The U.S. Department of Justice has opened a criminal investigation into Deel over allegations that it recruited a spy inside rival Rippling, according to documents seen by The Wall Street Journal. From the report: An Ireland-based Rippling employee, Keith O'Brien, alleged in an affidavit filed in April that Deel Chief Executive Alex Bouaziz recruited him ...

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Wired: When TikTok users in the U.S. opened the app today, they were greeted with a pop-up asking them to agree to the social media platform's new terms of service and privacy policy before they could resume scrolling. These changes are part of TikTok's transition to new ownership. In order to continue operating in ...

The White House doubled down after posting a digitally altered photo of Minnesota protester Nekima Levy Armstrong, dismissing it as a "meme" despite objections from her attorney and comparisons to reality-distorting propaganda. "YET AGAIN to the people who feel the need to reflexively defend perpetrators of heinous crimes in our country I share with you ...

Jeffrey Snover, the driving force behind PowerShell, has retired after a career that reshaped Windows administration. The Register reports: Snover's retirement comes after a brief sojourn at Google as a Distinguished Engineer, following a lengthy stint at Microsoft, during which he pulled the company back from imposing a graphical user interface (GUI) on ...

An anonymous reader quotes a report from TechCrunch: Microsoft provided the FBI with the recovery keys to unlock encrypted data on the hard drives of three laptops as part of a federal investigation, Forbes reported on Friday. Many modern Windows computers rely on full-disk encryption, called BitLocker, which is enabled by default. This type of technology ...

Global hiring remains 20% below pre-pandemic levels and job switching has hit a 10-year low, according to a LinkedIn report, and new university graduates are bearing the brunt of a labor market that increasingly favors experienced candidates over fresh talent. In the UK, the Institute of Student Employers found that graduate hiring fell 8% in the last ...

An anonymous reader shares a report: Shares of Japanese toilet maker Toto gained the most in five years after booming memory demand excited expectations of growth in its little-known chipmaking materials operations. The stock surged as much as 11%, its steepest rise since February 2021, after Goldman Sachs analysts said Toto's electrostatic chucks used in ...

An anonymous reader shares a report: A niche retirement plan favored by freelancers is quickly becoming a hot Wall Street sales pitch, as more and more Americans look for ways to shelter a bigger chunk of their paychecks from taxes. Known as solo 401(k)s, they allow the self-employed to contribute $72,000 a year into tax-advantaged retirement accounts. ...

After years of Western governments raising alarms about Chinese automotive overcapacity and erecting tariff barriers, an unexpected pivot is now underway as major economies cautiously open their markets to Chinese electric vehicles, Bloomberg writes. Beijing itself has started acknowledging the problem at home. Chinese regulators last week warned of "severe ...

Wind and solar power overtook fossil fuels last year as a source of electricity in the EU for the first time, a new report found. Semafor adds: The milestone was hit largely thanks to a rise in solar power, which generated a record 13% of electricity in the EU, according to Ember. Together, wind and solar hit 30% of EU electricity generation, edging out ...

A Toronto man posed as a pilot for years in order to fool airlines into giving him hundreds of free flights, prosecutors have alleged, in a case that has prompted comparisons to the Hollywood thriller Catch Me If You Can. From a report: Authorities in Hawaii announced this week that Dallas Pokornik, 33, had been charged with wire fraud after he allegedly ...

Marcel Bucher, a professor of plant sciences at the University of Cologne in Germany, lost two years of carefully structured academic work in an instant when he temporarily disabled ChatGPT's "data consent" option in August to test whether the AI tool's functions would still work without providing OpenAI his data. All his chats were permanently deleted and ...

An anonymous reader shares a report: The Apple supplier subject to a major cyberattack last month was China's Luxshare, it has now emerged. More than 1TB of confidential Apple information was reportedly stolen. It was reported in December that one of Apple's assemblers suffered a significant cyberattack that may have compromised sensitive production-line ...

Anthropic has a problem that most companies would envy: its AI model keeps getting so good, the company wrote in a blog post, that it passes the company's own hiring test for performance engineers. The test, designed in late 2023 by optimization lead Tristan Hume, asks candidates to speed up code running on a simulated computer chip. Over 1,000 people have ...

Vimeo is laying off employees around the world just months after Italian software company Bending Spoons completed its $1.38 billion acquisition of the video hosting platform. Dave Brown, Vimeo's former brand VP, described the cuts on LinkedIn as affecting "a large portion of the company." One video engineer claimed "almost everyone" was laid off, ...

Apple has accused the European Commission of using "political delay tactics" to postpone new app marketplace policies and create grounds for investigating and fining the iPhone maker, a preemptive response to reports that the commission plans to blame Apple for the announced closure of third-party app store Setapp. MacPaw, the developer behind Setapp, ...

An anonymous reader quotes a report from NPR: TikTok has finalized a deal to create a new American entity, avoiding the looming threat of a ban in the United States that has been in discussion for years. The social video platform company signed agreements with major investors including Oracle, Silver Lake and MGX to form the new TikTok U.S. joint venture. ...

alternative_right shares a report from ScienceAlert: A systematic review of 85 studies has now found good reason to differentiate between 'active' sitting, like playing cards or reading, and 'passive' sitting, like watching TV. [...] "Total sitting time has been shown to be related to brain health; however, sitting is often treated as a single entity, ...

Ancient Slashdot reader erice shares the findings from a recent study showing that while AI helped researchers publish more often and boosted their careers, the resulting papers were, on average, less useful. "You have this conflict between individual incentives and science as a whole," says James Evans, a sociologist at the University of Chicago who led ...

An anonymous reader quotes a report from the Korea Herald: South Korea will begin enforcing its Artificial Intelligence Act on Thursday, becoming the first country to formally establish safety requirements for high-performance, or so-called frontier, AI systems -- a move that sets the country apart in the global regulatory landscape. According to the ...

Intel says it struggled to satisfy demand for its AI data-center CPUs while new PC chips squeeze margins. CEO Lip-Bu Tan framed the turnaround as supply-constrained, not demand-constrained, with manufacturing yields (18A) improving but still below targets. Reuters reports: The forecast underscores the difficulties faced by Intel in predicting global chip ...

A federal judge revealed a previously undisclosed ~$800 million, six-year partnership between Epic Games and Google tied to Unreal Engine services and joint marketing. It raises questions about whether the deal influenced Epic's willingness to settle its antitrust case over Android. The Verge reports: [California District Judge James Donato] allowed Epic ...

The European Parliament is calling on the European Commission to reduce dependence on U.S. tech giants by prioritizing EU-based cloud, AI, and open-source infrastructure. The report frames "European Tech First," public procurement reform, and Public Money, Public Code as necessary self-defense against growing U.S. control over critical digital ...

An anonymous reader quotes a report from CBS News: As one of his final acts in office, former New Jersey Gov. Phil Murphy signed into law new requirements for e-bikes in his state. The new legislation signed Monday requires that owners and operators of e-bikes have licenses, registration and insurance. Owners and operators of e-bikes must be at least 17 ...

Longtime Slashdot reader theodp writes: GeekWire takes a look at AI's defining alliance in The Microsoft-OpenAI Files, an epic story drawn from 200+ documents, many made public Friday in Elon Musk's ongoing suit accusing OpenAI and its CEO Sam Altman of abandoning the nonprofit mission (Microsoft is also a defendant). Musk, who was an OpenAI co-founder, is ...