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Microsoft Copilot "isn't doing as well as the company would like," reports XDA-Developers.com (citing a report from startup/VC industry site Newcomer). The Redmond giant has invested billions of dollars and a lot of manpower into making it happen, but as a recent report claims, people just don't care. In fact, if the report is to be believed, Microsoft's rise in the AI scene has already come to a screeching halt: At Microsoft's annual executive huddle last month, the company's chief financial officer, Amy Hood, put up a slide that charted the number of users for its Copilot consumer AI tool over the past year. It was essentially a flat line, showing around 20 million weekly users. On the same slide was another line showing ChatGPT's growth over the same period, arching ever upward toward 400 million weekly users. OpenAI's iconic chatbot was soaring, while Microsoft's best hope for a mass-adoption AI tool was idling. It was a sobering chart for Microsoft's consumer AI team... That's right; Microsoft Copilot's weekly user base is only 5% of the number of people who use ChatGPT, and it's not increasing. It's also worth noting that there are approximately 1.5 billion Windows users worldwide, which means just over 1% of them are using Copilot, a tool that's now a Windows default app.... It's not a huge surprise that Copilot is faltering. Despite Microsoft's CEO claiming that Copilot will become "the next Start button", the company has had to backtrack on the Copilot key and allow people to customise it to do something else, including giving back its original feature of the Menu key. They also note earlier reports that Intel's AI PC chips aren't selling well.

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"Google's DeepMind UK team reportedly seeks to unionize," reports TechCrunch: Around 300 London-based members of Google's AI-focused DeepMind team are seeking to unionize with the Communication Workers Union, according to a Financial Times report that cites three people involved with the unionization effort. These DeepMind employees are reportedly unhappy about Google's decision to remove a pledge not to use AI for weapons or surveillance from its website. They're also concerned about the company's work with the Israeli military, including a $1.2 billion cloud computing contract that has prompted protests elsewhere at Google. At least five DeepMind employees quit, according to the report (out of a 2,000 total U.K. staff members). "A small group of around 200 employees of Google and its parent company Alphabet previously announced that they were unionizing," the article adds, "though as a union representing just a tiny slice of the total Google workforce, it lacked the ability to collectively bargain."

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"Not so long ago, working in tech meant job security, extravagant perks and a bring-your-whole-self-to-the-office ethos rare in other industries," writes the Wall Street Journal. But now tech work "looks like a regular job," with workers "contending with the constant fear of layoffs, longer hours and an ever-growing list of responsibilities for the same pay." Now employees find themselves doing the work of multiple laid-off colleagues. Some have lost jobs only to be rehired into positions that aren't eligible for raises or stock grants. Changing jobs used to be a surefire way to secure a raise; these days, asking for more money can lead to a job offer being withdrawn. The shift in tech has been building slowly. For years, demand for workers outstripped supply, a dynamic that peaked during the Covid-19 pandemic. Big tech companies like Meta and Salesforce admitted they brought on too many employees. The ensuing downturn included mass layoffs that started in 2022... [S]ome longtime tech employees say they no longer recognize the companies they work for. Management has become more focused on delivering the results Wall Street expects. Revenue remains strong for tech giants, but they're pouring resources into costly AI infrastructure, putting pressure on cash flow. With the industry all grown up, a heads-down, keep-quiet mentality has taken root, workers say... Tech workers are still well-paid compared with other sectors, but currently there's a split in the industry. Those working in AI — and especially those with Ph.D.s — are seeing their compensation packages soar. But those without AI experience are finding they're better off staying where they are, because companies aren't paying what they were a few years ago. Other excepts from the Wall Street Journal's article: "I'm hearing of people having 30 direct reports," says David Markley, who spent seven years at Amazon and is now an executive coach for workers at large tech companies. "It's not because the companies don't have the money. In a lot of ways, it's because of AI and the narratives out there about how collapsing the organization is better...." In some cases, companies post record revenue while still trimming head count. Google co-founder Sergey Brin told a group of employees in February that 60 hours a week was the sweet spot of productivity, in comments reported earlier by the New York Times. One recruiter at Meta who had been laid off by the company was rehired into her old role last year, but with a catch: She's now classified as a "short-term employee." Her contract is eligible for renewal, but she doesn't get merit pay increases, promotions or stock. The recruiter says she's responsible for a volume of work that used to be spread among several people. The company refers to being loaded with such additional responsibilities as "agility." More than 50,000 tech workers from over 100 companies have been laid off in 2025, according to Layoffs.fyi, a website that tracks job cuts and crowdsources lists of laid off workers... Even before those 50,000 layoffs in 2025, Silicon Valley's Mercury News was citing some interesting statistics from economic research/consulting firm Beacon Economics. In 2020, 2021 and 2022, the San Francisco Bay Area added 74,700 tech jobs But then in 2023 and 2024 the industry had slashed even more tech jobs -- 80,200 -- for a net loss (over five years) of 5,500. So is there really a cutback in perks and a fear of layoffs that's casting a pall over the industry? share your own thoughts and experiences in the comments. Do you agree with the picture that's being painted by the Wall Street Journal? They told their readers that tech workers are now "just like the rest of us: miserable at work."

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The university blamed it on "the significant number of students" who violated their coding competition's rules. Long-time Slashdot reader theodp quotes this report from The Logic: Finding that many students violated rules and submitted code not written by themselves, the University of Waterloo's Centre for Computing and Math decided not to release results from its annual Canadian Computing Competition (CCC), which many students rely on to bolster their chances of being accepted into Waterloo's prestigious computing and engineering programs, or land a spot on teams to represent Canada in international competitions. "It is clear that many students submitted code that they did not write themselves, relying instead on forbidden external help," the CCC co-chairs explained in a statement. "As such, the reliability of 'ranking' students would neither be equitable, fair, or accurate." "It is disappointing that the students who violated the CCC Rules will impact those students who are deserving of recognition," the univeresity said in its statement. They added that they are "considering possible ways to address this problem for future contests."

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"The U.S. and Canadian websites for Lenovo offered U.S. $140 and CAD $211 off on the same ThinkPad X1 Carbon model when choosing any one of the Linux-based alternatives," reports It's FOSS News: This was brought to my attention thanks to a Reddit post... Others then chimed in, saying that Lenovo has been doing this since at least 2020 and that the big price difference shows how ridiculous Windows' pricing is... Not all models from their laptop lineup, like ThinkPad, Yoga, Legion, LOQ, etc., feature an option to get Linux pre-installed during the checkout process. Luckily, there is an easy way to filter through the numerous laptops. Just go to the laptops section (U.S.) on the Lenovo website and turn on the "Operating System" filter under the Filter by specs sidebar menu. The article end with an embedded YouTube video showing a VCR playing a videotape of a 1999 local TV news report... about the legendary "Windows Refund Day" protests. Slashdot ran numerous stories about the event — including one by Jon Katz...

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80-year-old George Lucas appeared this week at a 45th anniversary screening of The Empire Strikes Back, reports CNN — and finally gave a good explanation for why Yoda speaks the way he does. "He explained that it came about in order to ensure that the little alien's usually profound messages really landed with audiences." "Because if you speak regular English, people won't listen that much," Lucas said at the 2025 TCM Classic Film Festival, per Variety . "But if he had an accent, or it's really hard to understand what he's saying, they focus on what he's saying." Yoda was "basically the philosopher of the movie," the filmmaker added. "I had to figure out a way to get people to actually listen — especially 12-year-olds." Also this week, the verified Instagram accounts for Disney+, Star Wars and LucasFilm — Lucas' film and television production company — posted clips of Yoda doing bloopers on the set of "Star Wars" films, with [Frank] Oz continuing to do the voice and manipulate the heavy Yoda puppet even on takes that were unusable. Suffice it to say: One for the ages, Yoda is. Lucas also remembered how he'd "mounted a guerilla campaign to generate excitement" for the first Star Wars movie, reports Variety. ("I got the kids walking around Disneyland and the Comic Cons and all that kind of stuff... that's why Fox was so shocked when the first day the lines were all around the block.") And Variety says Lucas described a condition in his contract for Star Wars "that would again be life-changing, both for him and the entertainment industry as a whole." "I said, 'besides that, I'd like licensing.' They went, 'What's licensing?'" Unimpressed by the film, and colored by the history of movie merchandising to that point, the studio capitulated to his demands. "They talked to themselves, and they went, 'He's never going to be able to do that. It takes them a billion dollars and a year to make a toy or make anything. There's no money in that at all.'"

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Some patches for Linux 6.15-rc4 (updating the kernel driver for the Bcachefs file system) triggered some "straight-to-the-point wisdom" from Linus Torvalds about case-insensitive filesystems, reports Phoronix. Bcachefs developer Kent Overstreet started the conversation, explaining how some buggy patches for their case-insensitive file and folder support were upstreamed into the Bcachefs kernel driver nearly two years ago: When I was discussing with the developer who did the implementation, I noted that fstests should already have tests. However, it seems I neglected to tell him to make sure the tests actually run... It is _not_ enough to simply rely on the automated tests. You have to have eyes on what your code is doing. Overstreet added "There's a story behind the case insensitive directory fixes, and lessons to be learned." To which Torvalds replied.... "No." "The only lesson to be learned is that filesystem people never learn." Torvalds: Case-insensitive names are horribly wrong, and you shouldn't have done them at all. The problem wasn't the lack of testing, the problem was implementing it in the first place. The problem is then compounded by "trying to do it right", and in the process doing it horrible wrong indeed, because "right" doesn't exist, but trying to will make random bytes have very magical meaning. And btw, the tests are all completely broken anyway. Last I saw, they didn't actually test for all the really interesting cases — the ones that cause security issues in user land. Security issues like "user space checked that the filename didn't match some security-sensitive pattern". And then the shit-for-brains filesystem ends up matching that pattern *anyway*, because the people who do case insensitivity *INVARIABLY* do things like ignore non-printing characters, so now "case insensitive" also means "insensitive to other things too".... Dammit. Case sensitivity is a BUG. The fact that filesystem people *still* think it's a feature, I cannot understand. It's like they revere the old FAT filesystem _so_ much that they have to recreate it — badly. And this led to a very lively back-and-forth discussion. Slashdot's summary of the highlights:

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"4chan, down for more than a week after hackers got in through an insecure script that handled PDFs, is back online," notes BoingBoing. (They add that Thursday saw 4chan's first blog postin years — just the words "Testing testing 123 123...") But 4chan posted a much longer explanation on Friday," confirming their servers were compromised by a malicious PDF upload from "a hacker using a UK IP address," granting access to their databases and administrative dashboard. The attacker "spent several hours exfiltrating database tables and much of 4chan's source code. When they had finished downloading what they wanted, they began to vandalize 4chan at which point moderators became aware and 4chan's servers were halted, preventing further access." While not all of our servers were breached, the most important one was, and it was due to simply not updating old operating systems and code in a timely fashion. Ultimately this problem was caused by having insufficient skilled man-hours available to update our code and infrastructure, and being starved of money for years by advertisers, payment providers, and service providers who had succumbed to external pressure campaigns. We had begun a process of speccing new servers in late 2023. As many have suspected, until that time 4chan had been running on a set of servers purchased second-hand by moot a few weeks before his final Q&A [in 2015], as prior to then we simply were not in a financial position to consider such a large purchase. Advertisers and payment providers willing to work with 4chan are rare, and are quickly pressured by activists into cancelling their services. Putting together the money for new equipment took nearly a decade... The free time that 4chan's development team had available to dedicate to 4chan was insufficient to update our software and infrastructure fast enough, and our luck ran out. However, we have not been idle during our nearly two weeks of downtime. The server that was breached has been replaced, with the operating system and code updated to the latest versions. PDF uploads have been temporarily disabled on those boards that supported them, but they will be back in the near future. One slow but much beloved board, /f/ — Flash, will not be returning however, as there is no realistic way to prevent similar exploits using .swf files. We are bringing on additional volunteer developers to help keep up with the workload, and our team of volunteer janitors & moderators remains united despite the grievous violations some have suffered to their personal privacy. 4chan is back. No other website can replace it, or this community. No matter how hard it is, we are not giving up.

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An anonymous reader shared this report from Business Insider: A Lufthansa flight carrying 461 passengers had to divert after someone's tablet became "jammed" in a business-class seat. The Airbus A380 took off from Los Angeles on Wednesday, bound for Munich, and had been flying for around three hours when the pilots diverted to Boston Logan International Airport. In a statement to Business Insider, an airline spokesperson said the tablet had become "jammed in a Business Class seat" and had "already shown visible signs of deformation due to the seat's movements" when the flight diverted. [The aviation site] Simply Flying, which first reported the news, said the device was an iPad. The decision to divert was taken "to eliminate any potential risk, particularly with regard to possible overheating," the spokesperson added, saying that it was the joint decision of the crew and air traffic control. Lithium batteries pose a safety risk if damaged, punctured, or crushed... In a confined space like an aircraft cabin, a lithium battery fire poses a serious hazard to the passengers onboard. Last year, a Breeze Airways flight from Los Angeles to Pittsburgh had to make an emergency landing in Albuquerque after a passenger's laptop caught fire.

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"Future moon astronauts may find water more accessible than previously thought," writes Space.com, citing a new NASA-led experiment: Because the moon lacks a magnetic field like Earth's, the barren lunar surface is constantly bombarded by energetic particles from the sun... Li Hsia Yeo, a planetary scientist at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Maryland, led a lab experiment observing the effects of simulated solar wind on two samples of loose regolith brought to Earth by the Apollo 17 mission... To mimic conditions on the moon, the researchers built a custom apparatus that included a vacuum chamber, where the samples were placed, and a tiny particle accelerator, which the scientists used to bombard the samples with hydrogen ions for several days. "The exciting thing here is that with only lunar soil and a basic ingredient from the sun — which is always spitting out hydrogen — there's a possibility of creating water," Yeo said in a statement. "That's incredible to think about." Supporting this idea, observations from previous moon missions have revealed an abundance of hydrogen gas in the moon's tenuous atmosphere. Scientists suspect that solar-wind-driven heating facilitates the combination of hydrogen atoms on the surface into hydrogen gas, which then escapes into space. This process also has a surprising upside, the new study suggests. Leftover oxygen atoms are free to bond with new hydrogen atoms formed by repeated bombardment of the solar wind, prepping the moon for more water formation on a renewable basis. The findings could help assess how sustainable water on the moon is, as the sought-after resource is crucial for both life support and as propellant for rockets. The team's study was published in March in the journal JGR Planets . NASA created a fascinating animation showing how water is released from the Moon during meteor showers. (In 2016 scientists discovered that when speck of comet debris vaporize on impact, they create shock waves in the lunar soil which can sometimes breach the dry upper layer, releasing water molecules from the hydrated layer below...)

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A New York Times technology columnist has a question. "Is there any threshold at which an A.I. would start to deserve, if not human-level rights, at least the same moral consideration we give to animals?" [W]hen I heard that researchers at Anthropic, the AI company that made the Claude chatbot, were starting to study "model welfare" — the idea that AI models might soon become conscious and deserve some kind of moral status — the humanist in me thought: Who cares about the chatbots? Aren't we supposed to be worried about AI mistreating us, not us mistreating it...? But I was intrigued... There is a small body of academic research on A.I. model welfare, and a modest but growing number of experts in fields like philosophy and neuroscience are taking the prospect of A.I. consciousness more seriously, as A.I. systems grow more intelligent.... Tech companies are starting to talk about it more, too. Google recently posted a job listing for a "post-AGI" research scientist whose areas of focus will include "machine consciousness." And last year, Anthropic hired its first AI welfare researcher, Kyle Fish... [who] believes that in the next few years, as AI models develop more humanlike abilities, AI companies will need to take the possibility of consciousness more seriously.... Fish isn't the only person at Anthropic thinking about AI welfare. There's an active channel on the company's Slack messaging system called #model-welfare, where employees check in on Claude's well-being and share examples of AI systems acting in humanlike ways. Jared Kaplan, Anthropic's chief science officer, said in a separate interview that he thought it was "pretty reasonable" to study AI welfare, given how intelligent the models are getting. But testing AI systems for consciousness is hard, Kaplan warned, because they're such good mimics. If you prompt Claude or ChatGPT to talk about its feelings, it might give you a compelling response. That doesn't mean the chatbot actually has feelings — only that it knows how to talk about them... [Fish] said there were things that AI companies could do to take their models' welfare into account, in case they do become conscious someday. One question Anthropic is exploring, he said, is whether future AI models should be given the ability to stop chatting with an annoying or abusive user if they find the user's requests too distressing.

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It's a pickup truck "that can change into whatever you need it to be — even an SUV," according to the manufacturer's web site. Selling in America for just $20,000 (after federal incentives), the new electric truck is "affordable, deeply customizable, and very analog," says TechCrunch. "It has manual windows and it doesn't come with a main infotainment screen. Heck, it isn't even painted..." Slate Auto is instead playing up the idea of wrapping its vehicles, something executives said they will sell in kits. Buyers can either have Slate do that work for them, or put the wraps on themselves. This not only adds to the idea of a buyer being able to personalize their vehicle, but it also cuts out a huge cost center for the company. It means Slate won't need a paint shop at its factory, allowing it to spend less to get to market, while also avoiding one of the most heavily regulated parts of vehicle manufacturing. Slate is telling customers that they can name the car whatever they want, offering the ability to purchase an embossed wrap for the tailgate. Otherwise, the truck is just referred to as the "Blank Slate...." It's billing the add-ons as "easy DIY" that "non-gearheads" can tackle, and says it will launch a suite of how-to resources under the billing of Slate University... The early library of customizations on Slate's website range from functional to cosmetic. Buyers can add infotainment screens, speakers, roof racks, light covers, and much more.... All that said, Slate's truck comes standard with some federally mandated safety features such as automatic emergency braking, airbags, and a backup camera. "The specs show a maximum range of 150 miles on a single charge, with the option for a longer-range battery pack that could offer up to 240 miles," reports NBC News (adding that the vehicles "aren't expected to be delivered to customers until late 2026, but can be reserved for a refundable $50 fee.") Earlier this month, TechCrunch broke the news that Bezos, along with the controlling owner of the Los Angeles Dodgers, Mark Walter; and a third investor, Thomas Tull, had helped Slate raise $111 million for the project. A document filed with the Securities and Exchange Commission listed Melinda Lewison, the head of Bezos' family office, as a Slate Auto director. Thanks to Slashdot reader fjo3 for sharing the news.

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"A group of researchers says it has identified a hidden reason we use Google for nearly all web searches," reports the Washington Post. "We've never given other options a real shot." Their research experiment suggests that Google is overwhelmingly popular partly because we believe it's the best, whether that's true or not. It's like a preference for your favorite soda. And their research suggested that our mass devotion to googling can be altered with habit-changing techniques, including by bribing people to try search alternatives to see what they are like... [A] group of academics — from Stanford University, the University of Pennsylvania and MIT — designed a novel experiment to try to figure out what might shake up Google's popularity. They recruited nearly 2,500 participants and remotely monitored their web searches on computers for months. The core of the experiment was paying some participants — most received $10 — to use Bing rather than Google for two weeks. After that period, the money stopped, and the participants had to pick either Bing or Google. The vast majority in the group of people who were paid to use Bing for 14 days chose to go back to Google once the payments stopped, suggesting a strong preference for Google even after trying an alternative. But a healthy number in that group — about 22 percent — chose Bing and were still using it many weeks later. "I realized Bing was not as bad as I thought it was...." one study participant said — which an assistant professor in business economics and public policy at the University of Pennsylvania says is a nice summation of the study's findings. "The researchers did not test other search engines," the article notes. But it also points out that more importantly: the research caught the attention of some government officials: Colorado Attorney General Phil Weiser (D), who is leading the group of states that sued Google alongside the Justice Department, said the research helped inspire a demand by the states to fix Google's search monopoly. They asked a judge to require Google to bankroll a consumer information campaign about web search alternatives, including "short-term incentive payments." On the basis of that, the article suggests "you could soon be paid to try Microsoft Bing or another alternative." And in the meantime, the reporter writes, "I encourage you to join me in a two-week (unpaid) experiment mirroring the research: Change your standard search engine to something other than Google and see whether you like it. (And drop me a line to let me know how it went.) I'm going with DuckDuckGo, a privacy-focused web search engine that uses Bing's technology."

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An anonymous reader quotes a report from IEEE Spectrum: The XPrize Foundation today announced the winners of its four-year, $100 million XPrize competition in carbon removal. The contest is one of dozens hosted by the foundation in its 20-year effort to encourage technological development. Contestants in the carbon removal XPrize had to demonstrate ways to pull carbon dioxide from the atmosphere or oceans and sequester it sustainably. Mati Carbon, a Houston-based startup developing a sequestration technique called enhanced rock weathering, won the grand prize of $50 million. The company spreads crushed basalt on small farms in India and Africa. The silica-rich volcanic rock improves the quality of the soil for the crops but also helps remove carbon dioxide from the air. It does this by reacting with dissolved CO2 in the soil's water, turning it into bicarbonate ions and preventing it from returning to the atmosphere. More than a dozen organizations globally are developing enhanced rock weathering approaches at an industrial scale, but Mati's tech-heavy verification and software platform caught the XPrize judges' attention. "On the one hand, they're moving rocks around in trucks—that's not very techy. But when we looked under the hood... what we saw was a very impressive data-collection exercise," says Michael Leitch, XPrize's technical lead for the competition. Here's a list of the runners-up: - Paris-based NetZero won $15 million for turning agricultural waste into biochar through pyrolysis, a method that locks carbon into a stable, solid form. - Houston-based Vaulted Deep won $8 million for geologically sequestering carbon-rich organic waste by injecting it deep underground. - London-based Undo Carbon won $5 million for its enhanced rock weathering approach, spreading silicate minerals to speed up natural carbon removal. Additionally, Project Hajar and Planetary Technologies each received $1 million honorary XFactor prizes, recognizing their promising work in direct air capture and ocean carbon removal, despite not meeting the competition's 1,000-tonne removal threshold.

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Initial claims that life-associated gases were detected on exoplanet K2-18b are being challenged, with independent reanalysis by Jake Taylor suggesting the data is too noisy to support such conclusions and that stronger, model-independent evidence is needed. NPR reports: Rather than seeing a bump or a wiggle that indicated a signal, "the data is consistent with a flat line," says Taylor, adding that more observations from the telescope are needed to know what can be reliably said about this planet's atmosphere. "If we want to claim biosignatures, we need to be extremely sure." What this new work shows is that "the strength of the evidence depends on the nitty gritty details of how we interpret the data, and that doesn't pass the bar for me for a convincing detection," says Laura Kreidberg, an expert on the atmospheres of distant planets at the Max Planck Institute for Astronomy in Germany who didn't work on the original research team or this new analysis. She explains that astronomers can make a lot of different choices when analyzing data; for example, they can make different assumptions about the physics and chemistry at play. "Ideally, for a robust detection, we want it to be model-independent," she says -- that is, they want the signal to show up even if the underlying assumptions change from one analysis to another. But that wasn't the case here.

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Longtime Slashdot reader AmiMoJo shares a report from the BBC: China will let scientists from six countries, including the U.S., examine the rocks it collected from the Moon -- a scientific collaboration that comes as the two countries remain locked in a bitter trade war. Two NASA-funded U.S. institutions have been granted access to the lunar samples collected by the Chang'e-5 mission in 2020, the China National Space Administration (CNSA) said on Thursday. CNSA chief Shan Zhongde said that the samples were "a shared treasure for all humanity," local media reported. Chinese researchers have not been able to access NASA's Moon samples because of restrictions imposed by U.S. lawmakers on the space agency's collaboration with China. Under the 2011 law, Nasa is banned from collaboration with China or any Chinese-owned companies unless it is specifically authorized by Congress. But John Logsdon, the former director of the Space Policy Institute at George Washington University, told BBC Newshour that the latest exchange of Moon rocks have "very little to do with politics." While there are controls on space technology, the examination of lunar samples had "nothing of military significance," he said. "It's international cooperation in science which is the norm."

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An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: Multiple studies and investigations have found that about half of American households watch TV and movies with subtitles on, but only a relatively small portion of those include someone with a hearing disability. That's because of the trouble many people have understanding dialogue in modern viewing situations, and Netflix has now introduced a subtitles option to help. The closed captioning we've all been using for years includes not only the words the people on-screen are saying, but additional information needed by the hard of hearing, including character names, music cues ("dramatic music intensifies") and sound effects ("loud explosion"). For those who just wanted to make sure they didn't miss a word here and there, the frequent descriptions of sound effects and music could be distracting. This new format omits those extras, just including the spoken words and nothing else -- even in the same language as the spoken dialogue. The feature will be available in new Netflix original programming, starting with the new season of You in multiple languages. Netflix says it's looking at bringing the option to older titles in the library (including those not produced by Netflix) in the future. Traditional closed captions are still available, of course. Those are labeled "English CC" whereas this new option is simply labeled "English" (or whatever your preferred language is).

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TV producer Alex Berger criticized Apple TV+ as "the worst marketer in the universe" for failing to promote his French-language show La Maison, despite its success in Europe. Berger said he initially partnered with Apple out of hope, but ultimately felt they undermined their own content by not supporting it properly. 9to5Mac reports: Rafa Sales Ross at Variety recently interviewed TV producer Alex Berger, who made La Maison for Apple TV+. That partnership is apparently not one he intends to repeat: "Marketing makes a show," he emphasized. "Apple, for example, is probably the worst marketer in the universe -- the best for iPhones, the worst for television. They don't do marketing, and it was an issue for us with 'La Maison.' We did a great show that had an amazing success in France and other places in Europe, but they never promoted it. It drove me crazy." Asked why, while believing Apple TV+ to lack in marketing efforts, did he decide to take "La Maison" to the streamer, Berger said simply: "Hope. We had hope." "Apple TV+ had never done a show in France and never really done a show in Europe," adds the producer. "'Slow Horses' started [things] in the U.K., but it was with the U.S.. I was hoping I would change them. We got very frustrated and just thought at one point that they were shooting themselves in the foot, and why? "La Maison faced the additional challenge of being a French-language series, at the time one of the only non-English shows on the streamer," notes 9to5Mac's Ryan Christoffel. "So it had an uphill battle already, making Apple's marketing struggles even more of a problem."

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YKK, the world's largest zipper maker, has unveiled a prototype self-propelled zipper that uses a motorized worm gear to zip itself closed at the push of a button. It currently relies on a wired remote and external power, and can zip spans up to 16 feet in under a minute. The Verge reports: Although some recent zipper innovations, such as Under Armour's one-handed MagZip upgrade, are designed to improve accessibility and make zippers easier to use for those with limited mobility, YKK envisions more industrial use cases for its prototype. As demonstrated in a video recently shared on the company's YouTube channel, the self-propelled zipper is seen connecting a pair of 16-foot-tall membranes in about 40 seconds. Zipping them together manually would require the use of a ladder or other machinery. In another video, the prototype is used to quickly connect a pair of 13-foot-wide temporary shelters standing over eight feet tall, taking about 50 seconds to progress from one side to the other. [...] In addition to miniaturizing the tech and adding a battery, YKK would also need to develop some safety mechanisms before its self-propelled zipper could ever reach consumers' clothing, ensuring there's nothing that might get stuck.

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Some developers are "crying foul" after Microsoft's C/C++ extension for Visual Studio Code stopped working with VS Code derivatives like VS Codium and Cursor, reports The Register. The move has prompted Cursor to transition to open-source alternatives, while some developers are calling for a regulatory investigation into Microsoft's alleged anti-competitive behavior. From the report: In early April, programmers using VS Codium, an open-source fork of Microsoft's MIT-licensed VS Code, and Cursor, a commercial AI code assistant built from the VS Code codebase, noticed that the C/C++ extension stopped working. The extension adds C/C++ language support, such as Intellisense code completion and debugging, to VS Code. The removal of these capabilities from competing tools breaks developer workflows, hobbles the editor, and arguably hinders competition. The breaking change appears to have occurred with the release of v1.24.5 on April 3, 2025. Following the April update, attempts to install the C/C++ extension outside of VS Code generate this error message: "The C/C++ extension may be used only with Microsoft Visual Studio, Visual Studio for Mac, Visual Studio Code, Azure DevOps, Team Foundation Server, and successor Microsoft products and services to develop and test your applications." Microsoft has forbidden the use of its extensions outside of its own software products since at least September 2020, when the current licensing terms were published. But it hasn't enforced those terms in its C/C++ extension with an environment check in its binaries until now. [...] Developers discussing the issue in Cursor's GitHub repo have noted that Microsoft recently rolled out a competing AI software agent capability, dubbed Agent Mode, within its Copilot software. One such developer who contacted us anonymously told The Register they sent a letter about the situation to the US Federal Trade Commission, asking them to probe Microsoft for unfair competition -- alleging self-preferencing, bundling Copilot without a removal option, and blocking rivals like Cursor to lock users into its AI ecosystem.

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