An anonymous reader quotes a report from TorrentFreak: Spotify and several major record labels, including UMG, Sony, and Warner, have taken legal action against the unknown operators of Anna's Archive. The action follows the shadow library's announcement that it would release hundreds of terabytes of scraped Spotify data. Unsealed documents reveal that the ...

Nova Launcher has been acquired by Instabridge, which says it will keep the app maintained but is evaluating ad-supported options for the free version. Android Authority reports: Today, Nova Launcher announced that the Swedish company Instabridge has acquired it from Branch Metrics. Instabridge claims it wants to be a responsible owner of Nova and does not ...

An anonymous reader quotes a report from 404 Media: The Belarusian government is threatening three HAM radio operators with the death penalty, detained at least seven people, and has accused them of "intercepting state secrets," according to Belarusian state media, independent media outside of Belarus, and the Belarusian human rights organization Viasna. ...

New research from Cornell University has tracked how households change their spending after someone starts taking GLP-1 medications like Ozempic and Wegovy, and the numbers are material enough to explain why food industry earnings calls keep blaming everything except the obvious culprit. The study analyzed transaction data from 150,000 households linked ...

Just 32 fossil fuel companies were responsible for half the global carbon dioxide emissions driving the climate crisis in 2024, down from 36 a year earlier, a report has revealed. The Guardian: Saudi Aramco was the biggest state-controlled polluter and ExxonMobil was the largest investor-owned polluter. Critics accused the leading fossil fuel companies of ...

Adobe has added a suite of AI-powered features to Acrobat that enable users to edit documents through natural language prompts, generate podcast-style audio summaries of their files, and create presentations by pulling content from multiple documents stored in a single workspace. The prompt-based editing supports 12 distinct actions: removing pages, text, ...

The price of water and sewer services for American households has more than doubled since the early 1980s after adjusting for inflation, even though per-capita water use has actually decreased over that period. Households in large cities now spend about $1,300 a year on water and sewer charges, approaching the roughly $1,600 they spend on electricity. The ...

Eightfold AI, a venture capital-backed AI hiring platform used by Microsoft, PayPal and many other Fortune 500 companies, is being sued in California for allegedly compiling reports used to screen job applicants without their knowledge. From a report: The lawsuit, filed on Tuesday accusing Eightfold of violating the Fair Credit Reporting Act shows how ...

Ubisoft is canceling game projects, shutting down studios and cutting its guidance as the Assassin's Creed maker restructures its business into five units. From a report: The French gaming firm expects earnings before interest and tax to be a loss of $1.2 billion the fiscal year 2025-2026 as a result of the restructuring, driven by a one-off writedown of ...

The Irish government is planning to bolster its police's ability to intercept communications, including encrypted messages, and provide a legal basis for spyware use. From a report: The Communications (Interception and Lawful Access) Bill is being framed as a replacement for the current legislation that governs digital communication interception. The ...

Google has temporarily disabled YouTube's advanced SRV3 caption format after discovering the feature was causing playback errors for some users, according to a statement the company posted. SRV3, also known as YouTube Timed Text, is a custom subtitle system Google introduced around 2018 that allows creators to use custom colors, transparency, animations, ...

San Diego Comic-Con changed an AI art friendly policy following an artist-led backlash last week. From a report: It was a small victory for working artists in an industry where jobs are slipping away as movie and video game studios adopt generative AI tools to save time and money. Every year, tens of thousands of people descend on San Diego for Comic-Con, ...

New submitter BeaverCleaver shares a report: Japan has restarted operations at the world's largest nuclear power plant for the first time since the 2011 Fukushima disaster forced the country to shut all of its reactors. The decision to restart reactor number 6 at Kashiwazaki-Kariwa north-west of Tokyo was taken despite local residents' safety concerns. It ...

YouTube CEO Neal Mohan used his annual letter to creators, published Wednesday, to outline an ambitious 2026 vision that embraces AI-powered creative tools while simultaneously pledging to crack down on the low-quality AI content that has come to be known as "slop." Mohan identified four AI-related areas that YouTube "must get right in 2026." The platform ...

Companies are spending vast sums on AI expecting the technology to boost efficiency, but a new survey from AI consulting firm Section found that two-thirds of non-management workers among 5,000 white-collar respondents say they save less than two hours a week or no time at all, while more than 40% of executives report the technology saves them upward of ...