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An anonymous reader quotes a report from Axios: Tinder is mandating new users in California verify their profiles using facial recognition technology starting Monday, executives exclusively tell Axios. The move aims to reduce impersonation and is part of Tinder parent Match Group's broader effort to improve trust and safety amid ongoing user frustration. The Face Check feature prompts users to take a short video selfie during onboarding. The biometric face scan, powered by FaceTec, then confirms the person is real and present and whether their face matches their profile photos. It also checks if the face is used across multiple accounts. If the criteria are met, the user receives a photo verified badge on their profile. The selfie video is then deleted. Tinder stores a non-reversible, encrypted face map to detect duplicate profiles in the future. Face Check is separate from Tinder's ID Check, which uses a government-issued ID to verify age and identity. "We see this as one part of a set of identity assurance options that are available to users," Match Group's head of trust and safety Yoel Roth says. "Face Check ... is really meant to be about confirming that this person is a real, live person and not a bot or a spoofed account." "Even if in the short term, it has the effect of potentially reducing some top-line user metrics, we think it's the right thing to do for the business," Rascoff said.

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Figma has filed to go public on the NYSE under the ticker "FIG," marking one of the most anticipated IPOs in recent years following its scrapped $20 billion acquisition by Adobe. CNBC reports: Revenue in the first quarter increased 46% to $228.2 million from $156.2 million in the same period a year ago, according to Figma's prospectus. The company recorded a net income of $44.9 million, compared to $13.5 million a year earlier. As of March 31, Figma had 1,031 customers contributing at least $100,000 a year to annual revenue, up 47% from a year earlier. Clients include Amazon Web Services, Google, Microsoft and Netflix. More than half of revenue comes from outside the U.S. Figma didn't say how many shares it plans to sell in the IPO. The company was valued at $12.5 billion in a tender offer last year, and in April it announced that it had confidentially filed for an IPO with the SEC. [...] Figma was founded in 2012 by CEO Dylan Field, 33, and Evan Wallace, and is based in San Francisco. The company had 1,646 employees as of March 31. Before establishing Figma, Field spent over two years at Brown University, where he met Wallace. Field then took a Thiel Fellowship "to pursue entrepreneurial projects," according to the filing. The two-year program that Founders Fund partner Peter Thiel established in 2011 gives young entrepreneurs a $200,000 grant along with support from founders and investors, according to an online description. Field is the biggest individual owner of Figma, with 56.6 million Class B shares and 51.1% of voting power ahead of the IPO. He said in a letter to investors that it was time for Figma to buck the "trend of many amazing companies staying privately indefinitely." "Some of the obvious benefits such as good corporate hygiene, brand awareness, liquidity, stronger currency and access to capital markets apply," wrote Field. "More importantly, I like the idea of our community sharing in the ownership of Figma -- and the best way to accomplish this is through public markets." As a public company, Field said investors should "expect us to take big swings," including through acquisitions. In April, Figma bought the assets and team of an unnamed technology company for $14 million, according to the filing. They also registered over 13 million users per month, one-third of which are designers.

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BrianFagioli shares a report from NERDS.xyz: In a move that feels straight out of a different era, Xerox has officially acquired Lexmark for $1.5 billion. The deal includes net debt and assumed liabilities, and it pulls Lexmark out of the hands of Chinese ownership and into a freshly restructured Xerox. That's a lot of money for a company best known for making machines that spit out paper. According to Xerox, this is all part of a "Reinvention" strategy. The company now claims it will be one of the top five players in every major print category and the leader in managed print services. [...] Xerox says the new leadership team will include executives from both sides, and the combined business will now support over 200,000 clients in more than 170 countries. They'll also be running 125 manufacturing and distribution centers in 16 countries.

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AMC Theatres now warns customers that movies start 25-30 minutes after the listed showtime to account for ads and trailers, "making it easier for moviegoers to know the actual start time of their film screening," reports The Verge. From the report: Starting today, AMC will also show more ads than before, meaning its preshow lineup may have to be reconfigured to avoid exceeding the 30-minute mark. The company made an agreement with the National CineMedia ad network that includes as much as five minutes of commercials shown "after a movie's official start time," according to The Hollywood Reporter, and an additional 30-to-60-second "Platinum Spot" that plays before the last one or two trailers. AMC was the only major theater chain to reject the National CineMedia ad spot when it was pitched in 2019, telling Bloomberg at the time that it believed "US moviegoers would react quite negatively." Now struggling financially amid an overall decline in movie theater attendance and box-office grosses, AMC has reversed course, telling The Hollywood Reporter that its competitors "have fully participated for more than five years without any direct impact to their attendance."

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An anonymous reader quotes a report from TechCrunch: After 13 years of deploying robots into its warehouses, Amazon reached a new milestone. The tech behemoth now has 1 million robots in its warehouses, the company announced Monday. This one millionth robot was recently delivered to an Amazon fulfillment facility in Japan. That figure puts Amazon on track to reach another landmark: Its vast network of warehouses may soon have the same number of robots working as people, according to reporting from The Wall Street Journal. The WSJ also reported that 75% of Amazon's global deliveries are now assisted in some way by a robot. Amazon also unveiled a new generative AI model called DeepFleet, built using SageMaker and trained on its own warehouse data, which improves robotic fleet speed by 10% through more efficient route coordination.

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Google will tell European Union antitrust regulators Tuesday that the bloc's Digital Markets Act is stifling innovation and harming European users and businesses. The tech giant faces charges under the DMA for allegedly favoring its own services like Google Shopping, Google Hotels, and Google Flights over competitors. Potential fines could reach 10% of Google's global annual revenue. Google lawyer Clare Kelly will address a European Commission workshop, arguing that compliance changes have forced Europeans to pay more for travel tickets while airlines, hotels, and restaurants report losing up to 30% of direct booking traffic.

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Tech enthusiast Matt Cole has created a comprehensive MicroSD card testing database, writing over 18 petabytes of data across nearly 200 cards since July 2023. Cole's "Great MicroSD Card Survey" uses eight machines running 70 card readers around the clock, writing 101 terabytes daily to test authenticity, performance, and endurance. The 15,000-word report covering over 200 different cards reveals significant quality disparities. Name-brand cards purchased from Amazon performed markedly better than identical models from AliExpress, while cards with "fake flash" -- inflated capacity ratings -- performed significantly worse than authentic storage. Sandisk and Kingston cards averaged 4,634 and 3,555 read/write cycles before first error, respectively, while Lenovo cards averaged just 291 cycles. Some off-brand cards failed after only 27 cycles. Cole tested 51 cards to complete destruction during the endurance testing phase.

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AT&T has launched a new Account Lock feature designed to protect customers from SIM swapping attacks. The security tool, available through the myAT&T app, prevents unauthorized changes to customer accounts including phone number transfers, SIM card changes, billing information updates, device upgrades, and modifications to authorized users. SIM swapping attacks occur when criminals obtain a victim's phone number through social engineering techniques, then intercept messages and calls to access two-factor authentication codes for sensitive accounts. The attacks have become increasingly common in recent years. AT&T began gradually rolling out Account Lock earlier this year, joining T-Mobile, Verizon, and Google Fi, which already offer similar fraud prevention features.

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An anonymous reader shares a report: A judge has sentenced a disgruntled IT worker to more than seven months in prison after he wreaked havoc on his employer's network following his suspension, according to West Yorkshire Police. According to the police, Mohammed Umar Taj, 31, from the Yorkshire town of Batley, was suspended from his job in nearby Huddersfield in July 2022. But the company didn't immediately rescind his network credentials, and within hours, he began altering login names and passwords to disrupt operations, the statement says. The following day, he allegedly changed access credentials and the biz's multi-factor authentication settings that locked out the firm and its clients in Germany and Bahrain, eventually causing an estimated $274,200 in lost business and reputational harm.

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AI agents are now conducting first-round job interviews to screen candidates before human recruiters review them, according to WashingtonPost, which cites job seekers who report being contacted by virtual recruiters from different staffing companies. The conversational agents, built on large language models, help recruiting firms respond to every applicant and conduct interviews around the clock as companies face increasingly large talent pools. LinkedIn reported that job applications have jumped 30% in the last two years, partially due to AI, with some positions receiving hundreds of applications within hours. The Society for Human Resource Management said a growing number of organizations now use AI for recruiting to automate candidate searches and communicate with applicants during interviews. The AI interviews, conducted by phone or video, can last anywhere from a few minutes to 20 minutes depending on the candidate's experience and the hiring firm's questions.

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An anonymous reader shares a report: Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas) has a plan for spectrum auctions that could take frequencies away from Wi-Fi and reallocate them for the exclusive use of wireless carriers. The plan would benefit AT&T, which is based in Cruz's home state, along with Verizon and T-Mobile. Cruz's proposal revives a years-old controversy over whether the entire 6 GHz band should be devoted to Wi-Fi, which can use the large spectrum band for faster speeds than networks that rely solely on the 2.4 and 5 GHz bands. Congress is on the verge of passing legislation that would require spectrum to be auctioned off for full-power, commercially licensed use, and the question is where that spectrum will come from. When the House of Representatives passed its so-called "One Big Beautiful Bill," it excluded all of the frequencies between 5.925 and 7.125 gigahertz from the planned spectrum auctions. But Cruz's version of the budget reconciliation bill, which is moving quickly toward a final vote, removed the 6 GHz band's protection from spectrum auctions. The Cruz bill is also controversial because it would penalize states that regulate artificial intelligence. Instead of excluding the 6 GHz band from auctions, Cruz's bill would instead exclude the 7.4-8.4 GHz band used by the military. Under conditions set by the bill, it could be hard for the Commerce Department and Federal Communications Commission to fulfill the Congressional mandate without taking some spectrum away from Wi-Fi.

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Apple is considering using AI technology from Anthropic or OpenAI to power a new version of Siri, according to Bloomberg, sidelining its own in-house models in a potentially blockbuster move aimed at turning around its flailing AI effort. From the report: The iPhone maker has talked with both companies about using their large language models for Siri, according to people familiar with the discussions. It has asked them to train versions of their models that could run on Apple's cloud infrastructure for testing, said the people, who asked not to be identified discussing private deliberations. If Apple ultimately moves forward, it would represent a monumental reversal. The company currently powers most of its AI features with homegrown technology that it calls Apple Foundation Models and had been planning a new version of its voice assistant that runs on that technology for 2026. A switch to Anthropic's Claude or OpenAI's ChatGPT models for Siri would be an acknowledgment that the company is struggling to compete in generative AI -- the most important new technology in decades. Apple already allows ChatGPT to answer web-based search queries in Siri, but the assistant itself is powered by Apple.

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TorrentFreak spotlights VP.net, a brand-new service from Private Internet Access founder Andrew Lee (the guy who gifted Linux Journal to Slashdot) that eliminates the classic "just trust your VPN" problem by locking identity-mapping and traffic-handling inside Intel SGX enclaves. The company promises 'cryptographically verifiable privacy' by using special hardware 'safes' (Intel SGX), so even the provider can't track what its users are up to. The design goal is that no one, not even the VPN company, can link "User X" to "Website Y." Lee frames it as enabling agency over one's privacy: "Our zero trust solution does not require you to trust us - and that's how it should be. Your privacy should be up to your choice - not up to some random VPN provider in some random foreign country." The team behind VP.net includes CEO Matt Kim as well as arguably the first Bitcoin veterans Roger Ver and Mark Karpeles. Ask Slashdot: Now that there's a VPN where you don't have to "just trust the provider" - arguably the first real zero-trust VPN - are trust based VPNs obsolete?

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Automattic CEO Matt Mullenweg said he regrets telling the media that "WordPress.org just belongs to me personally" during a new interview about his company's legal dispute with hosting provider WP Engine. The comment has been "taken out of context so many times" and represents "the worst thing ever," Mullenweg said in a new podcast interview with The Verge. The dispute began when Mullenweg accused WP Engine of "free-riding" on WordPress's open-source ecosystem without contributing adequate resources back to the project. Mullenweg filed a lawsuit against WP Engine while cutting off the company's access to core WordPress technologies. WP Engine countersued, and Automattic was forced to reverse some retaliatory measures. The controversy triggered significant internal upheaval at Automattic. The company offered "alignment" buyouts to employees who disagreed with the direction, reducing headcount from a peak of 2,100 to approximately 1,500 people. Mullenweg said this was "probably the fourth big time" WordPress has faced such community controversy, though the first in the current media landscape. WordPress powers 43% of websites globally. Mullenweg said he wants to return to "the most collaborative version of WordPress possible" but noted the legal proceedings continue with both sides spending "millions of dollars a month on lawyers."

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China's transition to digital payments has reached the point where physical cash has nearly vanished from daily commerce, with WeChat and Alipay now handling transactions from supermarkets to public transportation across the world's second-largest economy. Many businesses no longer maintain traditional cash registers and instead scan QR codes presented by customers, while numerous taxis refuse cash payments entirely. The widespread adoption has given tech giants Tencent and Alibaba immense power over routine financial transactions, prompting China's central bank to develop a competing digital yuan currency.

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Microsoft's new AI diagnostic system achieved 80% accuracy in diagnosing patients compared to 20% for human doctors, while reducing costs by 20%, according to company research published Monday. The MAI Diagnostic Orchestrator queries multiple leading AI models including OpenAI's GPT, Google's Gemini, Anthropic's Claude, Meta's Llama, and xAI's Grok in what the company describes as a "chain-of-debate style" approach. The system was tested against 304 case studies from the New England Journal of Medicine using Microsoft's Sequential Diagnosis Benchmark, which breaks down each case into step-by-step diagnostic processes that mirror how human physicians work. Microsoft CEO of AI Mustafa Suleyman called the development "a genuine step toward medical superintelligence."

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Avantare writes: Microsoft Authenticator houses your passwords and lets you sign into all of your Microsoft accounts using a PIN, facial recognition such as Windows Hello, or other biometric data, like a fingerprint. Authenticator can be used in other ways, such as verifying you're logging in if you forgot your password, or using two-factor authentication as an extra layer of security for your Microsoft accounts. In June, Microsoft stopped letting users add passwords to Authenticator, but here's a timeline of other changes you can expect, according to Microsoft: July 2025: You won't be able to use the autofill password function. August 2025: You'll no longer be able to use saved passwords.

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Companies deliberately design customer service friction to discourage refunds and claims, according to research into a practice academics call "sludge." The term, coined by legal scholar Cass R. Sunstein and economist Richard H. Thaler in their updated version of "Nudge," describes tortuous administrative demands, endless wait times, and excessive procedural fuss that impede customers. ProPublica reported in 2023 that Cigna saved millions of dollars by rejecting claims without having doctors read them. The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau ordered Toyota's motor-financing arm to pay $60 million for alleged misdeeds including deliberately setting up dead-end hotlines for canceling products and services. The 2023 National Customer Rage Survey found that the percentage of American consumers seeking revenge for customer service hassles had tripled in three years.

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Apple plans to release a cheaper MacBook powered by the A18 Pro chip used in the iPhone 16 Pro line, according to analyst Ming-Chi Kuo. The laptop will be priced below $999 -- first time for a MacBook Air -- and go into production in late 2025 or early 2026 on the new laptop, the analyst noted. The device will feature the same 13-inch screen as the current MacBook Air, with the chip representing the primary difference between models. The A18 Pro chip delivers single-core performance around 3,500 on Geekbench, trailing the M4 chip only slightly, though multicore performance lags significantly at approximately 8,780 versus 15,000 for the M4. The A18's multicore performance matches the original 2020 M1 chip.

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A founding member of the Xbox team says she believes Xbox hardware is "dead" and that Microsoft appears to be planning a "slow exit" from the gaming hardware business. Microsoft recently announced partnerships with external hardware companies including the ROG Xbox Ally, which runs Windows and functions as a portable PC that can run games from external stores like Steam. Laura Fryer, one of Microsoft Game Studios' first employees who worked as a producer on the original Gears of War games and served as director of the Xbox Advanced Technology Group, called the partnerships evidence of Microsoft's inability to ship hardware. "Personally, I think Xbox hardware is dead. The plan appears to be to just drive everybody to Game Pass," Fryer said.

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