there either, some great stuff did come out of that period, and some of it was lasting, but eventually the university wasn't on board with the web, as a community for intellect. Instead what came out of Harvard in that period was Facebook, which is a great accomplishment, I am a FB user to this day and appreciate how well it works at keeping friends from long ago in contact.

I still want an intellectual community on the web. That's why I'm putting so much effort into rebuilding it as a writing environment. All this because the writing products of Silicon Valley are always will be silos. As heroic as Ghost has been in supporting ActivityPub that is not the web. The barriers are too high. The web is the web. And that's where we have to go, and I want the minds to be there or else it wasn't worth the effort.

Yesterday I wrote a quick review of ChatGPT 5, after trying a simple programming exercise with it. It was an awful collaboration because it lied to me about its capabilities, leading me to develop a feature in my software to support the capability that it later admitted that it didn't have. I've never had a programming partner do that to me. I've had people who never showed up for work. Or people who were in so far over their heads that it would have been better if they had never shown up. It lied repeatedly, and when cornered it had the audacity to gaslight me. "I understand why you feel that way." Oh nothing pisses me off more than that.

I don't understand why other people don't review it based on its functionality, after all it isn't just a money sink, or a technological breakthrough, it's software that we pay actual money for that is meant to help us in our work. I don't know if it's by design that it's such an asshole. I have a feeling that people are going to focus on this eventually.

ChatGPT is not human, it's like the world of Rick and Morty. And we're meant to be one of the many versions of Rick and/or Morty, but which is the real one? Before we lose sight of that, let's keep our heads on, we're still the ones discovering stuff and being creative and entertaining other humans, not the machines. It'll all work a lot better when they're programmed to behave like computers, not these vain and corrupt pseudo humans. Still a breakthrough in search. Really sticks it to Google. Yaaay. That's good enough for me.

I'm more worried about AIs killing us by overwhelming our nervous systems than taking our place at work. Has anyone actually used any of the software an AI has written? I know people who have never written software before are in awe, as I am about drawing characters I make up, but how does the software it builds rate? If it lies to itself like it lies to me, the software doesn't work at all, even slightly. I'm pretty sure "garbage in garbage out" applies in the new world of software.

• 2019: "I'd love to understand how one can be a programmer and not always be searching for the truth. Unlike just about any other profession I can think of, ours depends on telling the truth. You can't lie to a compiler is one of my programming mottos. Garbage in garbage out."

The tech industry doesn't get its relationship with paying human customers. Had a problem with my cell phone service. I started getting emails saying it was shutting off my service because my credit card was being denied. Went to the account on the web and it looked fine. The messages kept coming. I reached out for help. The people couldn't understand what I was saying. I eventually gave up because I didn't understand either. I might have two accounts, I don't know, in some ways it looks like two, in other ways just one. I presume they have a way to find out, assuming there are actually any reasoning empathetic human beings who care about doing quality work. If we were talking to each other human to human, not as peripheral devices for a computer network, we might have figured it out in five minutes, instead of having the customer report it on their blog after weeks of bullshit that did not uncover the truth. We still don't know how many accounts I have.

The company is Google. They're good at dealing with imaginary customers not real ones. If they ever understood how to communicate with people, they have forgotten. And of course there's a real possibility that all my conversations were with their ChatGPT. If that's true, no wonder we were running around in circles never getting the answer.

The possible planet is just four-and-a-half light years away and may have moons that sustain life.