Reddit has begun verifying users' ages in the UK to restrict access to "certain mature content" for minors, complying with the UK's Online Safety Act. The BBC reports: Reddit, known for its online communities and discussions, said that while it does not want to know who its audience is: "It would be helpful for our safety efforts to be able to confirm whether you are a child or an adult." Ofcom, the UK regulator, said: "We expect other companies to follow suit, or face enforcement if they fail to act." Reddit said that from 14 July, an outside firm called Persona will perform age verification for the social media platform either through an uploaded selfie or "a photo of your government ID," such as a passport. It said Reddit will not have access to the photo and will only retain a user's verification status and date of birth so people do not have to re-enter it each time they try to access restricted content. Reddit added that Persona "promises not to retain the picture for longer than seven days" and will not have access to a user's data on the site. The new rules in the UK come into force on 25 July. [...] Companies that fail to meet the rules face fines of up to 18 million pounds or 10% of worldwide revenue, "whichever is greater." [Ofcom] added that in the most serious cases, it can seek a court order for "business disruption measures," such as requiring payment providers or advertisers to withdraw their services from a platform, or requiring Internet Service Providers to block access to a site in the UK."

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Plasma Bigscreen, KDE's TV-focused interface, is being revived after years of inactivity thanks to contributor Devin, who overhauled the UI, redesigned the Settings app, improved app launching, and updated key modules. While still in progress -- with features like HDMI-CEC remote support and a virtual keyboard pending -- the project aims to rejoin KDE's official Plasma release schedule, potentially in version 6.5. Neowin reports: If you have not heard of it, Plasma Bigscreen is a Plasma shell for televisions, with original support for the now-defunct Mycroft AI assistant. It used to provide a simple launcher for apps and custom "Mycroft Skills" before development stalled, causing most distributions to drop it. The project was left behind during the big transition to Plasma 6 last year because no one had ported it in time for the megarelease. After a friend of his started poking at the code, Devin stepped in to tackle the much-needed work. [...] For anyone who wants to test this out, you can do as Devin did by installing Plasma Bigscreen on a Raspberry Pi using postmarketOS, though you would have to compile it yourself or pull from the nightly repos to get the latest changes. Applications like Kodi and VacuumTube (smart TV version of YouTube) work well with remote navigation, and some games like SuperTuxKart are playable. Controller support exists, but getting TV remotes to work over HDMI CEC is still untested. The project is far from finished; it still needs an arrow-navigable virtual keyboard and a clearer long-term direction now that Mycroft is gone. Still, the goal is to get it back into the official Plasma release schedule, possibly for version 6.5.

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An anonymous reader quotes a report from Phoronix: Merged yesterday to the latest development code for the LibreOffice open-source office suite is now recognizing Bitcoin "BTC" as a supported currency for use within the Calc spreadsheet program and elsewhere within this cross-platform free software office suite. Stemming from a recent bug report requesting Bitcoin as an official currency option within LibreOffice Calc, the necessary additions are now in place so it's a built-in preset like USD and EUR. Thus easier managing of Bitcoin transactions and the like from within LibreOffice Calc.

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U.S. prosecutors and the Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC) have officially closed their investigations into Polymarket, the decentralized, blockchain-powered prediction market platform where users bet with real cryptocurrency on the outcomes of future events. "The DOJ was investigating Polymarket last year, reportedly for allowing U.S. users to place bets on the site despite Polymarket being required to block U.S. traders," reports CoinDesk. The FBI raided Polymarket CEO Shayne Coplan's Manhattan apartment last November, seizing his phone and electronic devices. A source close to the matter told The New York Post it was politically motivated due to Polymarket's successful prediction of Trump's election win. It's "grand political theater at its worst," the source said. "They could have asked his lawyer for any of these things. Instead, they staged a so-called raid so they can leak it to the media and use it for obvious political reasons."

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BrianFagioli shares a report from NERDS.xyz: Blender 4.5 has arrived and it's a long-term support release. That means users get two full years of updates and bug fixes, making it a smart choice for anyone looking for stability in serious projects. Whether you're a solo artist or part of a studio pipeline, this version is built to last. Here's a list of key features and changes in this release: - Vulkan backend replaces OpenGL (faster, smoother UI) - Adaptive subdivision up to 14x faster with multithreading - New Geometry Nodes: Camera Info, Instance Bounds - GPU-accelerated compositor nodes with standardized inputs - New Boolean solver: Manifold (cleaner, faster mesh operations) - UV maps visible in Object Mode + improved selection behavior - Grease Pencil render pass and Geometry Nodes integration - Improved file import support: PLY, OBJ, STL, CSV, VDB - Deprecations: Collada, Big Endian, legacy .blend, Intel Mac support - Cycles OptiX now requires NVIDIA driver v535+ - New shader variants for add-on developers (POLYLINES_*, POINT_*) ~500 bug fixes across all major systems

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An anonymous reader quotes a report from TorrentFreak: Internet service providers BT, Virgin Media, Sky, TalkTalk, EE, and Plusnet account for the majority of the UK's residential internet market and as a result, blocking injunctions previously obtained at the High Court often list these companies as respondents. These so-called "no fault' injunctions stopped being adversarial a long time ago; ISPs indicate in advance they won't contest a blocking order against various pirate sites, and typically that's good enough for the Court to issue an order with which they subsequently comply. For more than 15 years, this has led to blocking being carried out as close to users as possible, with ISPs' individual blocking measures doing the heavy lifting. A new wave of blocking targeting around 200 pirate site domains came into force yesterday but with the unexpected involvement of a significant new player. In the latest wave of blocking that seems to have come into force yesterday, close to 200 pirate domains requested by the Motion Picture Association were added to one of the longest pirate site blocking lists in the world. The big change is the unexpected involvement of Cloudflare, which for some users attempting to access the domains added yesterday, displays the [Error 451 -- Unavailable for Legal Reasons] notice ... As stated in the notice, Error 451 is returned when a domain is blocked for legal reasons, in this case reasons specific to the UK. [...] In this case there's no indication of who requested the blocking order, or the authority that issued it. However, from experience we know that the request was made by the studios of the Motion Picture Association and for the same reason the High Court in London was the issuing authority. [...] The issue lies with dynamic injunctions; while a list of domains will appear in the original order (which may or may not be made available), when the MPA concludes that other domains that appear subsequently are linked to the same order, those can be blocked too, but the details are only rarely made public. From information obtained independently, one candidate is an original order obtained in December 2022 which requested blocking of domains with well known pirate brands including 123movies, fmovies, soap2day, hurawatch, sflix, and onionplay. This leads directly to another unusual issue. The notice linked from Cloudflare doesn't directly concern Cloudflare. The studios sent the notice to Google after Google agreed to voluntarily remove those domains from its search indexes, if it was provided with a copy of relevant court orders. Notices like these were supplied and the domains were deindexed, and the practice has continued ever since. That raises questions about the nature of Cloudflare's involvement here and why it links to the order sent to Google; notices sent to Cloudflare are usually submitted to Lumen by Cloudflare itself. That doesn't appear to be the case here. "Domains blocked by Sky, BPI and others, don't appear to be affected," notes TorrentFreak. "All relate to sites targeted by the MPA, and the majority if not all trigger malware warnings of a very serious kind, either immediately upon visiting the sites, or shortly after." "At least in the short term, if Cloudflare is blocking a domain in the UK, moving on is strongly advised."

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Many trains in the U.S. are vulnerable to a hack that can remotely lock a train's brakes, according to the U.S. Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) and the researcher who discovered the vulnerability. From a report:The railroad industry has known about the vulnerability for more than a decade but only recently began to fix it. Independent researcher Neil Smith first discovered the vulnerability, which can be exploited over radio frequencies, in 2012. "All of the knowledge to generate the exploit already exists on the internet. AI could even build it for you," Smith told 404 Media. "The physical aspect really only means that you could not exploit this over the internet from another country, you would need to be some physical distance from the train [so] that your signal is still received."

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Perplexity CEO Aravind Srinivas warned young entrepreneurs that tech giants will "copy anything that's good" during a talk at Y Combinator's AI Startup School, telling founders they must "live with that fear." Srinivas said that companies raising tens of billions need to justify capital expenditures and search for new revenue streams. Perplexity pioneered web-crawling chatbots when it launched its answer engine in December 2022, but Google's Bard added internet-crawling three months later, followed by ChatGPT in May 2023 and Anthropic's Claude in March 2025. The competition has extended to browsers, with Perplexity launching its Comet browser on July 9 and Reuters reporting that OpenAI is developing a web browser to challenge Google Chrome. Perplexity's communications head Jesse Dwyer said larger companies will "drown your voice."

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NIST: There's a new record holder for the most accurate clock in the world. Researchers at the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) have improved their atomic clock based on a trapped aluminum ion. Part of the latest wave of optical atomic clocks, it can perform timekeeping with 19 decimal places of accuracy. Optical clocks are typically evaluated on two levels -- accuracy (how close a clock comes to measuring the ideal "true" time, also known as systematic uncertainty) and stability (how efficiently a clock can measure time, related to statistical uncertainty). This new record in accuracy comes out of 20 years of continuous improvement of the aluminum ion clock. Beyond its world-best accuracy, 41% greater than the previous record, this new clock is also 2.6 times more stable than any other ion clock. Reaching these levels has meant carefully improving every aspect of the clock, from the laser to the trap and the vacuum chamber. The team published its results in Physical Review Letters. "It's exciting to work on the most accurate clock ever," said Mason Marshall, NIST researcher and first author on the paper. "At NIST we get to carry out these long-term plans in precision measurement that can push the field of physics and our understanding of the world around us."

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A survey of 500 IT asset managers in organizations that use Oracle Java has found that 73% have been audited in the last three years. From a report: At the same time, nearly eight out of 10 Oracle Java users said they had migrated, or planned to shift, to open source Java to try to avoid the risk and high costs of the dominant vendor's development and runtime environments. Oracle introduced a paid subscription for Java in September 2018, and in January 2023, it decided to switch its pricing model to per employee rather than per user, creating a steep price hike for many users. In July 2023, Gartner recorded users experiencing price increases of between two and five times when they switched to the new licensing model. Two years later, the survey conducted by market research firm Dimensional Research showed only 14% of Oracle Java users intended to stick with the vendor's subscription model.

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Nearly half of young Americans feel unprepared for future jobs as AI reshapes the workforce faster than career guidance can adapt, according to a new study from the Schultz Family Foundation and HarrisX. The survey of thousands of workers aged 16-24, along with parents, counselors and employers, revealed differences between generations about job availability and requirements. While 71% of employers say sufficient opportunities exist, only 43% of young people agree. Parents rely on outdated personal experiences when advising children, with 79% drawing from their own career paths despite 66% believing their children should pursue different directions. Employers require at least one year of experience for 77% of entry-level positions while offering internships for just 38% of roles.

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An anonymous reader shares a report: Hugging Face, a company with a multi-billion dollar valuation and one of the most commonly used platforms for sharing AI tools and resources, is hosting over 5,000 AI image generation models that are designed to recreate the likeness of real people. These models were all previously hosted on Civitai, an AI model sharing platform 404 Media reporting has shown was used for creating nonconsensual pornography, until Civitai banned them due to pressure from payment processors. Users downloaded the models from Civitai and reuploaded them to Hugging Face as part of a concerted community effort to archive the models after Civitai announced in May it will ban them. In that announcement, Civitai said it will give the people who originally uploaded them "a short period of time" before they were removed. Civitai users began organizing an archiving effort on Discord earlier in May after Civitai indicated it had to make content policy changes due to pressure from payment processors, and the effort kicked into high gear when Civitai announced the new "real people" model policy.

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An anonymous reader quotes a report from Investing.com: Meta's newly formed superintelligence lab is discussing potential changes to the company's artificial intelligence strategy that could represent a major shift for the social media giant. A small group of top members of the lab, including 28-year-old Alexandr Wang, Meta's new chief A.I. officer, talked last week about abandoning the company's most powerful open source A.I. model, called Behemoth, in favor of developing a closed model, according to a report in the New York Times, citing people familiar with the matter. Meta has traditionally open sourced its A.I. models, making the computer code public for other developers to build upon, and any shift toward a closed A.I. model would mark a significant philosophical change for Meta. Meta had completed training its Behemoth model by feeding in data to improve it, but delayed its release due to poor internal performance. After the company announced the formation of the superintelligence lab last month, teams working on the Behemoth model, which is considered a "frontier" model, stopped conducting new tests on it. The discussions within the superintelligence lab remain preliminary, and no decisions have been finalized. Any potential changes would require approval from Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg.

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France, Spain, Italy, Denmark, and Greece will pilot an age verification app to better protect children online, as part of the EU's push to enforce its Digital Services Act. Reuters reports: The setup for the age verification app is built on the same technical specifications as the European Digital Identity Wallet which will be rolled out next year. The five countries can customize the model according to their requirements, integrate into a national app or keep it separately. The landmark legislation, which became applicable last year, requires Alphabet's Google, Meta, ByteDance's TikTok and other online companies to do more to tackle illegal and harmful online content. EU regulators said the new guidelines would help online platforms to tackle addictive design, cyberbullying, harmful content and unwanted contact from strangers.

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Chinese AI startup Moonshot AI has released Kimi K2, a trillion-parameter open-source language model that outperforms GPT-4 in key benchmarks with particularly strong performance on coding and autonomous agent tasks. VentureBeat reports: The new model, called Kimi K2, features 1 trillion total parameters with 32 billion activated parameters in a mixture-of-experts architecture. The company is releasing two versions: a foundation model for researchers and developers, and an instruction-tuned variant optimized for chat and autonomous agent applications. "Kimi K2 does not just answer; it acts," the company stated in its announcement blog. "With Kimi K2, advanced agentic intelligence is more open and accessible than ever. We can't wait to see what you build." The model's standout feature is its optimization for "agentic" capabilities -- the ability to autonomously use tools, write and execute code, and complete complex multi-step tasks without human intervention. In benchmark tests, Kimi K2 achieved 65.8% accuracy on SWE-bench Verified, a challenging software engineering benchmark, outperforming most open-source alternatives and matching some proprietary models. [...] On LiveCodeBench, arguably the most realistic coding benchmark available, Kimi K2 achieved 53.7% accuracy, decisively beating DeepSeek-V3's 46.9% and GPT-4.1's 44.7%. More striking still: it scored 97.4% on MATH-500 compared to GPT-4.1's 92.4%, suggesting Moonshot has cracked something fundamental about mathematical reasoning that has eluded larger, better-funded competitors. But here's what the benchmarks don't capture: Moonshot is achieving these results with a model that costs a fraction of what incumbents spend on training and inference. While OpenAI burns through hundreds of millions on compute for incremental improvements, Moonshot appears to have found a more efficient path to the same destination. It's a classic innovator's dilemma playing out in real time -- the scrappy outsider isn't just matching the incumbent's performance, they're doing it better, faster, and cheaper.

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An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: Samuel Herman and Alexander Baciu never liked using Comcast's cable broadband. Now, the residents of Saline, Michigan, operate a fiber Internet service provider that competes against Comcast in their neighborhoods and has ambitions to expand. "All throughout my life pretty much, I've had to deal with Xfinity's bullcrap, them not being able to handle the speeds that we need," Herman told Ars. "I lived in a house of 10. I have seven other brothers and sisters, and there's 10 of us in total with my parents." With all those kids using the Internet for school and other needs, "it just doesn't work out," he said. Herman was particularly frustrated with Comcast upload speeds, which are much slower than the cable service's download speeds. "Many times we would have to call Comcast and let them know our bandwidth was slowing down... then they would say, 'OK, we'll refresh the system.' So then it would work again for a week to two weeks, and then again we'd have the same issues," he said. Herman, now 25, got married in 2021 and started building his own house, and he tried to find another ISP to serve the property. He was familiar with local Internet service providers because he worked in construction for his father's company, which contracts with ISPs to build their networks. But no fiber ISP was looking to compete directly against Comcast where he lived, though Metronet and 123NET offer fiber elsewhere in the city, Herman said. He ended up paying Comcast $120 a month for gigabit download service with slower upload speeds. Baciu, who lives about a mile away from Herman, was also stuck with Comcast and was paying about the same amount for gigabit download speeds. Herman said he was the chief operating officer of his father's construction company and that he shifted the business "from doing just directional drilling to be a turnkey contractor for ISPs." Baciu, Herman's brother-in-law (having married Herman's oldest sister), was the chief construction officer. Fueled by their knowledge of the business and their dislike of Comcast, they founded a fiber ISP called Prime-One. Now, Herman is paying $80 a month to his own company for symmetrical gigabit service. Prime-One also offers 500Mbps for $75, 2Gbps for $95, and 5Gbps for $110. The first 30 days are free, and all plans have unlimited data and no contracts. "We are 100 percent fiber optic," Baciu told Ars. "Everything that we're doing is all underground. We're not doing aerial because we really want to protect the infrastructure and make sure we're having a reliable connection." Each customer's Optical Network Terminal (ONT) and other equipment is included in the service plan. Prime-One provides a modem and the ONT, plus a Wi-Fi router if the customer prefers not to use their own router. They don't charge equipment or installation fees, Herman and Baciu said. Prime-One began serving customers in January 2025, and Baciu said the network has been built to about 1,500 homes in Saline with about 75 miles of fiber installed. Prime-One intends to serve nearby towns as well, with the founders saying the plan is to serve 4,000 homes with the initial build and then expand further. [...] A bit more than 100 residents have bought service so far, they said. Herman said the company is looking to sign up about 30 percent of the homes in its network area to make a profit. "I feel fairly confident," Herman said, noting the number of customers who signed up with the initial construction not even halfway finished.

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Apple is facing pressure to shake up its corporate playbook to invigorate its struggling artificial intelligence efforts. From a report: Alarmed by a share slump that's erased more than $640 billion in market value this year and frustrated with delays in rolling out AI features, investors are calling for Apple to break with long-standing traditions to make a big acquisition and more aggressively pursue talent. "Historically Apple does not do big mergers and acquisitions," said Citigroup Inc. analyst Atif Malik, noting that the last major deal was its takeover of Beats in 2014. But, he argues, "investors would turn more positive if Apple could acquire or invest a meaningful stake in an established AI provider." Apple shares have fallen 16% this year while traders bid up the shares of peers like Meta, which is spending lavishly on AI. While Apple faces other problems, including its exposure to tariffs and regulatory issues, disappointment in bringing compelling AI features to its vast ecosystem of devices has become top of mind for investors.

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Armagh Observatory is marking a very special meteorological milestone as the institute celebrates 230 years of continuous weather observation. From a report: The unbroken tradition of handwritten data makes it the longest sequence of continuous weather information gathered anywhere in the UK and Ireland. Events are being held at Armagh Observatory on Monday to mark the significant anniversary. Nowadays, most weather data is gathered only by automated weather stations, but not in Armagh, where the human touch remains. The first handwritten recording was made on the evening of 14 July 1795, when a measurement of the temperature and air pressure was recorded on a graph at the observatory that sits above the city of Armagh. The measurement was repeated the next day and every subsequent day for the next 230 years.

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A small fraction of hyperactive social media users generates the vast majority of toxic online content, according to research by New York University psychology professor Jay Van Bavel and colleagues Claire Robertson and Kareena del Rosario. The study found that 10% of users produce roughly 97% of political tweets, while just 0.1% of users share 80% of fake news. Twelve accounts known as the "disinformation dozen" created most vaccine misinformation on Facebook during the pandemic, the research found. In experiments, researchers paid participants to unfollow divisive political accounts on X. After one month, participants reported 23% less animosity toward other political groups. Nearly half declined to refollow hostile accounts after the study ended, and those maintaining healthier newsfeeds reported reduced animosity 11 months later. The research describes social media as a "funhouse mirror" that amplifies extreme voices while muting moderate perspectives.

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A Department of Justice filing aiming to recover fraudulently obtained cryptocurrency may have inadvertently revealed the scam's victims as the CEO and CFO of crypto payment firm MoonPay. From a report: The filing, which aims to seize around $40,350 in USDT frozen by Tether, reveals that two victims sent $250,300 in USDT to a person posing as Steve Witkoff, co-chair of the President Trump's inaugural committee. However, records obtained from Binance revealed that the wallet that received the funds was registered to Ehiremen Aigbokhan, a man based in Lagos, Nigeria. The victims are identified in the filing only as "Ivan" and "Mouna." However, as outlet NOTUS noticed, Crypto payment firm Moonpay's CEO is Ivan Soto-Wright and its CFO is Mouna Ammari Siala. Furthermore, a wallet involved in the $250,300 transaction is listed by Etherscan as a MoonPay wallet.

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