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An anonymous reader shares a report: Senators are demanding answers from Big Tech companies accused of "filing thousands of H-1B skilled labor visa petitions after conducting mass layoffs of American employees." In letters sent to Amazon, Meta, Apple, Google, and Microsoft -- among some of the largest sponsors of H-1B visas -- Senators Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa) and Dick Durbin (D-Ill.) requested "information and data from each company regarding their recruitment and hiring practices, as well as any variation in salary and benefits between H-1B visa holders and American employees." The letters came shortly after Grassley sent a letter to Department of Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem requesting that DHS stop "issuing work authorizations to student visa holders." According to Grassley, "foreign student work authorizations put America at risk of technological and corporate espionage," in addition to allegedly "contributing to rising unemployment rates among college-educated Americans." [...] In the letters to tech firms, senators emphasized that the unemployment rate in America's tech sector is "well above" the overall jobless rate. Amazon perhaps faces the most scrutiny. US Citizenship and Immigration Services data showed that Amazon sponsored the most H-1B visas in 2024 at 14,000, compared to other criticized firms like Microsoft and Meta, which each sponsored 5,000, The Wall Street Journal reported. Senators alleged that Amazon blamed layoffs of "tens of thousands" on the "adoption of generative AI tools," then hired more than 10,000 foreign H-1B employees in 2025.

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Microsoft has disabled the Israeli Defense Ministry's access to certain services and subscriptions, after finding evidence that the ministry used the tech company's cloud services to surveil Gaza citizens. WSJ adds: The software company made the move after an internal investigation indicated Israel's Defense Ministry used Microsoft's Azure cloud services for surveillance, according to a person familiar with the matter. The company probe is ongoing. "As employees, we all have a shared interest in privacy protection, given the business value it creates by ensuring our customers can rely on our services with rock solid trust," Microsoft President Brad Smith said in a blog post Thursday on Microsoft's company website. Smith said Microsoft's investigation was guided by the company's "longstanding protection of privacy as a fundamental right." Microsoft opened the probe after the Guardian, the British news organization, reported in August that Israel used Azure to store data on Gaza civilians and surveil them. The issue has been the source of protests at the company.

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Cloudflare announced plans Thursday to launch NET Dollar, a U.S. dollar-backed stablecoin designed to enable autonomous AI agents to conduct instant financial transactions. The company says the stablecoin will support microtransactions and pay-per-use models as AI agents take over tasks like booking flights and ordering groceries. BrianFagioli comments: A U.S. dollar-backed cryptocurrency from Cloudflare feels unusual to me, and I'm still surprised by it. The decision shows just how much the Internet is shifting in response to artificial intelligence. CEO Matthew Prince said, "For decades, the business model of the Internet ran on ad platforms and bank transfers. The Internet's next business model will be powered by pay-per-use, fractional payments, and microtransactions -- "tools that shift incentives toward original, creative content that actually adds value." He added that by using its global network, Cloudflare aims to "help modernize the financial rails needed to move money at the speed of the Internet."

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An anonymous reader shares a report: OpenAI released a new benchmark on Thursday that tests how its AI models perform compared to human professionals across a wide range of industries and jobs. The test, GDPval, is an early attempt at understanding how close OpenAI's systems are to outperforming humans at economically valuable work -- a key part of the company's founding mission to develop artificial general intelligence or AGI. OpenAI says its found that its GPT-5 model and Anthropic's Claude Opus 4.1 "are already approaching the quality of work produced by industry experts." That's not to say that OpenAI's models are going to start replacing humans in their jobs immediately. Despite some CEOs' predictions that AI will take the jobs of humans in just a few years, OpenAI admits that GDPval today covers a very limited number of tasks people do in their real jobs. However, it is one of the latest ways the company is measuring AI's progress towards this milestone. GDPval is based on nine industries that contribute the most to America's gross domestic product, including domains such as healthcare, finance, manufacturing, and government. The benchmark tests an AI model's performance in 44 occupations among those industries, ranging from software engineers to nurses to journalists.

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Despite AI models outperforming radiologists on benchmark tests since 2017, demand for human radiologists has reached record highs. American diagnostic radiology residency programs offered 1,208 positions this year, up 4% from 2024, while average salaries hit $520,000 -- 48% higher than 2015. Over 700 FDA-cleared radiology AI models exist, yet only 48% of radiologists use AI at all. Models trained on standardized datasets lose up to 20% points accuracy when deployed in different hospitals. Radiologists spend just 36% of their time interpreting images, with the majority devoted to patient communication, teaching, and administrative tasks that current AI cannot perform.

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Circle, the world's second-biggest issuer of stablecoins, is examining ways to make it possible to reverse transactions involving its tokens [non-paywalled source], in a rare admission by a major crypto firm that it needs to take lessons from the traditional financial sector. Financial Times: Circle president Heath Tarbert said a mechanism that allowed money to be refunded in cases of fraud or disputes would help the stablecoin industry's push to become part of the financial mainstream. "We are thinking through...whether or not there's the possibility of reversibility of transactions, right, but at the same time, we want settlement finality," Tarbert told the Financial Times. "So there's an inherent tension there between being able to transfer something immediately, but having it be irrevocable," he added. Such measures could be seen as a major departure from the crypto industry's previous emphasis on the "immutability" of the blockchain, a digital ledger that is public and records transactions that cannot be unwound.

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Amazon will pay $2.5 billion to settle Federal Trade Commission allegations that it duped users into paying for Prime memberships, the regulatory agency announced Thursday. CNBC: The surprise settlement comes as Amazon and the FTC were just three days into the trial in a Seattle federal court. Opening arguments took place on Tuesday. The lawsuit, filed by the FTC in June 2023 under the Biden administration, claimed that Amazon deceived tens of millions of customers into signing up for its Prime subscription program and sabotaged their attempts to cancel it. Three senior Amazon executives were at risk of being held individually liable if the jury sided with the FTC. Amazon will pay a $1 billion civil penalty to the FTC and will refund $1.5 billion to an estimated 35 million customers who were impacted by "unwanted Prime enrollment or deferred cancellation," the agency said.

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Accenture has reduced its global workforce by more than 11,000 in the past three months and warned staff that more would be asked to leave if they cannot be retrained for the age of AI. From a report: The IT consulting group on Thursday detailed an $865 million restructuring programme and an outlook for the year ahead that reflects continuing sluggish corporate demand for consulting projects and a clampdown on spending within the US federal government. "We are exiting on a compressed timeline people where reskilling, based on our experience, is not a viable path for the skills we need," chief executive Julie Sweet told analysts on a conference call. The company employed 779,000 people at the end of August, it said, down from 791,000 three months earlier, after beginning a round of lay-offs that will continue until the end of November. It did not say how many jobs had gone directly as a result of the restructuring, but said severance payments and other costs totalled $615 million in the quarter just ended and would be $250 million more in the current three-month period.

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Lumafield's CT scan analysis of 1,054 lithium-ion 18650 batteries found 33 cells from low-cost and counterfeit brands contained a serious manufacturing defect called negative anode overhang, which increases risks of internal short-circuiting and battery fires. All defective batteries came from the 424 units sourced from budget brands on Amazon and Temu. The defect rate reached nearly 8% among low-cost cells, climbing to 12-15% for certain counterfeit brands claiming impossible 9,900 mAh capacities. None of the batteries from Samsung, Panasonic, and other established manufacturers exhibited the defect. The low-cost batteries also displayed significantly worse edge alignment of internal wound layers. Real-world testing revealed the counterfeit cells delivered under 1,300 mAh capacity despite their inflated specifications, compared to 3,000-3,450 mAh for legitimate 18650 batteries.

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Apple asked the European Union to scrap its landmark digital competition law on Thursday, arguing that it poses security risks and creates a "worse experience" for consumers. From a report: The US tech giant and the EU have repeatedly locked horns over the bloc's Digital Markets Act (DMA), which Brussels says seeks to make the digital sector in the 27-nation bloc fairer and more open. "The DMA should be repealed while a more appropriate fit for purpose legislative instrument is put in place," Apple said in a formal submission to the European Commission as part of a consultation on the law. [...] "It's become clear that the DMA is leading to a worse experience for Apple users in the EU," the tech giant said in a blog post accompanying its submission. "It's exposing them to new risks, and disrupting the simple, seamless way their Apple products work together."

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An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Conversation: Twenty-one years after Facebook's launch, Australia's top 25 news outlets now have a combined 27.6 million followers on the platform. They rely on Facebook's reach more than ever, posting far more stories there than in the past. With access to Meta's Content Library (Meta is the owner of Facebook), our big data study analysed more than three million posts from 25 Australian news publishers. We wanted to understand how content is distributed, how audiences engage with news topics, and the nature of misinformation spread. The study enabled us to track de-identified Facebook comments and take a closer look at examples of how misinformation spreads. These included cases about election integrity, the environment (floods) and health misinformation such as hydroxychloroquine promotion during the COVID pandemic. The data reveal misinformation's real-world impact: it isn't just a digital issue, it's linked to poor health outcomes, falling public trust, and significant societal harm. [...] Our study has lessons for public figures and institutions. They, especially politicians, must lead in curbing misinformation, as their misleading statements are quickly amplified by the public. Social media and mainstream media also play an important role in limiting the circulation of misinformation. As Australians increasingly rely on social media for news, mainstream media can provide credible information and counter misinformation through their online story posts. Digital platforms can also curb algorithmic spread and remove dangerous content that leads to real-world harms. The study offers evidence of a change over time in audiences' news consumption patterns. Whether this is due to news avoidance or changes in algorithmic promotion is unclear. But it is clear that from 2016 to 2024, online audiences increasingly engaged with arts, lifestyle and celebrity news over politics, leading media outlets to prioritize posting stories that entertain rather than inform. This shift may pose a challenge to mitigating misinformation with hard news facts. Finally, the study shows that fact-checking, while valuable, is not a silver bullet. Combating misinformation requires a multi-pronged approach, including counter-messaging by trusted civic leaders, media and digital literacy campaigns, and public restraint in sharing unverified content.

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The Japanese city of Toyoake has passed (PDF) a symbolic ordinance limiting recreational smartphone use to two hours a day, aiming to improve citizens' sleep -- especially for students after summer vacation. The Register reports: "The primary purpose of this ordinance is to ensure that all citizens receive adequate sleep," states a Council information page, which explains that many Japanese people ignore Ministry of Health, Labor and Welfare recommendations to spend six to eight hours a day dozing. An accompanying FAQ [PDF] explains that Council passed the ordinance because students who return to school after summer vacations sometimes need a nudge the re-establish an appropriate daily regime. The ordinance also points out "Excessive phone users and their families are facing difficulties in their daily and social lives," and suggests the two-hours-a-day guidance might help. Council's documents point out that smartphones have myriad uses beyond recreation, and that the ordinance should not be taken as a suggestion to reduce overall use of the devices. Toyoake is part of the Nagoya megalopolis and is home to around 70,000 people. The town's government plans to survey residents about the ordinance, and the FAQ also mentions it wants to tackle other digital menaces, among them harmful effects of using smartphones while walking.

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Doctors report the first successful treatment for Huntington's disease using a new type of gene therapy given during 12 to 18 hours of delicate brain surgery. The BBC reports: An emotional research team became tearful as they described how data shows the disease was slowed by 75% in patients. It means the decline you would normally expect in one year would take four years after treatment, giving patients decades of "good quality life", Prof Sarah Tabrizi told BBC News. The first symptoms of Huntington's disease tend to appear in your 30s or 40s and is normally fatal within two decades -- opening the possibility that earlier treatment could prevent symptoms from ever emerging. None of the patients who have been treated are being identified, but one was medically retired and has returned to work. Others in the trial are still walking despite being expected to need a wheelchair. Treatment is likely to be very expensive. However, this is a moment of real hope in a disease that hits people in their prime and devastates families. [...] It starts with a safe virus that has been altered to contain a specially designed sequence of DNA. This is infused deep into the brain using real-time MRI scanning to guide a microcatheter to two brain regions - the caudate nucleus and the putamen. This takes 12 to 18 hours of neurosurgery. The virus then acts like a microscopic postman -- delivering the new piece of DNA inside brain cells, where it becomes active. This turns the neurons into a factory for making the therapy to avert their own death. The cells produce a small fragment of genetic material (called microRNA) that is designed to intercept and disable the instructions (called messenger RNA) being sent from the cells' DNA for building mutant huntingtin. This results in lower levels of mutant huntingtin in the brain. [...] The data showed that three years after surgery there was an average 75% slowing of the disease based on a measure which combines cognition, motor function and the ability to manage in daily life. The data also shows the treatment is saving brain cells. Levels of neurofilaments in spinal fluid -- a clear sign of brain cells dying -- should have increased by a third if the disease continued to progress, but was actually lower than at the start of the trial.

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An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Guardian: The world's oceans have failed a key planetary health check for the first time, primarily due to the burning of fossil fuels, a report has shown. In its latest annual assessment, the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research said ocean acidity had crossed a critical threshold for marine life. This makes it the seventh of nine planetary boundaries to be transgressed, prompting scientists to call for a renewed global effort to curb fossil fuels, deforestation and other human-driven pressures that are tilting the Earth out of a habitable equilibrium. The report, which follows earlier warnings about ocean acidity, comes at a time of recordbreaking ocean heat and mass coral bleaching. Oceans cover 71% of the Earth's surface and play an essential role as a climate stabilizer. The new report calls them an "unsung guardian of planetary health", but says their vital functions are threatened. The 2025 Planetary Health Check noted that since the start of the industrial era, oceans' surface pH has fallen by about 0.1 units, a 30-40% increase in acidity, pushing marine ecosystems beyond safe limits. Cold-water corals, tropical coral reefs and Arctic marine life are especially at risk. This is primarily due to the human-caused climate crisis. When carbon dioxide from oil, coal and gas burning enters the sea, it forms carbonic acid. This reduces the availability of calcium carbonate, which many marine organisms depend upon to grow coral, shells or skeletons. Near the bottom of the food chain, this directly affects species like oysters, molluscs and clams. Indirectly, it harms salmon, whales and other sea life that eat smaller organisms. Ultimately, this is a risk for human food security and coastal economies. Scientists are concerned that it could also weaken the ocean's role as the planet's most important heat absorber and its capacity to draw down 25-30% of the carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. Marine life plays an important role in this process, acting as a "biotic bump" to sequester carbon in the depths. In the report, all of the other six breached boundaries -- climate change, biosphere integrity, land system change, freshwater use, biogeochemical flows, and novel entities -- showed a worsening trend. But the authors said the addition of the only solely ocean-centerd category was a alarming development because of its scale and importance.

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Intel has approached Apple about a possible investment and closer collaboration, following recent multibillion-dollar deals with Nvidia, the U.S. government, and SoftBank to stabilize the struggling chipmaker. Reuters reports: The iPhone maker and Intel have also discussed how to work more closely together, the report said, adding that the talks are at an early stage and may not lead to an agreement. Shares of Intel closed 6% higher after the news. [...] Striking lucrative partnerships and persuading outside clients to use Intel's factories remain key to its future. Intel has also reached out to other companies about possible investments and partnerships, according to the Bloomberg News report. The reported investment from Apple would come as another vote of confidence for Intel - Apple had been a longtime customer of Intel before it transitioned to using its own custom-designed silicon chips in 2020. For Apple, which relies heavily on Intel's rival TSMC to manufacture its chips, the new partnership would allow it to diversify its chipmaking supplier base - a move that would be valuable if geopolitical risks in Taiwan worsen due to China's role in the region. It would also help Apple improve its relationship with U.S. President Donald Trump, by showing that it is investing in the United States - while much of Apple's supply chain remains international, the company has committed about $600 billion to domestic initiatives over the next four years.

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Qualcomm unveiled its Snapdragon X2 Elite and Extreme chips, claiming they're the "fastest and most efficient processors for Windows PCs." Built on 3nm with up to 18 cores and a 5GHz Arm CPU boost, the chips promise 31% more CPU power, up to 2.3x GPU performance, stronger AI processing, and "multi-day battery life," with devices expected in the first half of 2026. The Verge reports: There's also a new 80 TOPS Hexagon NPU, for AI tasks, that offers 37 percent more performance with a 16 percent power consumption improvement, the company claims. Qualcomm's characterizing all of this as a "legendary leap in performance," claiming the Elite Extreme in particular offers "up to 75 percent faster CPU performance" at the same power. But it doesn't say who the competition is, or which chip it was up against, at least not in the press release. And while Qualcomm claims these power savings will lead to "multi-day battery life," that's also what the company said about last year's Snapdragon X Elite.

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Neon Mobile, now the No. 2 social networking app in Apple's U.S. App Store, pays users up to $30 per day to record their phone calls and sell the data to AI companies. The app claims to only capture one side of a call unless both parties use Neon, but its terms grant sweeping rights over recordings. TechCrunch reports: The app, Neon Mobile, pitches itself as a money-making tool offering "hundreds or even thousands of dollars per year" for access to your audio conversations. Neon's website says the company pays 30 cents per minute when you call other Neon users and up to $30 per day maximum for making calls to anyone else. The app also pays for referrals. According to Neon's terms of service, the company's mobile app can capture users' inbound and outbound phone calls. However, Neon's marketing claims to only record your side of the call unless it's with another Neon user. That data is being sold to "AI companies," the company's terms of service state, "for the purpose of developing, training, testing, and improving machine learning models, artificial intelligence tools and systems, and related technologies." Despite what Neon's privacy policy says, its terms include a very broad license to its user data, where Neon grants itself a: "...worldwide, exclusive, irrevocable, transferable, royalty-free, fully paid right and license (with the right to sublicense through multiple tiers) to sell, use, host, store, transfer, publicly display, publicly perform (including by means of a digital audio transmission), communicate to the public, reproduce, modify for the purpose of formatting for display, create derivative works as authorized in these Terms, and distribute your Recordings, in whole or in part, in any media formats and through any media channels, in each instance whether now known or hereafter developed." That leaves plenty of wiggle room for Neon to do more with users' data than it claims. The terms also include an extensive section on beta features, which have no warranty and may have all sorts of issues and bugs. Peter Jackson, cybersecurity and privacy attorney at Greenberg Glusker, told TechCrunch: "Once your voice is over there, it can be used for fraud. Now, this company has your phone number and essentially enough information -- they have recordings of your voice, which could be used to create an impersonation of you and do all sorts of fraud."

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An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: When the COVID-19 pandemic forced kids to stay home, educators flocked to VMware, and thousands of school districts adopted virtualization. The technology became a solution for distance learning during the pandemic and after, when events such as bad weather and illness can prevent children from physically attending school. However, the VMware being sold to K-12 schools today differs from the VMware that existed before and during the pandemic. Now a Broadcom business, the platform features higher prices and a business strategy that favors big spenders. This has created unique problems for educational IT departments juggling restrictive budgets and multiple technology vendors with children's needs. Ars Technica recently spoke with an IT director at a public school district in Indiana. The director requested anonymity for themself and the district out of concern about potential blowback. The director confirmed that the district has five schools and about 3,000 students. The district started using VMware's vSAN, a software-defined storage offering, and the vSphere virtualization platform in 2019. The Indiana school system bought the VMware offerings through a package that combined them with VxRail, which is hyperconverged infrastructure (HCI) hardware that Dell jointly engineered with VMware. However, like many of VMware customers, the Indiana school district was priced out of VMware after Broadcom's acquisition of the company. The IT director said the district received a quote that was "three to six" times higher than expected. This came as the school district is looking to manage changes in education-related taxes and funding over the next few years. As a result, the district's migration from VMware is taking IT resources from other projects, including ones aimed at improving curriculum. For instance, the Indiana district has been trying to bolster its technology curriculum, the IT director said. One way is through a summer employment program for upperclassmen that teaches how to use real-world IT products, like VMware and Cisco Meraki technologies. The district previously relied on VMware-based virtual machines (VMs) for creating "very easily and accessible" test environments for these students. But the school is no longer able to provide that opportunity, creating a learning "barrier," as the IT director put it. The IT director told Ars that dealing with a migration could be "catastrophic in that that's too much work for one person," adding: "It could be a chokehold, essentially, to where they're going to be basically forced into switching platforms -- maybe before they were anticipating -- or paying exorbitant prices that have skyrocketed for absolutely no reason. Nothing on the software side has changed. It's the same software. There's no features being added. Nobody's benefiting from the higher prices on the education side."

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In a bid to slash red tape, the European Commission wants to eliminate one of its peskiest laws: a 2009 tech rule that plastered the online world with pop-ups requesting consent to cookies. From a report: It's the kind of simplification ordinary Europeans can get behind. European rulemakers in 2009 revised a law called the e-Privacy Directive to require websites to get consent from users before loading cookies on their devices, unless the cookies are "strictly necessary" to provide a service. Fast forward to 2025 and the internet is full of consent banners that users have long learned to click away without thinking twice. "Too much consent basically kills consent. People are used to giving consent for everything, so they might stop reading things in as much detail, and if consent is the default for everything, it's no longer perceived in the same way by users," said Peter Craddock, data lawyer with Keller and Heckman. Cookie technology is now a focal point of the EU executive's plans to simplify technology regulation. Officials want to present an "omnibus" text in December, scrapping burdensome requirements on digital companies. On Monday, it held a meeting with the tech industry to discuss the handling of cookies and consent banners.

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The pressure is mounting on business leaders to harness AI to make work faster, cheaper, and more efficient. That may thrill investors, but for employees, it could mean fewer jobs around the world. From a report: At the $320 billion software giant SAP, there will likely be a need for fewer engineers to deliver the same -- or even greater -- output, according to the company's CFO Dominik Asam. "There's more automation, simply," Asam told Business Insider. "There are certain tasks which are automated and for the same volume of output we can afford to have less people." As a C-suite exec at Europe's most valuable software company, Asam cautioned that this reality will only come true if the corporate world implements the technology properly. After all, a recent MIT study found that 95% of generative AI pilots have not met the mark. "I will be brutal. And I also say this internally. For SAP and any other software company, AI is a great catalyst. It can be either great or catastrophe," Asam warned. "It will be great if you do it well, if you are able to implement it and do it faster than others. If you are left behind, you will have a problem for sure. We work day and night to not fall behind."

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