Tech

When Meta embedded AI bots in its apps, even students in the most remote corners of Colombia gained access. But rather than boosting learning, it’s getting in the way.

Starting in July 2024, AI was suddenly everywhere all at once in Latin America after Meta Platforms started incorporating chatbots in its apps across the region. Whether users wanted them or not, Facebook, WhatsApp, and Instagram became homes for a variety of AI bots.

The students of José Gregorio Salas Rural High School put them to work on their homework. This small community of farming and cattle-ranching families was no longer shielded from the AI revolution, which was disrupting education worldwide. It could no longer escape because the new bots were embedded in the apps everyone was already using. Meta had fine-tuned the apps for the emerging-market consumer, making them cheaper to use and designing them to work with less sophisticated phones and patchy connectivity.

Archive : https://archive.is/axmVg

Lawrence Klein, who’s based in Southern California, filed a complaint against Microsoft in the San Diego Superior Court over its plan to discontinue support for Windows 10 by October 14, 2025. According to the Courthouse News Service, Klein owns two Windows 10 laptops, both of which will become obsolete come October. He asserts that Microsoft is making this move “to force its customers to purchase new devices optimized to run Microsoft’s suite of generative artificial intelligence (AI) software such as Copilot, which comes bundled with Windows 11 by default.”

• Hard drives sold as new contained decade-old internals from previously used Seagate and Western Digital units
• SMART data was manipulated to hide prior usage, masking serious mechanical and read error issues
• Analysis revealed leftover user data, proving zeroing only touched the start of storage sectors

At the start of the month, Electronic Arts (EA) and Battlefield Studios shared Battlefield 6 gameplay, and alongside that, the system requirements for the title were also announced. Perhaps the most striking thing about the requirements was the need for Secure Boot and TPM 2.0 that were deemed necessary for the proper implementation of the latest Javelin anti-cheat system in the game.

As users may be reluctant to turn these features on inside their BIOS, EA reiterated that this was absolutely necessary, as it stated "to play on PC, you must have Secure Boot turned on."

Archive : https://archive.is/PZb3m

The Tea app, made for women to anonymously share information about men in their areas with other women, has been hit with 10 potential class action lawsuits in federal and state courts after a data breach led to the leak of thousands of selfies, ID photos and private conversations online.

All of the lawsuits allege that Tea Dating Advice Inc., the company that created the Tea app, was negligent in its data practices and breached a contract with its users.

Anker remains one of our preferred sources of power banks, USB-C hubs, and other PC and phone peripherals. But beware buying them from Anker itself. You might end up with a $9.99/mo “Plus subscription” that you’ll have to spot and actively cancel.

Some of Anker’s slim Nano products ship automatically bundled with the recurring Anker Plus subscription, which promises an extra five percent off of all purchases and benefits like free next-day delivery. That might be acceptable if it were your choice, but it’s not. The subscription is added as a one-time “free” benefit. After that, Anker will charge $9.99 to your credit card per month.

A software engineer has warned against trusting cloud data storage services in a painstakingly detailed blog post detailing their own “complete digital annihilation” at the hands of AWS admins. Developer Abdelkader Boudih, pen name Seuros, says they had been a fee-paying AWS subscriber for a decade, with the cloud service becoming a firm part of their workflow. Suffice to say, the developer’s long-standing relationship with AWS has now ended acrimoniously.

The outcry after a recent marketplace crackdown on games with adult content, seemingly due to pressure from payment processors, prompted Mastercard to release a brief statement Friday pushing back against recent headlines.

“Mastercard has not evaluated any game or required restrictions of any activity on game creator sites and platforms, contrary to media reports and allegations,” the company said, adding, “At the same time, we require merchants to have appropriate controls to ensure Mastercard cards cannot be used for unlawful purchases, including illegal adult content.”

This follows an open letter by the advocacy group Collective Shout addressed to executives at Paypal, Mastercard, Visa, and other companies, criticizing them for allowing the sale of “No Mercy” and other games that depict rape, incest, and child sexual abuse.

WhatsApp is rolling out a real-time voice chat feature for Meta AI on iOS beta version 25.21.10.76. This follows a previous rollout for Android users which we previously covered. When available, users can start a voice session by tapping on the waveform icon from the Chats tab, or by default, from the Calls tab. By rolling this out, Meta AI will catch up in a significant way with other chatbots which mostly offer calls already.

The integration on iOS has a few subtle differences to Android at the operating system level. When you begin a call with Meta AI, iOS will add an orange dot in the top-right corner of the screen to indicate that the microphone is in use. This privacy feature cannot be disabled by WhatsApp, so you’ll always know when Meta is listening.

Despite the rapid pace of GPU evolution and the hype around AI hardware, Linus Torvalds — the father of Linux — is still using a 2017-era AMD Radeon RX 580 as his main desktop GPU here in 2025. The Polaris-based graphics may be almost a decade old, but it’s aged remarkably well in Linux circles thanks to robust and mature open-source driver support. Torvalds' continued use of the RX 580, therefore, isn’t just boomer nostalgia. It's a statement of practicality, long-term support, and his disdain for unnecessary complexity.

Spotted by Phoronix, this revelation came during a bug report around AMD’s Display Stream Compression (DSC), which was causing black screen issues in Linux 6.17. Torvalds bisected the regression himself, eventually reverting a patch to maintain kernel progress. Ironically, DSC is what allows his Radeon RX 580 to comfortably drive his modern 5K ASUS ProArt monitor, a testament to how far open-source drivers have come.

“... same old boring Radeon RX 580,” Torvalds wrote in an email to the Linux Kernel Mailing List (LKML), reverting the patch for now so development can continue uninterrupted. That one line from the man himself speaks volumes about his preference for stability over novelty.

• Android Auto still doesn’t support the official YouTube app, but NewPipe can now fill that gap.
• The update lets you access playlists, history, and search from your car’s screen.
• Of course, you’ll only be able to watch while parked.

In a blog post, the NewPipe team says you can now browse your watch history, load playlists, or search for new content within Android Auto. The developers still urge caution when using the feature, even though Google already has guardrails to prevent you from getting distracted as you’re cruising along.

Amazon CEO Andy Jassy sees an opportunity to deliver ads to users during their conversations with the company’s AI-powered digital assistant, Alexa+, he said during Amazon’s second-quarter earnings call Thursday.

“People are excited about the devices that they can buy from us that has Alexa+ enabled in it. People do a lot of shopping [with Alexa+]; it’s a delightful shopping experience that will keep getting better,” said Jassy on the call with investors and Wall Street analysts. “I think over time, there will be opportunities, as people are engaging in more multi-turn conversations, to have advertising play a role to help people find discovery, and also as a lever to drive revenue.”

Amazon says it has rolled out Alexa+ to millions of customers, part of an effort to make its legacy digital assistant capable of agentic behaviors and more natural to talk to. Alexa+ is Amazon’s answer to generative AI voice assistants from OpenAI, Google, and Perplexity that have made legacy systems feel outdated. However, the business models behind generative AI products remain unclear.

Social media companies ​​are blocking wide-ranging content - including posts about the wars in Ukraine and Gaza - in an attempt to comply with the UK's new Online Safety Act, BBC Verify has found.

The new legislation, which came into effect last Friday, imposes fines on social media companies and other websites which fail to protect under-18s from pornography, posts promoting self-harm, and other harmful content. In serious cases, services could be blocked in the UK.

But BBC Verify found a range of public interest content, including parliamentary debates on grooming gangs, has been restricted on X and Reddit for those who have not completed age verification checks.

Experts warn companies are risking stifling legitimate public debate by overapplying the law.

The Competition and Markets Authority (CMA) convened a panel to investigate the cloud services market in the UK. The panel has now recommended that the CMA use its digital markets powers to prioritize an investigation into the largest cloud providers, Microsoft and Amazon Web Services, regarding their practices.

The panel's final decision highlighted three main issues. First, the UK cloud market is dominated by AWS and Microsoft, creating high barriers for new entrants to enter or grow. This situation gives Microsoft and Amazon significant market power and leaves customers with limited choice.

Second, technical and commercial barriers make it difficult for customers to switch cloud providers. This "lock-in" prevents them from taking advantage of better offers or more innovative services, which in turn weakens competition.

Third, Microsoft's software licensing strategies are specifically highlighted as anti-competitive. They are designed to disadvantage rivals like AWS and Google, further restricting choice for customers who rely on Microsoft software.

Meta's addition of AI services to encrypted messaging platform WhatsApp has Italian officials suspecting the Silicon Valley giant may be abusing its dominant market position to push unwanted features on users.

The Italian Competition Authority (AGCM) said in a statement that Meta added its Meta AI service to WhatsApp "without any prior request from users" and that it was "placed in a prominent position on the screen and integrated into the search bar."

The AGCM believes these actions could be a violation of article 102 of the Treaty on the Functioning of the European Union (TFEU).

"By combining Meta AI with WhatsApp, Meta appears capable of channeling its customer base into the emerging market, not through merit-based competition, but by 'imposing' the availability of the two distinct services upon users, potentially harming competitors," the AGCM said.

That imposition locks users into Meta's AI ecosystem, the AGCM added, further entrenching Meta's market dominance and limiting competition from local AI firms. Meta has not directly disputed the possibility that integrating its AI into WhatsApp could confer market dominance.