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After more than an year after, Boatswain 5.0 is finally out. It took me a long time to push it to the finish line, but I’m relatively happy with how it turned out, and it brings some nice features.

Let’s take a quick look at what’s new in this release!

New Devices

Boatswain 5.0 comes with support for 2 new device models from Elgado: Stream Deck Plus, and Stream Deck Neo.

Support for Elgato Stream Deck Plus came after the massively successful fundraising campaign from last year. A huge thanks to everyone that contributed to it!

As for Elgato Stream Deck Neo, I tentatively introduced support for it without actually having a device to test, so if there’s anyone out there that can test it, that’d be absolutely appreciated.

Support for Stream Deck Plus was probably the main reason it took so long to release Boatswain 5.0. The entirety of the app was originally written under the assumption that all devices were simply a grid of buttons. Introducing a touchscreen, and dials that act as buttons, required basically rewriting most of the app.

I used this opportunity to make Boatswain able to handle any kind of device, with any kind of layout. Everything is represented as regions in a grid layout. Simple Stream Deck devices just contain a button grid; Stream Deck Plus contains a button grid, a touchscreen, and a dial grid.

Keyboard Shortcuts

The new Keyboard Shortcut action allows executing any keyboard shortcut – or any keyboard event in general – on the desktop. This seems to work better than I could have anticipated!

Under the hood, this action uses the Remote Desktop portal be able to inject input on the desktop. Locally controlling the desktop was probably not on the original goals of the portal, but alas, it fit the use case perfectly!

Paired with folders, Keyboard Shortcuts are very powerful, especially for large and complex software with a large number of shortcuts.

Next Steps

This release might be a little disappointing as it took so long, and yet didn’t come as packed with new features. And yet, this was the largest release of Boatswain, perhaps larger than the initial release even.

I’ve reached a point where I’m mostly satisfied with how the internals work now. So much so that, right after the Boatswain 5.0 release, I was able to split the core logic of the app into an internal library, and hide device-specific details from the rest of the app. This paved the way for adding a testing framework using umockdev, and also will allow adding support for devices from other brands such as Loupedeck. If you have any Stream Deck-like device and wish to see it supported in Boatswain, now’s your chance!

For Boatswain 6, I personally want to focus on 2 major features:

1. Make Boatswain use the new USB portal. One of my goals with Boatswain is to make it a reference app, using the most modern platform features available – and adding missing features if necessary. The USB portal is an obvious choice!
2. Remove X11 support. This might come as a controversial decision, but I don’t personally use X11 anymore, do not support it, and will not work on fixing bugs that only exist there. As such, I think it’s fair to just remove X11 support from the apps that I maintain. Practically speaking, this just means removing --socket=fallback-x11, and users can add back this permission using Flatseal; but please do not expect any kind of support anymore.

Some features that would be lovely to have, but we currently don’t have either because we lack platform support (i.e. portals), or simply because nobody sat down and wrote it:

1. Tracking the current desktop state, such as the focused app, the session idle state, etc. This will be useful for contextual actions.
2. Clipboard integration. In theory people can simulate this using the Keyboard Shortcuts action, but proper clipboard integration will work better and in more cases.
3. Picking and launching apps from the host system. This needs to happen through portals which currently don’t exist.
4. A fancy visual icon editor so that people can create their pretty icons in the app! If any UI designer is reading, please consider yourself assigned to this little project.
5. Support for custom backgrounds in the touchscreen. I did not have time to finish it before the 5.0 release, but it shouldn’t be too hard to add it.
6. A proper testing framework!

Finally, I’d like to thank my Ko-Fi and YouTube supporters for all the patience and for enabling me to do this work. The fundraiser campaign last year was a massive success, and I’m happy to see the all this progress! You all are awesome and I truly appreciate the support.

Keep an eye on this space as there may be more good news in the near future!

Over the last two years I’ve worked a bit in my spare time on the user documentation of GIMP, a Free & Open Source Image Editor.
While I personally still consider it pretty bad user documentation regarding style inconsistency, duplication of topics, “organic growth”, and lack of task orientation, I managed to put some lipstick on that pig across nearly 900 commits.
I was sometimes rather ruthless pushing my changes (plus I am only a simple contributor and not a GIMP developer) so I’d like to thank Jacob Boerema for their patience and lenience.

In particular that led to

• pretty consistent and up-to-date user interface dialog screenshots using the default theme (a fun game in a repository with about 2000 images and no filename scheme whatsoever),
• less trivial screenshots; people know how menus look like and all their entries are covered by accompanying text anyway (which created more work for translators),
• all application icons updated to the default monochrome theme, in SVG format, located in one single directory within the docs repository, using the same filenames as in the GIMP code repository (so there’s theoretically a chance of maintenance),
  
• adding some icons to text because “click the fifth icon” isn’t particularly user-friendly (especially for RTL folks),
  
• slightly less quadruplication of string variants expressing the same meaning (which created more work for translators).

An interesting remaining issue is whether to remove outdated ancient localized screenshots and where to draw the line. Does having localized strings in the screenshot (not everybody prefers English) outweigh an outdated user interface in the screenshot (wrong numbers of buttons, or dropdowns instead of radio buttons)? Your mileage may vary.

Obviously there is much more to do, for example maybe rewriting everything from scratch or splitting screenshot files of translatable UI dialogs and non-translatable example images mashed into one single image file into two separate files because, again, translators and lower maintenance costs.

If you enjoy dealing with Docbook and all its quirks, see the open GIMP help issues or even write merge requests.

Version:next-20250424 (linux-next) Released:2025-04-24

Researchers in Germany successfully demonstrated coherent quantum communications over 254 km of existing commercial telecom fiber, marking the first real-world deployment of such a system without cryogenic cooling. Phys.Org reports: Their system uses a coherence-based twin-field quantum key distribution, which facilitates the distribution of secure information over long distances. The quantum communications network was deployed over three telecommunication data centers in Germany (Frankfurt, Kehl and Kirchfeld), connected by 254 km of commercial optical fiber -- a new record distance for real-world and practical quantum key distribution, according to the authors. This demonstration indicates that advanced quantum communications protocols that exploit the coherence of light can be made to work over existing telecom infrastructure. The research has been published in the journal Nature.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

If my phone is making me miserable my constantly nagging me for attention, surely the solution must be to ditch it and take a dumb phone that can only place calls and send texts?

Except calls are particularly intrusive interruptions, and the only texts I receive are from couriers. My family and friends use iMessage or Signal. And what about the pictures I can snap in a few seconds by pulling my phone from my pocket? What about GPS navigation? What about those parking lots where you can only pay with an app? What if I need to order a cab in a country I don't speak the language of? What about using my phone app as a 2FA from the bank as the PSD2 practically requires?

I thought about using a dumb down smartphone like the Lite Phone III or any of the other dumbed-down Android phones. In practice it doesn't work for me, because most of them either don't let me use the apps I need or let me break out of the dumb mode to use the app. At this point, why using a dumbed down smartphone at all?

I don't need a dumb(ed down smart)phone. I need the convenience of my smartphone, but I need to use intentionally instead of being dragged to it. My phone was already in silent mode all the time because I can't stand being interrupted loudly by it unless it's an actual emergency. But whenever a notification pops on the screen it brightens up, drags my attention to it, and even if I don't want to interact with it it stays in the back of my head until I finally unlock the phone and have a look at what it's all about.

What I was missing was a sense of priority for notifications. To stay focused on what I cared about, I needed my phone to hold back the unimportant notifications and tell me when something important happened. I could already deny some app the authorization to display notifications, but that's a double edged sword. If I do so with messaging apps I end up compulsively checking them to see if I missed anything important.

What solved it for me was the Focus feature of the iPhone. Instead of using the Do Not Disturb mode, I've configured the Personal Focus profile. I configured it so

• No notifications at all appear on my screen.
• If my favorite contacts call me I will be notified.
• If someone calls me twice within three minutes it will bypass the protection.
• If an app has a Time Sensitive notification to send me, it will bypass the protection.

All the rest is filtered out. As a result I have a phone that doesn't actively nag me for attention. Because it notifies me when something truly important happens, I don't have to check it regularly out of Fear Of Missing Out. This tweak is part of a broader effort to reclaim my attention capacity.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Business Insider: There is some microplastics in normal, healthy arteries," Dr. Ross Clark, a University of New Mexico medical researcher who led the study, told Business Insider before he presented his findings at the meeting of the American Heart Association in Baltimore on Tuesday. "But the amount that's there when they become diseased -- and become diseased with symptoms -- is really, really different," Clark said. Clark and his team measured microplastics and nanoplastics in the dangerous, fatty plaque that can build up in arteries, block blood flow, and cause strokes or heart attacks. Compared to the walls of healthy plaque-free arteries, plaque buildup had 16 times more plastic -- just in the people who didn't have symptoms. In people who had experienced stroke, mini-stroke, or vision loss, the plaque had 51 times more plastic. [...] To investigate why, Clark studied samples from 48 people's carotid arteries -- the pair of superhighways in your neck that channel blood to your brain. The difference in plastic quantities surprised him, but his team found another concerning trend, too. Cells in the plaque with lots of plastic showed different gene activity than those with low plastic. In the high-plastic environment, one group of immune cells had switched off a gene that's associated with turning off inflammation. Clark's team also found genetic differences in a group of stem cells thought to help prevent heart attacks and strokes by reducing inflammation and stabilizing plaque. "Could it be that microplastics are somehow altering their gene expression?" Clark said. He added that there's "lots more research needed to fully establish that, but at least it gives us a hint as to where to look." Ross, who specializes in the genetic mechanisms behind disease, agreed that more research is needed, but added that she thinks "these plastics are doing something with these plaques." Tracking microplastics in the human body is a new scientific endeavor as of the last couple years. It's not perfect. Clark's team heated the plaque samples to more than 1,000 degrees Fahrenheit to vaporize plastic polymers and break them down into smaller organic molecules, which can be identified and measured by their mass and other properties. Unfortunately, the lipids in plaque can break down into chemicals that look very similar to polyethylene, the most common plastic found in everything from plastic bags to car parts. "Because we know about this problem, we've taken a lot of steps to remove those lipids and confirm their removal, so that we're sure we're measuring polyethylene," Clark said. Still, he added, "it's a big limitation, and it should be acknowledged that these types of methodologies are continuously improving." "Almost all of what we know about microplastics in the human body, no matter where you look, can be summed up as: It's there, and we need to study further as to what it's doing, if anything," Clark said.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Five years removed from the onset of the Covid pandemic, Google is demanding that some remote employees return to the office if they want to keep their jobs and avoid being part of broader cost cuts at the company. CNBC reports: Several units within Google have told remote staffers that their roles may be at risk if they don't start showing up at the closest office for a hybrid work schedule, according to internal documents viewed by CNBC. Some of those employees were previously approved for remote work.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

New Jersey sued the property management software company RealPage, accusing it and 10 of the state's largest landlords of conspiring to drive up residential rents, violating federal and state antitrust laws and New Jersey consumer fraud laws. From a report: The complaint filed on Wednesday by state Attorney General Matthew Platkin said the defendants, including AvalonBay Communities illegally used RealPage's revenue management software and algorithms to inflate rents for apartments in multifamily properties. New Jersey said the defendants also quietly exchanged non-public data such as lease prices, amenities, concessions offered, property values and housing inventory, in order to align pricing and avoid competition to lower rents. The state said the collusion has inflated rents for hundreds of thousands of residents, with half of low-income renters paying more than 30% of their gross incomes toward rent. Many real estate and financial experts recommend a 30% limit.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

A draft executive order from the Trump administration proposes integrating AI into K-12 education by directing federal agencies to promote AI literacy, train teachers, and establish public-private partnerships. "The draft is marked 'predecisional' and could be subject to change before it is signed, or it could be abandoned," notes the Washington Post. From the report: Titled "Advancing artificial intelligence education for American youth," the draft order would establish a White House task force on AI education that would be chaired by Michael Kratsios, director of the Office of Science and Technology Policy, and would include the secretaries of education, agriculture, labor and energy, as well as Trump's special adviser for AI and cryptocurrency, David Sacks. The draft order would instruct federal agencies to seek public-private partnerships with industry, academia and nonprofit groups in efforts to teach students "foundational AI literacy and critical thinking skills." The task force should look for existing federal funding such as grants that could be used for AI programs, and agencies should prioritize spending on AI education, according to the draft order. It would also instruct Education Secretary Linda McMahon to prioritize federal grant funding for training teachers on how to use AI, including for administrative tasks and teacher training and evaluation. All educators should undergo professional development to integrate AI into all subject areas, the draft order says. It would also establish a "Presidential AI Challenge" -- a competition for students and educators to demonstrate their AI skills -- and instruct Labor Secretary Lori Chavez-DeRemer to develop registered apprenticeships in AI-related occupations. The focus is on K-12 education, but the draft order says, "Our Nation must also make resources available for lifelong learners to develop new skills for a changing workforce."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Google revealed in court that its Gemini AI chatbot reached 350 million monthly active users worldwide as of March 2025 -- up from 9 million daily users in October 2024. TechCrunch reports: Usage of Google's AI offerings has exploded in the last year. Gemini had just 9 million daily active users in October 2024, but last month, the company reportedly logged 35 million daily active users, according to its data. Gemini still lags behind the industry's most popular AI tools, however. Google estimates that ChatGPT had roughly 600 million monthly active users in March, according to the company's data shown in court. That puts ChatGPT on a similar user base to Meta AI, which CEO Mark Zuckerberg said in September was nearing 500 million monthly users.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

WhatsApp is rolling out a new "Advanced Chat Privacy" feature that blocks others from exporting chat histories or automatically downloading media. While it doesn't stop screenshots or manual downloads, it marks the first step in WhatsApp's plan to enhance in-chat privacy protections. The Verge reports: By default, WhatsApp saves photos and videos in a chat to your phone's local storage. It also lets you and your recipients export chats (with or without media) to your messages, email, or notes app. The Advanced Chat Privacy setting will prevent this in group and individual chats. [...] WhatsApp says this is its "first version" of the feature, and that it plans to add more protections down the line. "We think this feature is best used when talking with groups where you may not know everyone closely but are nevertheless sensitive in nature," WhatsApp says in its announcement. WABetaInfo first spotted this feature earlier this month, and now it's rolling out to the latest version of the app. You can turn on the setting by tapping the name of your chat and selecting Advanced Chat Privacy.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: Wizards of the Coast has released the System Reference Document, the heart of the three core rule books that constitute Dungeons & Dragons' 2024 gameplay, under a Creative Commons license. This means the company cannot alter the deal further, like it almost did in early 2023, leading to considerable pushback and, eventually, a retreat. It was a long quest, but the lawful good party has earned some long-term rewards, including a new, similarly licensed reference book. [...] Version 5.2 of the SRD, all 360-plus pages of it, has now been released under the same Creative Commons license. The major change is that it includes more 2024 5th edition (i.e., D&D One) rules and content, while version 5.1 focused on 2014 rules. Legally, you can now design and publish campaigns under the 2024 5th edition rule set. More importantly, more aspects of the newest D&D rule books are available under a free license: - "Rhythm of Play" and "Exploration" documentation - More character origins and backgrounds, including criminal, sage, soldier, and the goliath and orc species. - 16 feats, including archery, great weapon fighting, and seven boons - Five bits of equipment, 20 spells, 15 magic items, and 17 monsters, including the hippopotamus There are some aspects of D&D you still can't really touch without bumping up against copyrights. Certain monsters from the Monster Manual, like the Kraken, are in the public domain, but their specific stats in the D&D rulebook are copyrighted. Iconic creatures and species like the Beholder, Displacer Beast, Illithid, Githyanki, Yuan-Ti, and others remain the property of WotC (and thereby Hasbro). As a creator, you'll still need to do some History (or is it Arcana?) checks before you publish and sell.

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Discord CEO and co-founder Jason Citron is stepping down from his leadership role at the company and being replaced by Humam Sakhnini, a former executive from Activision Blizzard. "Citron will remain on Discord's board of directors, and fellow co-founder Stanislav Vishnevskiy will continue acting as the company's chief technology officer," notes Engadget. From the report: There's an important financial context to Citron's move. The New York Times reported in March that Discord was meeting with investors to take the company public. Sakhnini has experience acting as a leader of a public company. He was also the President of King Digital -- the creator of Candy Crush and other popular mobile games -- after the company was acquired by Activision Blizzard. A veteran executive could be a natural fit to usher Discord to an IPO. Citron didn't deny the plan when VentureBeat asked if the company would go public: "As you can imagine, hiring someone like Humam is a step in that direction." "From the very beginning, our mission has been about bringing people together around games," Citron said in a statement. "It's a mission I've dedicated my career to, and I'm confident that passing the torch to Humam is the right evolution for Discord's future." While initially pitched as a way to talk to friend's before, during and after playing games, Discord has morphed into a much larger and more general social platform, serving "more than 200 million monthly active users worldwide," the company says.

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• Up early, sync with Dave, Tracie & a partner. Encouraging monthly all-hands. Collabora quarterly mgmt meeting for much of the afternoon.
• Published the next strip: Draft Governance Rules

Meta has expanded both the feature set and availability of its Ray-Ban smart glasses. Notable updates include live translation with offline support through downloadable language packs, the ability to send messages and make calls via Instagram, and conversations with Meta AI based on real-time visual context. The Verge reports: Live translation was first teased at Meta Connect 2024 last October, and saw a limited rollout through Meta's Early Access Program in select countries last December. Starting today it's getting a wider rollout to all the markets where the Ray-Ban Meta smart glasses are available. You can hold a conversation with someone who speaks English, French, Italian, or Spanish, and hear a real-time translation through the smart glasses in your preferred language. If you download a language pack in advance, you can use the live translations feature without Wi-Fi or access to a cellular network, making it more convenient to use while traveling abroad. Meta also highlighted a few other features that are still enroute or getting an expanded release. Live AI, which allows the Meta AI smart assistant to continuously see what you do for more natural conversations is now "coming soon to general availability in the US and Canada." The ability to "send and receive direct messages, photos, audio calls, and video calls from Instagram on your glasses," similar to functionality already available through WhatsApp, Messenger, and iOS and Android's native messaging apps, is coming soon as well. Access to music apps like Spotify, Amazon Music, Shazam, and Apple Music is starting to expand beyond the US and Canada, Meta says. However, asking Meta AI to play music, or for more information about what you're listening to, will still only be available to those with their "default language is set to English."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

In a few weeks it’ll be one year since a board member of the GNOME Foundation was removed from the project entirely (including Gitlab, Matrix, Discourse, etc.) under very suspicious circumstances. Very little has been said or done about this in public since then. The intentions behind keeping everything internal were good — the hope was to get to a resolution without unnecessary conflict. However, because there’s no non-public way to have discussions across the entire community, and with this dragging on longer and longer, what I’ve seen is partial facts and misunderstandings spreading across different sub-groups, making it harder to talk to each other. I’m now convinced it’s better to break the silence and start having this conversations across the entire project, rather than letting the conflict continue to fester in the background.

That’s not to say nothing has been happening. Over the past year, a number of people from the community (including myself), and some members of the board have tried to resolve this behind the scenes. On a personal level, I’d like to thank all the board members involved for their efforts, even if we didn’t always see eye to eye. Medium-term I’m hopeful that some positive policy changes can be made as a result of this process.

One important thing to note is that nobody involved is against Codes of Conduct. The problem here is the Foundation’s structural dysfunction, bad leadership, and the way the CoC was used in this case as a result. I’m aware of the charged nature of the subject, and the potential for feeding right wing narratives, but I think it’s also important to not let that deter us from discussing these very real issues. But just to be extra clear: Fuck Nazis, GNOME is Antifa.

Sonny has been out since last summer, and as far as I know he’s currently not interested in investing more energy into this. That’s understandable given how he’s been treated, but the rest of us are still here, and we still need to work together. For that we need, if not justice, at least closure, and a way forward.

In this case someone was disappeared entirely from the community with no recourse, no attempts to de-escalate, no process for re-integration, and no communication to the rest of the project (not until months later anyway). Having talked to members of other projects’ CoC structures this is highly unusual, especially completely out of the blue against a well-integrated member of the project.

While the details of this case are unknown to most of the community due to the (understandable) need to keep CoC reports confidential, what is known (semi-) publicly paints a pretty damning picture all by itself:

• A first-time CoC complaint was met with an immediate ban
• A week later the ban was suspended, and a mediation promised
• The 2024 board elections were held a few weeks later without informing the electorate about the ban
• 2 months later the ban was re-instated unilaterally, against the wishes of the new board
• There was an (unsuccessful) vote to remove the chairman of the CoC committee from the board and CoC committee

Given the above, I think it’s fair to say that the people who were on the board and CoC committee when the ban happened, have, at the very least, acted with incredible recklessness. The haphazard and intransparent way in which they handled this case, the incoherence of their subsequent actions, and the lack of communication have have caused great damage to the project. Among other things, in Sonny Piers they have cost us one of our most prolific developers and organizers, and in the STF development team our most successful program in recent history.

What perhaps not everyone’s aware of is that we were working on making this team permanent and tried to apply for followup funding from different sources. None of this materialized due to the ban and the events surrounding it, and the team has since been disbanded. In an alternate world where this had not happened we could be looking at a very different Foundation today, with an arm that strategically funds ongoing development and can employ community members.

More importantly however, we’re now in a situation where large parts of the community do not trust our CoC structure because they feel it can be weaponized as part of internal power struggles.

This ban was only the latest in a long series of failures, missteps, and broken promises by the Foundation. In addition to the recent financial problems and operational failures (e.g. not handling internships, repeatedly messing up invoicing, not responding to time-sensitive communication), all strategic initiatives over the past 5+ years have either stalled or just never happened (e.g. Flathub payments (2019), local-first (2021), development initiative (2024)).

I think there are structural reasons at the root of many of these issues, but it’s also true that much of the Foundation leadership and staff has not changed throughout this period, and that new people joining the board and trying to improve things tend to get frustrated and give up quickly (or in Sonny’s case, get banned). This is a problem we need to confront.

To those on the board and CoC committee who were involved in Sonny’s ban: I’m asking you to step down from your positions, and take some time off from Foundation politics. I know you know you fucked up, and I know you care about this project, like we all do. Whatever your reasons at the time, consider what’s best for the project now. Nobody can undo what happened, but in the medium-term I’m actually hopeful that reconciliation is possible and that both the Foundation and community can come out of this stronger than before. I don’t think that can happen under the current leadership though.

To everyone else: My hope in talking openly about this is that we can get closer to a common understanding of the situation. It seems unlikely that we can resolve this quickly, but I’d at least like to make a start. Eventually I hope we can have some mediated sessions for people from across the community to process the many feelings about this, and see how we can heal these wounds. Perhaps we could organize something at GUADEC this summer — if anyone would be interested in that, let me know.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: On Monday, the State Bar of California revealed that it used AI to develop a portion of multiple-choice questions on its February 2025 bar exam, causing outrage among law school faculty and test takers. The admission comes after weeks of complaints about technical problems and irregularities during the exam administration, reports the Los Angeles Times. The State Bar disclosed that its psychometrician (a person skilled in administrating psychological tests), ACS Ventures, created 23 of the 171 scored multiple-choice questions with AI assistance. Another 48 questions came from a first-year law student exam, while Kaplan Exam Services developed the remaining 100 questions. The State Bar defended its practices, telling the LA Times that all questions underwent review by content validation panels and subject matter experts before the exam. "The ACS questions were developed with the assistance of AI and subsequently reviewed by content validation panels and a subject matter expert in advance of the exam," wrote State Bar Executive Director Leah Wilson in a press release. According to the LA Times, the revelation has drawn strong criticism from several legal education experts. "The debacle that was the February 2025 bar exam is worse than we imagined," said Mary Basick, assistant dean of academic skills at the University of California, Irvine School of Law. "I'm almost speechless. Having the questions drafted by non-lawyers using artificial intelligence is just unbelievable." Katie Moran, an associate professor at the University of San Francisco School of Law who specializes in bar exam preparation, called it "a staggering admission." She pointed out that the same company that drafted AI-generated questions also evaluated and approved them for use on the exam. The report notes that the AI disclosure follows technical glitches with the February exam (like login issues, screen lag, and confusing questions), which led to a federal lawsuit against Meazure Learning and calls for a State Bar audit.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader shares a report: For two years, ChatGPT has been OpenAI's cash cow. But by the end of the decade, the company has told some potential and current investors it expects combined sales from agents and other new products to exceed its popular chatbot, lifting total sales to $125 billion in 2029 and $174 billion the next year, according to documents seen by The Information. The projections, which would propel the 10-year-old startup's sales toward the level of Nvidia or Meta Platforms today, reflect rapid revenue gains from agents, or AI software that can take actions on behalf of customers, as well as other new products. These include those tied to "free user monetization," likely meaning money made from OpenAI's nonpaying users.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Nintendo has filed a request for subpoena in California's Northern District Court to compel Discord to reveal the identity of user "GameFreakOUT," the alleged source of last year's extensive Pokemon leak. The company is demanding the name, address, phone number, and email of the individual behind the "Teraleak," which contained claimed source code for upcoming title Pokemon Legends: Z-A, next-generation Pokemon games, builds of older titles, and numerous concept art and lore documents. Court documents obtained by Polygon show Nintendo included a partially redacted Discord screenshot as evidence, where GameFreakOUT shared files in a server named "FreakLeak." The breach occurred around October 12, 2024, two days after Game Freak publicly acknowledged a hack affecting employee information without confirming game data theft.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Apple was fined 500 million euros ($570 million) on Wednesday and Meta 200 million euros, as European Union antitrust regulators handed out the first sanctions under landmark legislation aimed at curbing the power of Big Tech. From a report: The EU fines could stoke tensions with U.S. President Donald Trump who has threatened to levy tariffs against countries that penalise U.S. companies. WSJ adds more details: The commission also issued cease-and-desist orders that could have a bigger impact than the fines. One order targets Apple's App Store and the other takes aim at Meta's use of personalized ads -- important revenue streams for each company. [...] The EU's action against Meta focuses on the company's effort to get users to agree to seeing personalized ads on Instagram and Facebook -- its main source of revenue. The commission ordered Meta to stop requiring users to either agree to those ads or pay for a subscription. It said it was still evaluating whether a "less-personalized ads" option that Meta introduced last fall complies with that order, raising the specter of further changes. The Apple case deals with the company's App Store rules. The commission said Apple had failed to comply with an obligation to allow app developers to inform customers, free of charge, of alternative ways to purchase digital products.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.