Farmers have been fighting John Deere for years over the right to repair their equipment, and this week, they finally reached a landmark settlement.

While the agricultural manufacturing giant pointed out in a statement that this is no admission of wrongdoing, it agreed to pay $99 million into a fund for farms and individuals who participated in a class action lawsuit. Specifically, that money is available to those involved who paid John Deere’s authorized dealers for large equipment repairs from January 2018. This means that plaintiffs will recover somewhere between 26% and 53% of overcharge damages, according to one of the court documents—far beyond the typical amount, which lands between 5% and 15%.

The settlement also includes an agreement by Deere to provide “the digital tools ​required for the maintenance, diagnosis, and repair” of tractors, combines, and other machinery for 10 years. That part is crucial, as farmers previously resorted to hacking their own equipment’s software just to get it up and running again. John Deere signed a memorandum of understanding in 2023 that partially addressed those concerns, providing third parties with the technology to diagnose and repair, as long as its intellectual property was safeguarded. Monday’s settlement seems to represent a much stronger (and legally binding) step forward.

[...]there was one group that was (and remains) uniformly silent as Trump threatened to use the military, and presumably its store of nuclear weapons, to enact genocide: the leadership of the tech industry, which in recent months has inked numerous lucrative deals with that very same military. Currently, OpenAI, Microsoft, Google, Amazon, xAI, Oracle and even Meta have large contracts with the US military.

None of the leadership from any of those companies has expressed any discomfort with Trump’s genocidal threatmaking, let alone the entire war of aggression against Iran. It’s worth sitting with this for a moment, I think; the fact that Alex Jones has expressed more moral concern over a US president’s calls to kill an entire civilization than any major tech executive. (Any tech executive that I have seen, anyway, and I’ve spent the last couple of days looking.) It is occasion to examine the extent to which Silicon Valley has become an enabling partner in Trump’s military adventuring.

Now, the foundational story has been more or less the same since Silicon Valley began its embrace of Trump in earnest last year: The tech giants and largest AI firms made public shows of fealty, embedded themselves in the administration’s broader project and explicitly aligned their interests with Trump’s, in exchange for access to the state’s largesse, deregulatory agenda, and multifaceted support.

But this week should serve as a clarifying moment. The sitting American president explicitly promised a genocide then forced the Iranian people to wait for hours to see if they would be bombed “into the stone age” and the rest of the world to see if he would start World War III in earnest this time. Even a few years ago, Silicon Valley executives might have spoken out against such horrific declarations; intents to, in part, harness their AI, tools and technological infrastructure to such abject ends. Now they are silent; content, apparently, as long as Trump continues to give them favorable land use policy for their data centers and state AI law moratoria. If an industry that rose to cultural dominance by promising to be harbingers of progress—to improve people’s lives, to do no evil, to bring people together, to make a dent in the universe, and by using all of the above as a powerful recruitment tool—cannot draw the line here, then what’s left?

So, today, I want to drill into the myriad ways some of the top AI and tech firms—OpenAI, Google, Microsoft, Amazon, and Anthropic—are profiting directly from the US Department of War and their close ties to Trump. Even if all of the tech firms listed above are not explicitly building the technical infrastructure that enables mass killing—though some are—they have become pivotal to Trump’s geopolitical project nonetheless. They have provided his administration financial support, credibility, and lent his project a veneer of forward-looking futurity, even as that project delivers regression, oppression, and violence on the ground. They have provided cloud and AI services to the military and affiliated government agencies. They are war profiteers.

Have you heard about @surf, the new social website product from the makers of @Flipboard? Available on any web browser or as an app, Surf gives users control of their own social media timelines. It lets you easily create customizable feeds of content from Mastodon, Bluesky, YouTube, podcasts, Threads and RSS feeds — basically any platform that’s part of the open social web. It allows you to escape the "tyranny of the algorithm" and follow the topics you really care about.

CNET has a good explainer: cnet.com/news/social-media/fli…

Surf is for anyone, but publishers are already seeing its potential. @RollingStone, @theverge, @WIRED and @404mediaco are just a few who already have Surf social websites.

My favorite headline from all the positive media coverage: “The web can still be wonderful, and Flipboard’s Surf proves it” by @harrymccracken at @FastCompany. “This new app lets human beings weave together worthwhile stuff from across the internet, in a way that’s uniquely rewarding — and sometimes even beautiful,” the magazine’s editors wrote. fastcompany.com/91520679/surf-…

Check it out at surf.social/ or download the app in the Google Play store: play.google.com/store/apps/det…. For iOS, sign up on the waitlist: waitlist.surf.social/.

And here's a blog post with more info: about.flipboard.com/fediverse/…

#SocialMedia #Technology #Fediverse #OpenSocialWeb

archive.is

Amid all of this, Silicon Valley is doubling down on its push to integrate AI into schools. In the lead-up to final exams last spring, nearly every major AI firm offered college students free (or heavily discounted) access to their paid chatbots. Now the tech industry is offering students cheap access to their agentic tools. Last summer, Anthropic announced “Claude Builder Clubs”—an initiative in which students paid by the AI company host workshops and hackathons on their campuses. In exchange for membership in those clubs, students are given free access to Claude Code. A few weeks ago, OpenAI announced that it would be offering college students $100 worth of credits for Codex, its agentic coding tool.

The students affiliated with the AI companies, at least, say that the more powerful bots are helping them with their studies. Thor Warnken, an Anthropic ambassador and a biology major at the University of Florida, told me that he has designed what is effectively a personalized Khan Academy. When he takes a practice test—say, in organic chemistry—he feeds his completed work into Claude. He then asks the bot to find patterns in his errors and make new practice problems based on them. “The first practice question will be super easy, and the next one will get a little harder and a little harder, until it gets super hard,” he explained. Liu, who also serves as an ambassador for Anthropic, similarly said that the bot has made for a “fantastic” study partner. When he has questions during large lectures, he asks Claude, which has access to his course materials, and the bot explains concepts in real time; previously, those questions might have gone unanswered.

Instructors, as I have previously written, are also using plenty of AI. Canvas recently introduced a new AI teaching agent designed to save instructors time on “low educational value tasks” such as organizing online-course modules and adjusting assignment due dates. “Faculty are using AI tools both for instructional purposes, for building course materials, but they’re also starting to play around with generative AI to actually grade and assess the learning,” Marc Watkins, a researcher at the University of Mississippi who studies AI and education, told me. He gave a hypothetical: “I could set my agent up, open it up in my course, go out on campus to walk across campus to get a cup of coffee at Starbucks,” he said. By the time he returned, 15 minutes later, all of the essays would be graded, and “bespoke personal feedback” would be sent out to each student. AI can save teachers time—that same grading takes him 10 or 12 hours, Watkins estimated—but in the process, the technology threatens the relationship between students and teachers that is core to education. “That’s really scary,” he said.

A 20-year-old man allegedly tossed a molotov cocktail at the home of Sam Altman, OpenAI’s CEO, before the sun rose on Friday, according to statements from San Francisco police.

The suspect, who allegedly threw the fire bomb at the $27m North Beach residence around 4.12am, has been arrested but not identified. The same person allegedly threatened to torch OpenAI’s headquarters in the city. No injuries were reported.

The San Francisco police wrote in a statement on X on Friday morning that the agency responded to a “fire investigation” after the man allegedly threw a molotov cocktail at Altman’s residence. Law enforcement said there was a “fire to an exterior gate”, after which the suspect fled on foot. There were no injuries, the agency said.

About an hour later, just after 5am, police responded to reports from a business in the Mission Bay neighborhood, where OpenAI’s headquarters are located, about a man “threatening to burn down the building”. Officers said they recognized the man as the suspect from the earlier incident and immediately detained him.

Funny that when you threaten an entire society, some will break. That he was only 20 suggests a sense that he will never have a seat at the table for the rest of his life.

And he's not wrong.

In June 2024, a cyber-attack on a pathology services company caused chaos across London’s hospitals. More than 10,000 appointments were cancelled. Blood shortages followed and delays to blood tests led to a patient’s death.

Lethal cyber-attacks like this are thankfully rare. But a new AI release could change that – plunging us into a terrifying new world of chaos and disruption to the digital systems that we rely on.

This week Anthropic, a leading AI company in San Francisco, announced “Claude Mythos Preview”, an AI model that the startup says is too dangerous to publicly release, thanks to its exceptional cybersecurity – and cyber-attacking – capabilities. Mythos, the company claims, has found vulnerabilities in every major browser and operating system. In other words, this new AI model might be able to help hackers disrupt much of the world’s most important software.

“This is Y2K-level alarming,” one security expert said. Already, Mythos has found a 27-year-old bug in a critical piece of security infrastructure and multiple vulnerabilities in the Linux kernel, essential for computer systems worldwide. These weak points could threaten almost everything on the internet from the streaming services you relax with to the banking systems you rely on.

The public freakout about blue light started with a study in 2014. Half of the 12 participants read on an iPad before bed. The rest read physical books. The iPad users took longer to fall asleep, felt groggier the next day and produced less melatonin. The researchers said the culprit was the glow emitted from the iPad's LED screen, which produces a disproportionate amount of light in the upper, bluer end of the spectrum. Under specific circumstances, blue-enriched light disrupts the daily circadian rhythm – our body's natural pacemaker – that uses daylight to help determine when we start to feel tired. Subsequent research seemed to support the findings. Sounds simple, right? It's not.

"This was an incredibly deceptive piece of work," says Jamie Zeitzer, a professor of psychiatry and behavioural sciences at Stanford University, who studies the effect of light on the circadian system. The science wasn't bad, he says, the problem is it brought people to bad conclusions.

After years warnings and millions of people flipping on the blue light filters built into their phones, the latest science suggests screens are not the main culprit here after all. For example, a recent review of 11 different studies and found that the light from screens only delayed sleep by about nine minutes, at worst. Not zero, but not life altering, either.

The amount of blue light emitted by the screens of phones, laptops and tablets has also been shown to be tiny compared to the blue light we receive from the Sun – 24 hours-worth of blue light from digital devices totted up to less than one minute spent outdoors, according to one study. Other studies have shown it's not enough to affect levels of the hormones that control our sleep.

So why am I so tired all the time? Zeitzer and others told me there are lots of other ways that light, blue and otherwise, could be ruining my bedtime. If I really wanted to tackle the blue monster, it was going to take a serious lifestyle change.

Modern power demands have outgrown standard cables, especially in environments like data centers and high-performance workstations. The IEC C19 power cord is designed to handle heavy electrical loads—up to 20 amps—making it ideal for servers, PDUs, UPS systems, and industrial equipment. Unlike basic cords, it delivers consistent, stable power without overheating or risking failure.

In high-density server racks, even a small power issue can lead to downtime or hardware damage. That’s where the C19 power cable proves its value. It ensures reliable power delivery, supports continuous operation, and helps prevent costly interruptions. The same applies to advanced workstations used for tasks like video rendering or AI processing, where stable power is essential for performance.

IEC C19 cords are also widely used in enterprise UPS systems and power distribution units, where high current capacity and safety are non-negotiable. In industries and laboratories, their durable build handles demanding conditions, including heat and vibration, without compromising safety.

Choosing the right IEC C19 power cord means considering factors like cable length, wire gauge, certifications, and the environment it will be used in. A high-quality cable not only protects your equipment but also ensures long-term reliability.

In short, IEC C19 power cords are the backbone of modern high-power setups. Using the right one keeps systems running smoothly, minimizes risks, and supports uninterrupted performance when it matters most.

Original blog :- sfcable.com/blog/top-7-use-cas…

The Wi-Fi broke on my Kindle Paperwhite years ago, and I have only one micro-B cable left that will connect to it.

Amazon is to stop supporting older Kindle models leaving longtime ebook fans unable to access new content from the Kindle store.

Devices released during or before 2012 will no longer receive updates from 20 May, affecting owners of older Kindles, including the earliest models such as the Touch and some Fire tablets. It is thought that 2m e-readers could be affected.

Users will still be able to read ebooks they have downloaded, and their accounts and their Kindle library will remain accessible on mobile and desktop apps. Active users have been offered discounts to help “transition to newer devices”. Amazon said performing a factory reset on affected Kindles would make them unusable.

Disappointed users have vented their frustration online, including in comments on The Verge, accusing Amazon of “causing waste at a large scale” and saying their devices would be reduced to a paperweight despite still working.

One wonders whether these old devices just don't have enough telemetry built in for Amazon's liking.

OpenAI has put on hold plans for a landmark project to strengthen the UK’s AI capabilities, citing high energy costs and regulation.

Stargate UK was a part of the landmark UK-US AI deal announced last September, in which US companies appeared to commit £31bn to the UK’s tech sector, part of a larger series of investments intended to “mainline AI” into the British economy.

A Guardian investigation last month revealed many of these were “phantom investments” and a supercomputer scheduled to go live in 2026 was this March still a scaffolding yard in Essex. That supercomputer was to be built by Nscale, a UK firm that had never built a datacentre before but said it was aiming to deliver the project in 2027. Nscale was also to build key datacentres for Stargate UK.

The Stargate project was to support Britain in building out “sovereign compute” – infrastructure that would allow the government and other UK institutions to run AI models on datacentres in the country. This is in theory important to the security of British data, for institutions and individuals.

An OpenAI spokesperson said: “We see huge potential for the UK’s AI future. We continue to explore Stargate UK and will move forward when the right conditions such as regulation and the cost of energy enable long-term infrastructure investment.”

Or maybe it's as simple as "shit, we actually don't make any money, and people have caught onto the grift."

When the first M1 Apple Silicon systems sprouted at the end of 2020, we loved the tech but not the walled garden it grew in. Apple had complete control over all its platforms and could set its own rules, but only to become more Apple-y. There was a whole world outside that area where Apple Silicon would never tread, even if Cupertino could iterate fast enough to keep up. Plus, Apple's appliance sensibility limited its expansion options, especially with performance dependent on its own silicon.

More than five years on, that remains true. Yes, the architecture can iterate at least as fast as anything else in its class. It turns out that gigabit Wi-Fi, 10 Gb Ethernet, and high speed expansion is not such a problem anymore. Otherwise, if you ignore embedded niche cases that nobody cares about, Apple is still where it started, in desktops and laptops. It has even lost one form factor. And ironically, the most exciting new machine for years, the Macbook Neo, doesn't even have an M-type SoC in it.

And yet, that Macbook Neo has given the Windows world the fear, precisely because of the Apple Silicon walled garden strategy. A simple equation has reached a critical point, and it may be irreversible. Every year of Apple Silicon, the experience of using a Mac has gotten better. Every year of Windows 11, the experience of using a PC has gotten worse.

Sixteen miles north of Albuquerque, in Rio Rancho, New Mexico, an Intel chip plant sits on more than 200 acres of land. The site was established in the 1980s, part of it built on top of a sod farm. In 2007, as Intel’s business faltered, operations in one of the key fabs, Fab 9, came to a halt. Employees say families of raccoons and a badger took up residence in the space.

Then, in January 2024, the dormant fab was booted up again. Intel funneled billions into the facility, including $500 million it was granted from the US CHIPS Act. Now, Fab 9 and its neighbor, Fab 11X, are critical infrastructure for one of Intel’s quietly fast-growing businesses: advanced chip packaging.

Packaging involves combining multiple chiplets, or smaller components, onto a single, custom chip. Over the past six months, Intel has been signaling that its advanced packaging business, which operates within the Foundry chip-making arm of the company, is having a growth spurt. The company’s efforts around this have it going head-to-head with Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Corporation, which far surpasses Intel’s production in terms of scale. But in an era where AI is driving demand for all kinds of computing power, and leading nearly every major tech company to consider making its own custom chips, Intel thinks this effort can help it grab a bigger slice of the AI pie.

One point in favor of the sprawling Linux ecosystem is its broad hardware support—the kernel officially supports everything from ’90s-era PC hardware to Arm-based Apple Silicon chips, thanks to decades of combined effort from hardware manufacturers and motivated community members.

But nothing can last forever, and for a few years now, Linux maintainers (including Linus Torvalds) have been pushing to drop kernel support for Intel’s 80486 processor. This chip was originally introduced in 1989, was replaced by the first Intel Pentium in 1993, and was fully discontinued in 2007. Code commits suggest that Linux kernel version 7.1 will be the first to follow through, making it impossible to build a version of the kernel that will support the 486; Phoronix says that additional kernel changes to remove 486-related code will follow in subsequent kernel versions.

Although these chips haven’t changed in decades, maintaining support for them in modern software isn’t free.

“In the x86 architecture we have various complicated hardware emulation facilities on x86-32 to support ancient 32-bit CPUs that very, very few people are using with modern kernels,” writes Linux kernel contributor Ingo Molnar in his initial patch removing 486 support from the kernel. “This compatibility glue is sometimes even causing problems that people spend time to resolve, which time could be spent on other things.”

Too soon?

The Supreme Court yesterday overturned a 5th Circuit ruling that could have forced Internet service provider Grande Communications to terminate broadband subscribers accused of piracy.

Yesterday’s ruling follows a precedent-setting decision last month in which the Supreme Court threw out a 4th Circuit ruling against Cox Communications, another ISP accused by record labels of not doing enough to fight piracy. In the case involving Cox and Sony, the court said that “a company is not liable as a copyright infringer for merely providing a service to the general public with knowledge that it will be used by some to infringe copyrights.”

N.B.: This looks an awful lot like the litigation and resolution surrounding VCRs. (Ask your parents.)

Cox is one of several cases in which record labels sought financial damages from ISPs that continued to serve customers whose IP addresses were repeatedly traced to torrent downloads or uploads. In October 2024, record labels Universal, Warner, and Sony got a win over Grande when the US Court of Appeals for the 5th Circuit decided the ISP was liable for contributory copyright infringement.

The conservative-leaning 5th Circuit court held in a 3-0 decision that “Grande knew (or was willfully blind to) the identities of its infringing subscribers” but “made the choice to continue providing services to them anyway, rather than taking simple measures to prevent infringement.” But the 5th Circuit now has to reconsider the Grande v. UMG case after a two-sentence ruling issued yesterday by the Supreme Court.

Grande’s petition “for a writ of certiorari is granted. The judgment is vacated, and the case is remanded to the United States Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit for further consideration in light of Cox Communications, Inc. v. Sony Music Entertainment,” the Supreme Court said.

In the realm of his other unrealistic plans and potentially broken promises, Elon Musk's Terafab stands out as one of the biggest pipedreams, promising to boost semiconductor production by 50x for the benefit of orbital datacenters. But hey, this idea must have legs, because now Intel has announced it is joining the aspiring Bond villain's initiative.

"If you add up all the fabs on earth combined, they're only about 2% of what we need for the… Terafab project," Musk said.

In case you were wondering, Musk has never built a wafer fab before. Neither have any of his companies. So when the world's richest man revealed a pie-in-the-sky plan to build a factory capable of churning out enough chips to make his dream a reality, folks were understandably skeptical.

Fabs are among the most complex and expensive facilities in the world. It can cost $30 billion and take as long as five years to bring a modestly-sized facility online, and that's if you already know what you're doing.

There is nothing modest about what Musk has proposed.

But at least it's "going to be happening" in a city with skyrocketing electrical costs and in a yearslong drought.

"We will have all of the equipment necessary to make a chip of any kind [including] logical memory," Musk said of the first Terafab facility, which will purportedly be located in Austin, Texas, which has become the fabulist hecto-billionaire's geographic center of gravity over the last few years. "So in a single building, we can create a lithography mask, make the chip, test the chip, make another mask, and have an incredibly fast recursive loop for improving the chip design."

Let's be reasonable. It's not going to be "in" Austin, because then the city has jurisdiction. Just look out for annexation, Elon.

Hundreds of thousands of tech workers are facing a harsh reality. Their well-paying jobs are no longer safe. Now that artificial intelligence (AI) is here, their futures don’t look as bright as they did a decade ago.

As US tech companies have ramped up investments in AI, they’ve slashed a staggering number of jobs. Microsoft cut 15,000 workers last year. Amazon laid off 30,000 employees in the last six months. Financial-services company Block eliminated more than 4,000 people, or 40% of its workforce, in February. Meta laid off more than 1,000 in the last six months, and, according to a Reuters report, may cut 20% of all employees in the near future. Just this week, the software giant Oracle laid off thousands of workers. Smaller players like Pinterest and Atlassian also made recent cuts, culling about 15% and 10% of their workforces, respectively. Estimates put the total number of tech layoffs in the past year at more than 165,000, according to the tracker Layoffs.fyi.

“At no point in my career have I ever been this pessimistic about the future of careers in tech,” said a tech employee, who has worked at big tech companies for decades and requested anonymity for fear of retribution. “And that’s really sad because I love tech.”