An anonymous reader shares a report: One of the interesting projects engaged in by Mozilla that directly wasn't related to their web browser efforts was DeepSpeech, an embedded/offline speech-to-text engine. To not much surprise given the lack of activity in recent years, last week they finally and formally discontinued the open-source project. Mozilla DeepSpeech was a promising speech-to-text engine with great performance for real-time communication even when running on Raspberry Pi SBCs and other low-power systems.

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Senator Bernie Sanders called for a four-day work week during a recent interview with podcaster Joe Rogan, arguing that AI productivity gains should benefit workers rather than just technology companies and corporate executives. Sanders proposed reducing the standard work week to 32 hours when AI tools increase worker productivity, rather than eliminating jobs entirely. "Technology is gonna work to improve us, not just the people who own the technology and the CEOs of large corporations," Sanders said. "You are a worker, your productivity is increasing because we give you AI, right? Instead of throwing you out on the street, I'm gonna reduce your work week to 32 hours."

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The City of Lyon will replace Microsoft's office suite with free office software, including OnlyOffice for office work and Linux and PostgreSQL for systems and databases. The city aims to "no longer be dependent on American software solutions and acquire true digital sovereignty," according to an official statement.

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A Gallup and Walton Family Foundation poll found 6 in 10 US teachers in K-12 public schools used AI tools for work during the past school year, with higher adoption rates among high school educators and early-career teachers. The survey of more than 2,000 teachers nationwide conducted in April found that those using AI tools weekly estimate saving about six hours per week. About 8 in 10 teachers using AI tools report time savings on creating worksheets, assessments, quizzes and administrative work. About 6 in 10 said AI improves their work quality when modifying student materials or providing feedback. However, approximately half of teachers worry student AI use will diminish teens' critical thinking abilities and independent problem-solving persistence.

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theodp writes: The job of the future might already be past its prime," writes The Atlantic's Rose Horowitch in The Computer-Science Bubble Is Bursting. "For years, young people seeking a lucrative career were urged to go all in on computer science. From 2005 to 2023, the number of comp-sci majors in the United States quadrupled. All of which makes the latest batch of numbers so startling. This year, enrollment grew by only 0.2 percent nationally, and at many programs, it appears to already be in decline, according to interviews with professors and department chairs. At Stanford, widely considered one of the country's top programs, the number of comp-sci majors has stalled after years of blistering growth. Szymon Rusinkiewicz, the chair of Princeton's computer-science department, told me that, if current trends hold, the cohort of graduating comp-sci majors at Princeton is set to be 25 percent smaller in two years than it is today. The number of Duke students enrolled in introductory computer-science courses has dropped about 20 percent over the past year." "But if the decline is surprising, the reason for it is fairly straightforward: Young people are responding to a grim job outlook for entry-level coders. In recent years, the tech industry has been roiled by layoffs and hiring freezes. The leading culprit for the slowdown is technology itself. Artificial intelligence has proved to be even more valuable as a writer of computer code than as a writer of words. This means it is ideally suited to replacing the very type of person who built it. A recent Pew study found that Americans think software engineers will be most affected by generative AI. Many young people aren't waiting to find out whether that's true." Meanwhile, writing in the Communications of the ACM, Orit Hazzan and Avi Salmon ask: Should Universities Raise or Lower Admission Requirements for CS Programs in the Age of GenAI? "This debate raises a key dilemma: should universities raise admission standards for computer science programs to ensure that only highly skilled problem-solvers enter the field, lower them to fill the gaps left by those who now see computer science as obsolete due to GenAI, or restructure them to attract excellent candidates with diverse skill sets who may not have considered computer science prior to the rise of GenAI, but who now, with the intensive GenAI and vibe coding tools supporting programming tasks, may consider entering the field?

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U.S. banks have failed to prevent mass-scale money laundering in the face of approximately $44 billion per year in pig-butchering scams conducted by Asian crime syndicates, according to a ProPublica investigation. Chinese-language Telegram channels openly advertise rental of U.S. bank accounts to scammers who use them to move victims' cash into cryptocurrency. Bank of America allowed hundreds of unverified customers to open accounts, prosecutors alleged, including 176 customers who claimed the same small home as their address. Major financial institutions whose accounts pig-butchering scammers have exploited include Bank of America, Chase, Citibank, HSBC and Wells Fargo. The scams typically involve fake cryptocurrency trading platforms that convince victims to wire money to seemingly legitimate business accounts. Banks are reluctant to share account information with each other even after identifying suspicious activity, and "no real standards" exist for what banks must do to detect fraud or money laundering.

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An anonymous reader quotes a report from 404 Media: A massive data center for Meta's AI will likely lead to rate hikes for Louisiana customers, but Meta wants to keep the details under wraps. Holly Ridge is a rural community bisected by US Highway 80, gridded with farmland, with a big creek -- it is literally named Big Creek -- running through it. It is home to rice and grain mills and an elementary school and a few houses. Soon, it will also be home to Meta's massive, 4 million square foot AI data center hosting thousands of perpetually humming servers that require billions of watts of energy to power. And that energy-guzzling infrastructure will be partially paid for by Louisiana residents. The plan is part of what Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg said would be "a defining year for AI." On Threads, Zuckerberg boasted that his company was "building a 2GW+ datacenter that is so large it would cover a significant part of Manhattan," posting a map of Manhattan along with the data center overlaid. Zuckerberg went on to say that over the coming years, AI "will drive our core products and business, unlock historic innovation, and extend American technology leadership. Let's go build! " What Zuckerberg did not mention is that "Let's go build" refers not only to the massive data center but also three new Meta-subsidized, gas power plants and a transmission line to fuel it serviced by Entergy Louisiana, the region's energy monopoly. Key details about Meta's investments with the data center remain vague, and Meta's contracts with Entergy are largely cloaked from public scrutiny. But what is known is the $10 billion data center has been positioned as an enormous economic boon for the area -- one that politicians bent over backward to facilitate -- and Meta said it will invest $200 million into "local roads and water infrastructure." A January report from NOLA.com said that the the state had rewritten zoning laws, promised to change a law so that it no longer had to put state property up for public bidding, and rewrote what was supposed to be a tax incentive for broadband internet meant to bridge the digital divide so that it was only an incentive for data centers, all with the goal of luring in Meta. But Entergy Louisiana's residential customers, who live in one of the poorest regions of the state, will see their utility bills increase to pay for Meta's energy infrastructure, according to Entergy's application. Entergy estimates that amount will be small and will only cover a transmission line, but advocates for energy affordability say the costs could balloon depending on whether Meta agrees to finish paying for its three gas plants 15 years from now. The short-term rate increases will be debated in a public hearing before state regulators that has not yet been scheduled. The Alliance for Affordable Energy called it a "black hole of energy use," and said "to give perspective on how much electricity the Meta project will use: Meta's energy needs are roughly 2.3x the power needs of Orleans Parish ... it's like building the power impact of a large city overnight in the middle of nowhere."

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The Register's Simon Sharwood reports: Huawei's chairman Xu Zhijun -- aka Eric Xu -- has called out China's enormous lead in fiber-to-the-room (FTTR) installations. Speaking at last week's Mobile World Congress event in Shanghai, Xu shared his views on the telecommunications industry's future growth opportunities and said by the end of 2025 China will be home to 75 million FTTR installations -- but just 500,000 exist outside the Middle Kingdom. Xu said FTTR will benefit businesses by increasing their internet connection speeds, helping them address spotty Wi-Fi coverage, allowing them to deploy tech in more places, and therefore creating more opportunities to adopt productivity-boosting devices and services. FTTR will also help carriers to sell more expensive packages, he said. Xu also urged telecom carriers to target high-growth user groups like delivery riders and livestream influencers, citing their above-average data consumption and revenue potential. Delivery riders, who will make up 5% of the global workforce by 2030, use four times more voice minutes and double the data of average users, while influencers generate five times the data usage and four times the revenue. He also pushed for greater collaboration between carriers and platforms to deliver more high-res video content, and called for improved efficiency in networking equipment and device power use. "Xu said Huawei is here to help carriers deliver any of the scenarios he mentioned," concludes Sharwood. "And of course it is, because the Chinese giant has a thriving business selling to telcos -- or at least to telcos beyond the liberal democracies that have largely decided Huawei's close ties with Beijing mean the company and its products represent an unacceptable threat to the operation of critical infrastructure."

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Longtime Slashdot reader williamyf writes: Firefox 140 just landed. Some user-facing features include: Vertical Tabs: You can now keep more -- or fewer -- pinned tabs in view for quicker access to important windows. Just drag the divider to resize your pinned tabs section. Unload Tabs: You can now unload tabs by right-clicking on a tab (or multiple selected tabs) and selecting "Unload Tab." This can speed up performance by reducing Firefox's memory and CPU usage. But the most important feature? This release is an Extended Support Release (ESR). Why are ESRs so important? ESR is the Firefox version that ships as the default with many Linux distributions. Some downstream projects (like Waterfox) depend on the ESR version. Many enterprise software systems are tested only against ESR. When features are dropped -- like support for older operating systems or Flash -- ESR keeps that functionality around for longer. And speaking of old operating systems: If you are using Windows 7, 8.1, or macOS 10.12~10.15, note that FireFox ESR 115 (the last version supporting these OSs) will continue to receive patches until at least September 2025. So one can see why ESR is very important for some people. The release notes are available here.

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Google DeepMind has launched Gemini Robotics On-Device, a new language model that enables robots to perform complex tasks locally without internet connectivity. TechCrunch reports: Building on the company's previous Gemini Robotics model that was released in March, Gemini Robotics On-Device can control a robot's movements. Developers can control and fine-tune the model to suit various needs using natural language prompts. In benchmarks, Google claims the model performs at a level close to the cloud-based Gemini Robotics model. The company says it outperforms other on-device models in general benchmarks, though it didn't name those models. In a demo, the company showed robots running this local model doing things like unzipping bags and folding clothes. Google says that while the model was trained for ALOHA robots, it later adapted it to work on a bi-arm Franka FR3 robot and the Apollo humanoid robot by Apptronik. Google claims the bi-arm Franka FR3 was successful in tackling scenarios and objects it hadn't "seen" before, like doing assembly on an industrial belt. Google DeepMind is also releasing a Gemini Robotics SDK. The company said developers can show robots 50 to 100 demonstrations of tasks to train them on new tasks using these models on the MuJoCo physics simulator.

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An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Verge: Microsoft is planning to cut jobs in the company's Xbox gaming business, as early as next week. I first reported in Notepad earlier this month that Microsoft was planning Xbox layoffs "potentially by the end of the month," and now Bloomberg says a round of "major layoffs" is due next week. I understand managers at Microsoft have been briefed about Xbox cuts and wider layoffs in other parts of Microsoft's businesses. The upcoming cuts are also expected to hit Microsoft's sales organization, just at the start of a new financial year. Microsoft is planning to restructure parts of its Xbox business as it looks ahead to its next generation of consoles. One source tells me Microsoft is restructuring Xbox distribution across central Europe, resulting in some Xbox operations ceasing in some regions. The expected layoffs will be in addition to the 6,000 cuts Microsoft already made in May, and on top of the more than 300 job cuts earlier this month.

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Waymo and Uber have launched a robotaxi service in Atlanta, allowing users to book autonomous rides through the Uber app across a 65-square-mile area. They will not yet travel on highways or to the airport. CNBC reports: The vehicles feature Waymo's driverless technology, known as the Waymo Driver, integrated into battery electric Jaguar I-PACE SUVs. [...] In Atlanta and Austin, Waymo rides are only available through Uber's app, while in San Francisco and Los Angeles, passengers book through the Waymo One app. Waymo said it would start with dozens of robotaxis live in Atlanta. The company says it currently has more than 1,500 autonomous vehicles in its U.S. fleet. The Waymo-Uber partnership only covers passenger rides, not Uber Eats deliveries.

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Microsoft has released a modern, open-source version of its classic MS-DOS Editor -- built with Rust and compatible with Windows, macOS, and Linux. It's now simple called "Edit." Ars Technica reports: Aside from ease of use, Microsoft's main reason for creating the new version of Edit stems from a peculiar gap in modern Windows. "What motivated us to build Edit was the need for a default CLI text editor in 64-bit versions of Windows," writes [Christopher Nguyen, a product manager on Microsoft's Windows Terminal team] while referring to the command-line interface, or CLI. "32-bit versions of Windows ship with the MS-DOS editor, but 64-bit versions do not have a CLI editor installed inbox." [...] Linux users can download Edit from the project's GitHub releases page or install it through an unofficial snap package. Oh, and if you're a fan of the vintage editor and crave a 16-bit text-mode for your retro machine that actually runs MS-DOS, you can download a copy on the Internet Archive. [...] At 250KB, the new Edit maintains the lightweight philosophy of its predecessor while adding features the original couldn't dream of: Unicode support, regular expressions, and the ability to handle gigabyte-sized files. The original editor was limited to files smaller than 300KB depending on available conventional memory -- a constraint that seems quaint in an era of terabyte storage. But the web publication OMG! Ubuntu found that the modern Edit not only "works great on Ubuntu" but noted its speed when handling gigabyte-sized documents.

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An anonymous reader quotes a report from Transport Topics: A ship that caught fire in the Pacific Ocean earlier this month has sunk. The vessel was abandoned in the middle of the pacific -- about 360 miles from land -- after a blaze. It was carrying about 3,000 vehicles of which about 800 were EVs. Damage caused by the fire was compounded by heavy weather, causing the ship to take on water and ultimately sink on June 23, the vessel's manager, Zodiac Maritime, said in a statement on June 24. Smoke was initially seen emanating from a deck carrying electric vehicles, Zodiac said when the incident first happened. While the ship's relative distance from land means that it will sink into ocean that is approximately 5,000 meters deep, it also made a rapid response trickier. The second of three specialist vessels that were due to assist the ship arrived on June 15, more than a week after the fire first broke out. The vessel was carrying cars from a range of manufacturers including Chery Automobile Co. and Great Wall Motor Co. to Mexico, people familiar with the matter said at the time.

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More than 110 million people across Europe suffer high levels of health-damaging noise pollution, according to a report. The resulting physiological stress and sleep disturbance leads to 66,000 early deaths a year and many cases of heart disease, diabetes and depression. The Guardian: The report, from the European Environment Agency (EEA), focuses on noise from cars, trains and aeroplanes and found that 20% of the population of the European Economic Area (EEA) were affected. Separate research, using a slightly lower threshold for dangerous noise pollution, found that 40% of the UK population were exposed to harmful transport noise. Seventeen million people endure particularly high noise pollution -- "long-term, high-annoyance" -- and almost 5 million suffer "severe" sleep disturbance. Fifteen million children live in areas of harmful noise. The harm to health from noise is greater than that from higher-profile risks including secondhand tobacco smoke or lead exposure, and incurs an economic cost of almost $116bn a year, the analysis found. The damage to health is likely to be an underestimate, the researchers said. Using the World Health Organization's stricter threshold for risky noise pollution gives an estimate of 150 million people across Europe exposed. The EU's target to cut the number of people chronically disturbed by transport noise by 30% by 2030 will not be met without further action, the researchers said.

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Google has begun rolling out a feature that allows Chrome users on Android to move the browser's address bar to the bottom of the screen. This capability has been available to iOS Chrome users since 2023 and aims to improve accessibility for users with larger devices. Users can relocate the address bar by pressing and holding on it and selecting the move option, or by adjusting the setting through Chrome's settings menu. The feature addresses usability concerns for users of phones with bigger screens, where reaching the top of the display can prove difficult during one-handed operation.

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Western Digital has succeeded in having the sum it owed from a patent infringement case reduced from $553 million down to just $1 in post-trial motions, when the judge found the plaintiff's claims had shifted during the course of the litigation. From a report: The storage biz was held by a California jury to have infringed on data encryption patents owned by SPEX Technologies Inc in October, relating to several of its self-encrypting hard drive products. WD was initially told to pay $316 million in damages, but District Judge James Selna ruled the company owed a further $237 million in interest charges earlier this year, bringing the total to more than half a billion dollars. In February, WD was given a week to file a bond or stump up the entire damages payment. Selna granted Western Digital's post-trial motion to reduce damages, writing that "SPEX's damages theory changed as certain evidence and theories became unavailable" and there was "insufficient evidence from which the Court could determine a reasonable royalty."

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An anonymous reader shares a report: Apple customers aren't thrilled they're getting an ad from the Apple Wallet app promoting the tech giant's Original Film, "F1 the Movie." Across social media, iPhone owners are complaining that their Wallet app sent out a push notification offering a $10 discount at Fandango for anyone buying two or more tickets to the film. The feature film, starring Brad Pitt, explores the world of Formula 1 and was shot at actual Grand Prix races. It also showcases the use of Apple technology, from the custom-made cameras made of iPhone parts used to film inside the cars, to the AirPods Max that Pitt's character, F1 driver Sonny Hayes, sleeps in. However well-received the film may be, iPhone users don't necessarily want their built-in utilities, like their digital wallet, marketing to them.

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Philips Hue will raise prices across its smart lighting and security products for US customers starting July 1st, with parent company Signify attributing the increases directly to tariffs. The company initially notified customers that prices would "go up" through a promotional message before confirming the tariff-related reasoning in a statement. Signify has not provided specific pricing details or identified which products will be affected, though the company's statement suggests changes may impact the entire Hue lineup. Some products already reflect higher US pricing, including the new $219.99 Hue Play Wall Washer light, which costs approximately 10% more than the European price when currencies are converted. The latest $32.99 Smart Button also exceeds the $24.99 launch price of its predecessor, while European pricing remained at 21.99 euro ($25.50) for both generations.

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Microsoft will offer free Windows 10 security updates through October 2026 to consumers who enable Windows Backup or spend 1,000 Microsoft Rewards points, the company said today. The move provides alternatives to the previously announced $30-per-PC Extended Security Update program for individuals wanting to continue using Windows 10 past its October 14, 2025 end-of-support date. The company will notify Windows 10 users about the ESU program through the Settings app and notifications starting in July, with full rollout by mid-August. Both free options require a Microsoft Account, which the company has increasingly pushed in Windows 11. Business and organizational customers can still purchase up to three years of ESU updates but must pay for the service. Windows 10 remains installed on 53% of Windows PCs worldwide, according to Statcounter data.

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